Sorry for the radio silence for the last month. I was fighting off zombies and Plagas, helping mutants and comic book heroes, and battling against Word War II German tanks.

Well, you probably have already seen the announcement of the new mobile game. It will be the prequel to our movie and you will be defending Fort Casey with the K-12 team under the command of Hero.  Hope you all are excited as it will be available on both iOS and Android (that should cover about 90% of you). We also are about to debut our teaser trailer at Wondercon on Mar 17th! If you cannot make it out to lovely Anaheim, CA, rest assured you will get to see it online soon after. Will talk about the trailer next time.

This time, let me talk a little bit about the motion capture we did in Tokyo last year. As you all know, on March 11, 2011, the huge earthquake and devastating Tsunami hit the coast of Japan. It has been a year, but a full recovery is still a very long way off. We already had locked in our travel plans to do the motion capture in Tokyo in May, and the US staff flew out from Houston as originally planned. It was only 2 months after the earthquake with frequent aftershocks and a shortage of electricity — so it was a rather scary experience for the folks who flew in. For some of them, it was their first experience with earthquakes. Even though it was in an unusual atmosphere (to say the least), the motion capture went very well. Motion capture is done with people wearing black skin-tight suits with kind of light balls that reflect the infrared signals and let the multiple high tech cameras capture the movement. As our characters are supposed to be wearing power suits in the movie, we had to put sponges under our actors’ arms so that their movements would be limited as if they were wearing armor. They also had to fight imaginary bugs. But, for some scenes, a Japanese staffer held a balloon and made squeaky noises to simulate the bug squeals. The funny part is that he practiced impersonating a bug at home in front of his wife, and I guess his wife was like “what the ???”. Anyway, please check out this glimpse of how the motion capture was done. It looks strange and a bit comical but guaranteed to be amazing sequences when finished.

We are about to start our voice recording sessions. Our 2-year march is almost at its finale. Keep your expectations high; STI is going to blow your expectations out of the water!