Digital humans are invading the movies. A decade ago, you'd occasionally see a computer generated human performing a stunt that was just too dangerous for a stunt person to do. The digital human was typically moving fast and pretty small on screen. Now, they are commonplace.

Over the last few years, we're starting to see digital humans that are nearly indistinguishable from a real actor. And not just for stunts, these characters are performing along with actors, close to the camera.

This is still the hardest thing to do in visual effects. The subtleties of motion in a human face are very difficult to mimic, but, luckily, mathematics comes to the rescue! Math is so integrated into the process that when artists animate a face they often refer to it as "solving the facial performance".

We will look at the recent history of digital humans in cinema, talk about the difficulties and explore our current techniques to create photorealistic, animated digital human characters.

Doug Roble is a mathematician/computer scientist a Creative Director of Software at Digital Domain, and won an Academy Award for “track” in 1998.  He is a voting member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he has given many talks on mathematics and movies, including talks at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and at the Joint Meetings of the American Mathematical Society and Mathematics Association of America (AMS/MAA).  Most recently, Digital Domain worked on the movie Deadpool.  Other movies they have worked on include Furious 7, Iron Man 3, and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.