CHENNAI: Meet Kiran Bhat won the Oscar Award for technical achievements after Cottalango Leon won the Oscar in the same category last year. Kiran will be awarded along with three others on February 11 at Beverly Wilshire, Beverly Hills, for the design and development of the ILM facial performance capture solving system.
City Express caught up with the Coimbatore man… “It was an amazing feeling for us (the team). We had worked on this for many years on several movies when the news came. It felt really nice,” he smiles.
Kiran never dreamt of receiving the award while working on it. “It is basically a challenge that we were working to solve; award was never part of the picture at all. We set out to figure out a way to capture emotion of human faces and translate that to the characters, so that the characters feel alive when they are rendered in movies.”
For many years the photo-realistic believable computer faces was one of the biggest unsolved problems. “The main challenge was to go from an actor to a character, the emotions had to be believable on a character that may not look like a human face. We were trying to solve it.”
Did he ever think the technology he was developing would be this successful? “It is hard to define success, partly because the output of what we did was the character the audiences would see. At the end of the day we had to create a character and the performance on screen in a computer which would connect emotionally to the audience.”
He also admits that he never knew if what they produced would connect with the audience in the beginning. “The challenge was not to reproduce an actor’s performance but to produce it in a way that, when re-targeted to a character, will connect to the audience. It is a different level of complexity. You are not only solving a technical problem but you are also solving an aesthetic problem.”
Kiran also adds that while the work was on, actors were skeptical about it. They were worried their performance would get lost when translated into a computer and let it play back on a
character.
Nevertheless, Kiran has worked on a lot of characters in many films like Avengers (2012), Star Wars Rogue One (2016), Warcraft (2016) and more. Talking about his favourite he saya, “I think there is a special place for The Hulk in my heart. I am a fan of the character and that was the first movie that really pushed me towards the concept. The actor and director were also incredible. Mark Ruffalo is an amazing actor and he was excited about trying this new technology. You need a champion like that who believed in the
technology.”
Kiran started his new venture Loom.ai where he has built a technology for creating personalised and 3D digital avatars from photographs. “A year ago I started it with my friend. One of our primary motivations was to try and bring some of the digital persona to an average user and not just for Hollywood stars. We decided to go on a complete artificial intelligence rout, where we would train these avatars on videos of users. Think of it as a single photograph that we automatically create an avatar for that looks like you. Overtime, we are also planning to make the avatar adapt itself to your nuances. For instance, it will capture your smile and what is unique about you.” Though theirs is a young company, Kiran is excited. He believes, in a year they will have a technology that will have much more accurate representation of the individual that could be used in movies, games and
virtual reality.
Moving on to technical advancements in Indian cinemas he says, “In terms of visual effects there have been a lot of good Indian movies. Baahubali (2015) is one. What I’m hoping for is more interesting story narratives in science fiction. A film like The Revenant (2015) which had the bear completely computer generated, the fact that it was such an integral part of the movie made it so special.” He hopes that if Indian movies build more such characters and stories there will be a leap in technology the movies in our country will
be amazing.