Digital Domain Creates 3D Martin Luther King Jr. for TIME VR Project

VFX Online February 23, 2020, 2:16 am 2.2k Views

Digital Domain Creates 3D Martin Luther King Jr. for TIME VR Project

In order to bring the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to life in virtual reality, TIME embarked on a three-year journey to virtualize Martin Luther King Jr. and his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech. Here’s a look behind the scenes.

TIME’s Emmy-award winning division TIME Studios will debut its groundbreaking immersive project The March as an experiential exhibit on February 28, 2020 at the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, IL, the first independent African American history museum in the country. The March brings the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech to virtual reality for the first time.

Or rather, it was inside that room that the visual-effects studio Digital Domain captured the expressions, movements and spirit of King, so that he could appear digitally in The March, a virtual reality experience that TIME has produced in partnership with the civil rights leader’s estate. The experience, which is executive–produced and narrated by actor Viola Davis, draws on more than a decade of research in machine learning and human anatomy to create a visually striking re-creation of the country’s National Mall circa 1963—and of King himself.

When work on the project began more than three years ago, a big question needed answering. Was the existing technology capable of accomplishing the project’s goals—not just creating a stunningly realistic digital human, but doing so in a way that met the standards demanded by the subject matter? And Alton Glass, who co-created The March with TIME’s Mia Tramz, points out that another goal was just as key: the creation of what Glass calls a prosthetic memory—something people can use to see a famous historic moment through a different perspective, to surround themselves with those who were willing to make sacrifices in the past for the sake of a more inclusive future. “When you watch these stories, they’re more powerful,” says Glass, “because you’re actually experiencing them instead of reading about them.”

“You cannot have a rubbery Dr. King delivering this speech as though he was in Call of Duty,” says The March’s lead producer, Ari Palitz of V.A.L.I.S. “It needed to look like Dr. King.”