Dave Preciado Q&A: “Hobbit” Motion Editor By: Rachel Handel Filed under: Animation & Effects December 16, 2014 Share This: The Art institutes: What work did you do on The Hobbit Films? What are the steps involved? Dave: I worked on the last two Hobbit films – “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug” (THB2) and “The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (THB3). “For THB2, I was on the for the entire post duration of the film, roughly 6 months, and the same on THB3. I’ve worked as a motion editor—basically an animator/technical animator who works with performance capture data, using Giant Studio’s motion editing software called Nuance instead of Maya—on both films. On [THB2] I did get to work on stage with the director, Peter Jackson, during the final month of shooting virtual cameras. Motion edit and animation are essentially the same thing when it comes to working with mocap (motion capture) data, so we work most closely with the animation department. Both animation and motion edit fall under the “Motion” department at Weta Digital. As a motion editor, I do a variety of jobs on the film. I clean up motion capture data, solve the performers data onto […]
Here it is! I’ve been working on this in my spare time since the beginning of May 2015. Working on a feature film while doing a music video…oy! We finished a week ago and it premiered today, Friday November 13th! I’ll post a more thorough update soon – stay tuned!
