When director Gurinder Chadha set out to create the festive film Christmas Karma, she turned to virtual production specialists Dimension to conjure one of the most vital—and spectral—characters: Jacob Marley, played by Hugh Bonneville.
The film is a Bollywood-inspired adaptation of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol, following hard-nosed businessman Eshaan Sood as he’s visited by both Marley and three festive spirits over the course of one Christmas Eve night.
Dimension’s team, including producer Ozan Akgun and virtual production supervisor Tim Doubleday, were tasked with working on two of the film’s elements: the Marley double and an LED shoot for scenes involving Danny Dyer’s taxi driver. While the technology was new to the director, the Dimension team focused on integrating their cutting-edge tools into a familiar filmmaking process.
“It was all new to her,” Doubleday says of the director’s experience with virtual production. “Directors and creatives who are new to it always see it as a big toy box. You break it down and try to make it into a very easy-to-understand set of processes. A lot of it is traditional filmmaking, albeit there are things like LED and motion capture involved.”
In total, Dimension was responsible for 34 shots across two sequences, with the majority of work focused on the first time Sood sees Marley. “That involved 31 shots,” explains Akgun, “and then the second sequence was the fairground sequence, which had three shots in total.”
The one-day mocap challenge
Key to Marley’s digital creation was the single-day motion capture (mocap) shoot with Hugh Bonneville. Due to the actor’s busy schedule, the day was meticulously planned, requiring him to undergo several stages of scanning and capture.
“Hugh Bonneville is quite a highly sought-after actor, so his time was really limited,” Doubleday recalls. “We had to be quite clever about how we planned that day.”
Following initial scans, Bonneville was filmed in full make-up and a practical suit for body scanning to reference costume details. The make-up and suit were then removed for a third process, which involved the actor donning the traditional motion capture suit and head-mounted camera helmet for performance capture.
While markerless capture exists, the team at Dimension opted for the “traditional suit with the ping pong balls” for the highest quality animation. They used Vicon Valkyrie cameras for body performance and a Technoprops helmet for facial depth and performance.
Dimension worked with Clear Angle Studios on the scanning, who were able to process the first scan in around an hour. This meant that Bonneville was able to see an approximation of his character on screen.
“That allowed us to very quickly get something up and running; it wasn’t final pixel quality, but it was good enough for on set,” explains Doubleday.
“It also allowed us to be able to start framing things in terms of where the bed was, where our other characters were, and so on. We got the colourful tape out and put it on the floor to represent the corner of the bed, because we didn’t want Marley walking through the bed. Hugh also had to know where the door was. We had cameras set up to film references but also give us an idea of where the film camera might be in terms of the lens choice and how that framing might look in the final piece.”
Grooming
Once the mocap data was captured, the five-month character creation process began. The full head and body photogrammetry scans, high resolution facial expressions and reference videos for proportions, hair, skin and behaviour were processed by Dimension and Clear Angle.
“Once we cleaned up the raw scans, we reconstructed high-resolution head and body meshes, rebuilt topology if needed for the animation, and then generated displacement and normal maps,” explains Akgun.
“Then we got into MetaHuman rig integration, which involved converting the head and body scans into a MetaHuman-compatible topology. We aligned the scan to MetaHuman’s fact-based facial rig to build a head and body rig from the new joints, then merged that with the body rig and skeleton.”
When watching a mocap character, the audience will rarely think about the character’s grooming. If they do, then something has probably gone wrong. For Marley, the Dimension team created high-resolution textures, eyes, teeth, tongue, hair, eyebrows, beard, and eyelashes.
“Once we got to the stage that we were happy with and that the client was happy with, then we went back into rigging and plugged the scan into the MetaHuman facial rig, before running QC.”
The biggest hurdle of working on Christmas Karma, says Akgun, was maintaining the authenticity of Bonneville’s performance while transforming him into a ghostly figure. “The main challenge with a character like Marley is balancing the supernatural element with the very human performance underneath it. The challenge was maintaining that emotional truth of Hugh’s performance while layering on the aesthetic choices that made Marley feel spectral and keeping both of those things in harmony was the real challenge.”
For Doubleday, the on-set challenge was purely human. “Anytime you work with an actor of Hugh’s prestige, it’s making them feel comfortable and making them feel like they can just act, they don’t have to think about the fact that they’re wearing a helmet of a mocap suit.”
Despite the use of modern technology to create Jacob Marley, Akgun is keen to stress that it was all driven by Chadha’s vision. “We worked very closely with Gurinder throughout the project,” he adds. “She has a very strong connection to her characters and remembers every nuance of the performances captured on set, and that’s what she constantly looks for. Her notes were always very specific, which helped us immensely, especially around the eyes, the timing, and the emotional clarity.
“I remember when she first saw the animated Marley. She was very pleased, and then the first feedback was, I can see Hugh in his eyes, which is probably the best feedback that you can get, because that’s the overall goal,” he adds.
“Her direction throughout the project shaped the final look and movement of the character significantly. She always kept us anchored to Hugh’s original performance. She kept Marley very authentic, emotional and true to the story.”
Christmas Karma is in UK cinemas now.
