An Inside Look At How Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph Was Made #WreckItRalph #DisneyOzEvent

If you follow me on Twitter then you probably saw my Tweets from the #DisneyOzEvent that I attended in Los Angeles. What an amazing trip it was! As part of the trip we visited the Disney Animation Studios in order to learn more about how the movie Wreck-It Ralph was made. I’ll be sharing more about the movie and learning how it was made soon enough, but for now I want to share with you one of the coolest parts of the day – learning about camera capture.

Camera Capture is the technology used to use real objects in order to control the motion of virtual objects inside animation software named Maya. Disney does this in order to make it easier for the creative people to  collaborate with the technical people on movies. It saves a lot of time and labor, and makes communication between project members a lot easier. And most importantly, it provides the same effects that a live action camera provides.
To use this technology, a set is created. Here you can see part of the set, it’s a big box created with tape and small cones. Markers are placed on objects within the set.

Next they surround the set with cameras.

The cameras monitor the positioning of the objects and feed it into Maya.
This is Alex, demonstrating how the technology works.

To use the technology you just use the camera very similar to the way you would use a real video camera. So, if you’re capturing video in order to animate a character running, you’d not only move the camera left and right, but you’d also jiggle it up and down a bit to give it the feel that the character is really running. if you’ve ever seen video footage of a person running, you know what I mean about the jiggling look. After that, the footage is scaled to size and tweaked inside the Maya software.
And here’s video of me giving it a shot. (Sorry the sound is a little muffled.) The scenes we were working with were used in one of the Hero’s Duty bridge scenes. The camera was actually light. The technology was pretty simple to use, the thing I had to remember was the left was right and right was left.

Want to learn more about how Wreck-It Ralph was made? Be sure to check back over the coming weeks, as I will have more about the day to share. You can also follow the hashtag #WreckItRalph to follow along with me and the other bloggers that visited the studio.
Wreck-It Ralph arrives in stores on Blu-ray and DVD on March 5, and is already available via digital download.
Wreck-It Ralph website
Wreck-It Ralph on Facebook
Wreck-It Ralph on Twitter
My visit to the Disney Animation Studio for Wreck-It Ralph press day was part of a trip for the red carpet premiere of OZ The Great And Powerful. I attended as a guest of Disney, with all expenses paid. As always, any personal opinions reflected in this post are my own and have not been influenced by the sponsor in any way.