Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring The Muppets has recently opened at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Scooter is hard at work to make sure things go off without a hitch. In a new video, Disney gives a behind-the-scenes look at its very first Audio-Animatronic of the muppet. What makes this animatronic unique is the fact that motion capture was used to capture every movement’s accuracy.
“This is the first time that we’ve ever taken a Muppet and motion captured them to create an Audio-Animatronics figure,” one imagineer explains in the video.
The video shows how Scooter’s performer, David Rudman, had his movements captured in order to bring Scooter’s Audio-Animatronic to life. Scooter was outfitted with a specially-made muppet-sized motion capture suit to make sure the performance was captured authentically.
“The team has built a very solid robot that is very capable of recreating this performance,” remarks John, the team’s principal figure and character animator. “We’re down to millimeters in most cases here, between what David did and what our robot does.”
