Christmas Karma

Not wanting to take on the typical Dickensian look and feel for Christmas Karma, Chadha has adopted a much more visually-rich approach to telling her version of the classic story. And that included a fully-digital Jacob Marley, which was created by Dimension using detailed performance capture of actor Hugh Bonneville and translating his performance into an animation.

Bonneville’s version of Marley is shackled in locks and chains, and drags behind him safes as he visits Eshaan Sood, this film’s equivalent of Scrooge played by Kunal Nayyar.

The Dimension team ran a session with Hugh at our motion capture studio where Gurinder directed him and his facial and physical performance was captured. We knew his performance would be very expressive, so we built a FACS-based facial capture rig which provided the most anatomically-correct data that we could. Planning and capturing an extensive set of FACS poses and blendshapes meant that we could capture the performance down to the smallest detail.

The Dimension team then developed the digital character, paying close attention to the balance between creating the ghost-like figure and presenting a likeness to Hugh Bonneville. The mocap data was then retargeted onto a digital character and did a small polish on the sequences’ animation. Everything was done in Dimension’s real-time workflows, before handing our assets over to the project’s VFX vendor.

Talking about the project, Dimension Producer Ozan Akgun said; ‘we enjoyed the challenge of this project, which like many digital performances required us to strike a great balance. We needed to create a fantastical figure that was believable; in this case the ghostly figure of Jacob Marley, whilst ensuring that the performer was still very present in the performance. Feedback on the work that we delivered from Gurinder was that she could really see Hugh in Marley’s eyes. And that’s precisely our job on a project like this.’