Whether you love Neill Blomkamp’s CHAPPiE or hate it, it's hard not to be impressed by the film's visual effects. In this featurette from WIRED, we get a glimpse inside the CGI animation that transformed Sharlto Copley into a robot.
Astonishingly, CHAPPiE’s animations weren’t accomplished through the use of motion capture, but rather, hand animated around the actors’ movements. Actors donned GoPro cameras to capture their viewpoint and surroundings, which then provided the point-of-view footage seen from each robot.
After each live scene was shot, animators went to work painstakingly painting the actors from the frame and replacing them with their robotic avatars. Blomkamp shot most of the film on real sets, eschewing green-screen work in favor of encouraging actors to interact with their environments as much as possible.
The technique is more reminiscent of the methods used in classics like Who Framed Roger Rabbit – in which real-world props and interactions were maintained, than modern cinematic blockbusters like Avatar. It seems to me that this is a large part of what makes Blomkamp's work seem so much more real and gritty than other science fiction films.
"Neill Blomkamp's new dystopian sci-fi thriller "Chappie" stars a fully digital A.I. robot as the title character, acted out by Sharlto Copley. Mike Seymour goes behind the scenes of the CG robots."
