Lindsey Howell – Aardman Animations

Supervisors:
Dr Peter Hall
Dr Darren Cosker

Industry Mentors:
Tom Downes
Jess McKillop

 

Investigating the Removal of Rigging Equipment from Stop-Motion Film Frames

When animating in stop-motion, rigging equipment is used to get characters or objects into the necessary positions. This rigging is then visible in the captured images and has to be removed in post-production. The aim of the research is to investigate whether this rigging equipment can be computationally removed from an image, to the standard required by industry.

Given images of a frame containing rigging as input, an ideal output would be the same image but with the rig removed and any gaps filled. In order for the resulting image to be usable, the rig must be removed very accurately and the image must be high quality. Therefore, the first stage of the research will be to investigate what methods are available to complete these tasks and if any of these could be implemented to provide a solution that will satisfy the company’s requirements.

It might not be possible to find a solution that produces images to the standard required by the company. In this case, an acceptable result would be to conclude that current computer vision research is not advanced enough for a solution satisfying the requirements to be possible.