Peacock's Ted series got a huge VFX revelation. It involves creator and star Seth MacFarlane.
3,000+ shots of of VFX
Speaking to Variety, Blair Clark, VFX Supervisor, talked about the Peacock series. His focus was making sure that the titular bear in Ted didn't look different than he did in the films. “He's an established character, and those features needed to stay the same,” he told the outlet.
Over a decade ago, Clark helped create the character's look for the films. Years later, he had to start from the ground up. MacFarlane's company, Fuzzy Door, utilized an augmented reality tool that's called ViewScreen Studio.
Thanks to this, MacFarlane was able to interact with the actors in real-time, something Max Burkholder and Giorgia Whigham talked to ClutchPoints about. Additionally, he was able to do the motion capture work without using a mo-cap suit. There are over 3,000 VFX shots were used in the series to animate Ted. MacFarlane would do motion capture work for “two hours per week for 22 weeks, from December to May.”
“Seth does motion capture for pretty much all of the scenes. His performance is something we use as a base and something we don't deviate from,” Clark revealed. “We have reference cameras on him so the animators can reference the timings and beats for when his eyebrows go up on a word, but they don't go up until the second syllable of the word.”
In the end, Clark wanted Ted to feel like a character. “He's just a great character… if you can accept there's a talking teddy bear,” he said. “We did hone it a little bit so that it became Ted, rather than just Seth. It was Seth Plus, and that was the hardest thing to try and make sure we didn't deviate from.”
Peacock's Ted
Peacock's Ted series is a prequel to Seth MacFarlane's films. It follows a young John Bennett (Max Burkholder) as he navigates his junior year of high school. Giorgia Whigham, Scott Grimes, and Alanna Ubach also star in the series.
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