DIGITIZING: THE SET AND EQUIPMENT
Incredible Technologies had done some digitizing for the previously mentioned Hard Yardage, but the digitizing for SFTM would be an undertaking on a whole new scale. Characters were to be huge by comparison, full color, (256 palette registers per sprite,) and they had to animate incredibly smoothly. We needed to capture a lot of frames of data. Clearly the Hard Yardage setup from 2 years prior was not going to work.
We ended up with some huge, broadcast quality Sony camera and some supposedly high end capture card which was installed in a PC with one of those (at the time,) fancy new CD ROM burners. The camera connected directly to the card/PC. I really wish I could remember the specifics of the makes and models, but they escape me now. What I do remember is that the card was not capturing data fast enough. Ever wonder why some of those SFTM animation look stiff? Get this: Its because the actors basically had to perform each motion IN SLOW MOTION! If they moved too fast, the image would get split across fields, resulting in tearing of the image which was a real bear to deal with for the artists as they would have to somehow extract the background color from character image while somehow rebuilding the field interpolated data. We experimented with all kinds of camera settings, capture settings, lighting schemes, you name it. We minimized the effect as best we could, but in the end, we were capturing animations in slow motion. The slower the better. (Supposedly we had purchased the same capture card as the Mortal Kombat guys had, but I really dont know where that info came from, as it couldnt possibly be true. When we did a project with Midway later, I got to see just how advanced their capture setup was. It was no surprise they had such beautiful artwork!)
Capture was done in front of a blue screen as we had expected that we were going to use a professional grade chromakeyer to strip the data. That didnt pan out, but we used blue anyway. We probably would have been better off with a flat grey background. We had a guy manning the camera and PC, and then 2 directors, each with his own monitor, to coach the actor through each move as necessary. Our two lead producers were on hand to do anything else that needed doing. We also generally had a lot of spectators lurking off screen, watching the whole process.
As far as props went, we had a turn table, a wooden box roughly 2x2x3, and a small wooden staircase maybe 4 feet long and 3 feet high, with four to six steps up it, all painted blue to match the background. The turn table was for moves in which the character had to spin. The box and staircase came in handy for faking in air moves or posing an actors legs on to simulate high kicks. Remember, we couldnt capture at full speed, so many of the kick type moves had to be posed out, frame by frame for a clean shot. Besides, the majority of the actors werent martial artists, so they were not going to be performing good looking kicks anyway. BTW, special mention goes to Peter Tuiasosopo, who played E. Honda. Peter is a big man, and not a martial artist, yet he got his legs up way higher for the kicks just about all of the other actors. Half naked. Wearing a skirt. And a Wig. All greased up in baby oil under those hot lights. That guy was a real class act. Super good natured and fun. A true professional.
We had some number of stage lights positioned around the actor to best create the right highlights and edge definition, probably somewhere on the order of 10 big lights. Some of these were on stands, some on the floor. Some had diffusers on them, some had their barn doors open or closed to varying degrees. The thing they all had in common was that these lights were HOT. We had a couple of fans wed turn on to cool the actors down as much as possible.
Also on set was a Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, which wed use to demo some of the moves that were more difficult for the actors to visualize. Many months before arriving on set to shoot, we mapped out every characters animations/move set. These were all storyboarded and assigned a four letter code. This naming convention was something to the effect of SCFP, for Standing Close Fierce Punch. These codes were all printed onto standard 8.5x11 paper in big bold letters, and then arranged into a big binder. This binder would be held up in front of the camera before each take so that we knew which move was which by looking at the first frame of the capture. It also helped to make sure we got every single scheduled move. Sounds dumb, but it was an important little piece of the process.
I think that was the majority of the mission critical digitizing equipment we had on set. We did a number of dry runs in the warehouse of the Chicago office to make sure we had our bases covered, and then we provided a list of our equipment needs to Capcom. We planned on taking our PC and capture card, the camera, and the binder with us, while Capcom would recreate everything else on set as per our specifications. Off to Australia!!!
