From Quito, an animated series was made with a “metahuman” Andrés Iniesta

“The boy who heard the silence” is called the animated series about the historic goal of Andres Iniesta with which Spain won the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. An Ecuadorian, Francisco Vega, participated in this project that lasts seven minutes.

This series that presents Iniesta as the hero who turned the World Cup failures of the Spanish team into success, with emphasis on the moment before kicking the ball, where the footballer affirms that he could hear the silence.

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“It is a very poetic and symbolic image,” Santiago Padrón, general director of A&D Real Time, the company that created the series with a team spread between Spain, Ecuador and the United States, with the support of the Innovation Chair of the Spanish Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV).

In it first video of the seriesreleased last Friday, the metahuman Iniesta recreates in great detail the goal that the real Iniesta scored against the Netherlands twelve years ago, including the sequence of the play, from the touch of his heel in midfield to the rebound by Rafael Van der Vaart, and the decisive pass from Cesc Fábregas.

Nor was the miraculous save by Iker Casillas moments before missing, who with his right foot saved a one-on-one against Arjen Robben that seemed withering.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXs7p35t-eE

“Here we are with the construction of characters that go beyond the avatar. We play with textures and try to handle hyperreality with the characters,” says Padrón.

“The narrative was already told but we wanted to give it that texture because the metahuman is a different language. Even though it resembles the real one, you get rid of the complexes that you can have with a real human and admire these characters in a different dimension” , Add.

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Game engine from Epic Games

To shape the characters, the animators received training from the UPV Chair of Innovation in the creation of metahumans through the Unreal Engine, the video game engine developed by Epic Games, the house that devised the well-known “Fortnite”.

“The process begins from any photograph, and based on it, we have to go mixing the different features, giving the different textures to the skin, if we want it smoother or more wrinkled, the color of the eyes, the type eyebrows, hair color”, explains Francisco Vega, creator and 3D animator of A&D Real Time.

Once the textures and facial and anatomical characteristics have been defined, it is time to create the clothes through a program used by the fashion industry, while the movement is refined with capture suits.

“The good thing about these metahumans is that they already give us these hyper-realistic characteristics. The level of detail is outrageous, too close to reality, which sometimes even confuses us,” says Vega. However, they still need to polish the “lip sync”, the synchronization of the character’s lips with the sound of the words.

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Now this company based in Quito seeks support to continue with a project whose cost, according to their estimates, is $4,000 per minute of animationbecause every 60 seconds they take a week and a half of work.

For the following seasons, which will always be counted from the perspective of the winning team, they had thought of Pelé and Garrincha’s Brazil in Chile 1962 or Zinedine Zidane’s France 1998, but “everything depends on Qatar 2022, because if Ecuador wins, the following season will be the World Cup in Ecuador”, anticipates Padrón. (YO)