page_title: Rendez-vous in Montreal
section_title: Techniques
hierarchical_section_title: Rendez-vous in Montreal / Techniques
caption_attribution_description: English: Facial Expression for Humphrey in the film Rendez-vous a Montreal
context_page_description: Rendez-vous in Montreal is an animated film that used advanced computer techniques to achieve such effects as modelling the film stars Marilyn Monroe and Humphrey Bogart. The film was directed by Nadia Magnenat Thalmann and Daniel Thalmann and produced with a team of 10 people. Specific interactive software was developed that allowed designers in 1987 to interactively use commands to generate the sequences. The main purpose of Rendez-vous in Montreal were to show that true synthetic actors can be created. This film represented a technological breakthrough both on the software side and the film itself.
context_section_description: 3D models of Marilyn and Humphrey were created by drawing polygons and vertices on Marilyn’s and Humphrey’s sculptures and digitizing photos from these plaster models.
  At the beginning, the computer needs to know the shapes of the characters, even the detail of their hands or their thumbs. For example, a sculptor sculpted Marilyn's and Humphrey's hands by covering real human hands with plaster, a grid was drawn, photos from various angles were taken, and the information was digitized in 2D and the computer  reconstituted the 3D information. For the heads and torsos, a sculptor created 3D plaster models and the process of digitizing is the same.
  The system used for the production of the film was Human Factory . A making of Rendez-vous in Montreal  was done that explained all these pioneer methods.
  The most important parts of the software developed was:
  The body motion control based on keyframe animation and inverse kinematics
  The skinning system based on Joint-Local dependent Operators (JLD), which is recognized as the original classical skeleton-based deformation algorithm.
  The facial animation control based on 3 levels:
  The low level based on specialized procedures called abstract muscles action (AMA) procedures  that work on specific regions of the human face,.
  The expression level consisting of phonemes and emotions.
  The script level corresponding to the facial animation.
caption: Facial Expression of Humphrey
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