Jewels and Fear Sticks and Other Motion Capture Lingo

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Grant, I don’t even remember how I went down this rabbit hole.

But this week I was reading about mocap and mocap slang.

Mocap being short for motion capture.

You know, that’s when you’re creating digital characters for 2D or 3D computer animation, and you’ve seen this, you know, they stick little reflective dots all over an actor, and then they have them move around in front of a green screen.

And this field is relatively new, but there’s already a lot of great jargon.

And there’s

A whole collection of it at motioncapturesociety.com, which is an organization for professionals in the field. Those little dots, the mocap markers, are called either dots or jewels. And just from looking at their vocabulary, it sounds like part of the challenge is keeping all those dots in the right place, like during a fight scene or something. One of those expressions is marker dune, and that’s what the crew yells if a dot has fallen off of an actor. And another one is hitchhiker. That’s when a marker is transferred from one actor to another but hasn’t fallen off yet. And another one I really like is fear stick. The fear stick is a pool noodle at the end of a long stick that’s used to hit actors to make them react appropriately during shots.

But wait a second. I want to go back to marker doon. It’s not marker down?

No, it’s marker doon.

So were they imitating a Scots accent?

I don’t know how that arose.

Marker doon.

This could be a good assignment for you, Grant.

That’s fantastic. I love insider lingo, particularly if it’s got a little bit of humor to it.

Right. MotionCaptureSociety.com. And these terms do check out. I’ve looked them up elsewhere.

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