Nels Madsen’s wife understood his passion for motion-capture technology as she sipped her green appletini.
She sat at the pre-event party before her husband received an Academy Award at the 77th Scientific & Technical Awards, she herself always having enjoyed watching the Oscars from her home TV.
But this time, she was thanking the Academy.
“When she got that appletini, she finally decided, man, this is good,” Madsen said with a smile. “I guess it was worth it that I had spent all those hours working on motion capture-type stuff … And she still likes appletinis, so.”
Madsen received a Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Feb. 12, 2005, for helping bring the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy’s Gollum to life.
And over a decade later, he still marries animation with life.
Madsen dedicated years to developing motion-capture technology outside of his job as an Auburn University engineering professor, but he never intended for it to have such an authority in filmmaking.
A love for learning
Madsen said he didn’t have a solid plan for his life, though he laughs at how that’s probably not the best advice to give as a professor.
But he knew he loved to learn.
So in lieu of a detailed life plan, Madsen earned degree after degree until he came to a halt after he obtained his doctorate.
“But there weren’t any other degrees after that, or I’d probably still be in school if there were,” Madsen said. “So at that point, if I can’t be in school, what’s the next best thing?”
That’s when he applied to Auburn University, joining the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering faculty in 1978.
It was there Madsen met Tom McLaughlin, who shared his interest in sports biomechanics and measuring human movement to display motion.
At the time, a new wave of video cameras had just appeared on the tech scene, and computer graphics and image processing were still improving.
McLaughlin left the University and later jumpstarted Biomechanics Inc. — now known as Motion Reality Inc. — in 1984.
He invited Madsen to join him at Motion Reality, and together they combined computer graphics, desktop computing, image processing and cameras to create a system that captured golfers’ motions.
Through relationships in the golf industry, Motion Reality entered the video game business, which led to its first step into the entertainment industry.
It configured an on-site motion-capture studio to help configure Acclaim Entertainment’s 1995 "Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball" by capturing Thomas’ movements.
Using Motion Reality technology, Acclaim also simultaneously mapped two people in one scene in the early ‘90s, a major step forward in motion capture, which was still imperfect and underdeveloped.
Presence in the video game industry exposed Motion Reality’s system to special effects artist John Dykstra, who used it to capture Batman’s movements in “Batman Forever” in the late 1990s.
This cinematographic work captured director Peter Jackson’s attention, landing Madsen and the Motion Reality team into the world of hobbits and dwarves.
More specifically, Gollum’s world.
Capturing the fictional world
Suited up in a full-body suit dotted with bright markers, actor Andy Serkis brought Gollum to life with his voice and body language, the latter of which Motion Reality tech — under licensee Giant Studios — mapped for the Gollum’s first appearance in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy in the early 2000s.
Behind the scenes, Madsen secured the software capability and advised in creating specific effects.
“We had people that were over there working with them on set, and I never did that,” Madsen said. “I wouldn’t want to have been there. That was a lot of pressure, as you can imagine.”
But the technology Madsen helped create didn’t just stay in “Lord of the Rings.” It helped animate Tom Hanks in “The Polar Express” and extended to other creatures besides Gollum.
“To this day, it’s still a popular tool out there,” Madsen said. “It was used in Avatar. They used our system for their animations and are continuing to use it for the upcoming (sequel).”
Today, Motion Reality has a system in Quantico, Virginia, that the FBI uses to train its agents in a virtual-reality environment.
“I certainly get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing how it’s been used in movies … but the engineer in me is always more excited about what we can do next,” Madsen said.
Beyond the big screen
More than 10 years after emerging from Middle Earth, Madsen said his business experience as Motion Reality’s vice president for research and development has helped him grow as a professor.
“I understand the world that our students are walking into,” Madsen said. “It is a highly competitive environment. You need to be at the top of your game.”
Brian Windsor, 1994 Auburn engineering graduate, entered that world upon graduating, joining Acclaim, and later Giant Studios.
As a mechanical engineering senior, Windsor worked with Madsen throughout his senior design project, which focused on motion capture.
Windsor said he remembers Madsen’s class was difficult, but it paid off.
“You learned so much,” Windsor said. “He was one of those professors that … he wasn’t going to give you the easy way out. You were going to have to work in his class and get the answer, but when you did, you kind of knew what you were doing by that time.”
Windsor went on to work with motion capture in the entertainment industry until eight years ago.
“If he hadn’t been involved in (motion-capture technology), there was no way at Auburn I would’ve gone down that road,” Windsor said.
He still remembers when Madsen won the Academy Award, and how people asked him about it, unsure if the Academy Award-winning Auburn professor was fact or fiction.
“That was my professor at Auburn,” Windsor said. “He was a heck of a professor, I’ll put it that way.”
“No magic to it”
The first time Damon Rowe, junior in mechanical engineering, ever saw Madsen, he seemed quiet, but after attending his Mechanics of Materials class for about two months this semester, Rowe said the opposite.
“Pretty much every single day, he’ll crack a joke in class,” Rowe said. “It’s a terrible joke, but it’s worth the laugh just because it’s so quirky of a joke.”
Most of Madsen’s students remember one thing about his teaching style: Every question is a great question.
And sometimes simple yes or no question may turn into an elaborate explanation.
“I would definitely say that’s what gives him his most charismatic trait,” Rowe said.
Day to day, Madsen helps students during and sometimes after his office hours.
“No magic to it,” he says to a group of students working through a homework problem. “Just geometry.”
A clock with math equations sits behind him in his office, forcing you to take the square root of 4 to find that it’s 2 p.m., while photos of his family line his desk.
“One of the things that people don’t understand about teaching is it’s by far the best way to learn a subject,” Madsen said.
And to this day, Madsen said he still learns as he teaches.
“(My wife and I) figured we’d only be here [Auburn] for a few years, but that was almost 38 years ago now, and we’re still here,” Madsen said. “We like it here very, very much.”
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