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Xscape General Discussion

Elizabeth @StatenStories · 17 h.

Chalk sidewalk drawing #MJXSCAPE
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Paris78;4021035 said:
some days ago, but worth to post :)

Vodafone New Zealand @vodafoneNZ · May 9th

Artwork is progressing nicely @owendippie. #MJXSCAPE

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Vodafone New Zealand @vodafoneNZ · May 9th

Looking incredible! @owendippie #MJXSCAPE https://vine.co/v/MgBbzVOKtX5
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OMG THAT LOOKS INCREDIBLE! :clapping: :clap: :woohoo:
 
I am loving this album more and more! Lately, I have been focussing on the last 3 tracks. I have to say that DYKWYCA has really grown on me. I'm also really enjoying BG and Xscape. Honestly, this whole album is brilliant. The fact that people gravitate between which song is their current favourite is a testament to this. There is so much to discover here, especially given that we also have the originals/demos. Everyday, I feel like I am uncovering new layers to these wonderful songs. Such a treat!
 
Listened to the original versions for the first time in a while, Blue Gangsta is absolutely incredible. Slave is brilliant but in a more nostalgic way. I absolutely love everyone involved with this. Great, GREAT project! :)
 
dam2040 said:
Listened to the original versions for the first time in a while, Blue Gangsta is absolutely incredible. Slave is brilliant but in a more nostalgic way. I absolutely love everyone involved with this. Great, GREAT project! :)
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I think so too! :yes:
 
So any second thoughts about APWNN being the 2nd single? I wished it was either Chicago or Blue Gangsta :p
 
MpMj1011 said:
So any second thoughts about APWNN being the 2nd single? I wished it was either Chicago or Blue Gangsta :p
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My favourite songs are: 1. Chicago, 2. Slave To The Rhythm, 3. Xscape and 4. A Place With No Name, but I still think A Place With No Name has the biggest hit potential among general public and radio stations.
 
Michael is on fire in Chicago! Vocals are amazing. I hope that Chicago and APWNN are singles. I'm starting to wonder if there will be another single. It's very quiet as of late. Anybody have any info on what's next?
 
Smooth72 said:
Michael is on fire in Chicago! Vocals are amazing. I hope that Chicago and APWNN are singles. I'm starting to wonder if there will be another single. It's very quiet as of late. Anybody have any info on what's next?
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Are they aiming for next week to release a new single? I strongly feel that way because its almost time. As a part of remembrance and tribute to MJ's legacy, they might release the new APWNN video as well. Also, it is the 3rd week of June, we are expecting the reworked versions of LNFSG and STTR by AR Rahman's school in India. I am guessing things will again dramatically pick up during the end of June and it feels appropriate.
 
This one radio station where I live play Slave to the Rhythm a lot. I hear it regularly. I am happy about that. I still hear LNFSG once in awhile too. This time radio play has been a lot better than the last time. Usually they play the classics songs on the stations but this is a nice change.
 
When I first heard the updated version of BG, I wasn't completely sold. However, I absolutely love this song now! It is really amazing! I really love how Michael switches from a low register to a higher one and from a soft to hard voice. The harmonies are also amazing! He sings this song with so much feeling and conviction that I sometimes don't even hear the music. All I hear and feel is that amazing voice and the emotion that he is emitting. This is a complex song which needs time to be fully appreciated. For those of you who have dismissed this song, I really encourage you to give it another try. Perhaps you will come to love it as well
 
Aha

http://www.contactmusic.com/story/jackson-brothers-want-to-be-on-next-mj-record_4248494

Michael Jackson - Jackson brothers want to be on next MJ record

by Bang Showbiz | 18 June 2014

The Jackson brothers want to appear on a future Michael Jackson album following the release of his posthumous record 'Xscape'.

The Jackson brothers want to appear on a future Michael Jackson album.

The King of Pop's siblings - Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Jackie - have revealed they hope to be able to work on a record after Michael's posthumous album 'Xscape' hit the number one spot recently and eight more are reportedly planned for release.

Jackie told Gigwise: ''We would love to do some recording on the next album.

''We haven't had time to do that yet, but we would love to get into a recording studio on another record. I would love to be a part of my brother's next record.''

Jackie, 63, also praised the new album and is insists he is supporting the re-mastering of more of Michael's demos and unheard tracks.

He said: ''I'm very pleased with what they did, considering what they had to work with.

''The way things came together - Timbaland, Jay Rock and all the other
producers
on that record. They made a good record out of what they had to work with, they did a fantastic job. The work they did on that record was wonderful.

''I want to keep the legacy alive, I want the fans to keep hearing music from Michael and the whole family. We want to give it to them as much as we can.''

The Jacksons are set to perform two shows in the Isle Of Man and Hardwick Garden Party Live this year with a video projection of Michael, following his hologram appearance at the Billboard Music Awards.

Jackie said: ''It is an emotional experience. It's a bittersweet moment sometimes when we are showing him on the screen behind us, people are tearing up and crying in the audience, and it makes us cry too on the stage, but we switch it around to some up-tempo songs and it returns to cheering and dancing. It's a bittersweet moment.''
 
The title track should be a single at some point. It's too good to be ignored. The title track could be a real dance floor filler
 
donalb said:
When I first heard the updated version of BG, I wasn't completely sold. However, I absolutely love this song now! It is really amazing! I really love how Michael switches from a low register to a higher one and from a soft to hard voice. The harmonies are also amazing! He sings this song with so much feeling and conviction that I sometimes don't even hear the music. All I hear and feel is that amazing voice and the emotion that he is emitting. This is a complex song which needs time to be fully appreciated. For those of you who have dismissed this song, I really encourage you to give it another try. Perhaps you will come to love it as well
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Agreed.

It took some time however, I did learn to appreciate the contemporized/remixed versions of BG, APWNN, and DYKWYCA.

I still would like to see DYKWYCA as the second single. It sounds like nothing else currently in the market and with an amazing animated video it could be a standout.

I thought fans were able to choose the second single from Xscape as per L.A. Reid and I have not seen or heard anything in regards to that.
 
How about some info on the next single. Have not seen a lot of regular posters in a long time! Zaak, Qbee where you at!
 
The Technology of Michael Jackson Reborn
Mike Seymour
June 16, 2014
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Stephen Rosenbaum was tasked with digitally creating one of the world’s most famous performers, Michael Jackson, to promote a new song, Slave To The Rhythm, at the live event of the Billboard Awards. It was a digital performance with excellent facial animation built on a range of technologies from LightStage facial capture to motion capture.

Given the enormous importance of Michael Jackson to music generally and his global reputation for stunning live performances, the job of allowing an audience to once again see him perform brought with it a justifiable amount of pressure. Clearly, after decades of enjoying his performances, the audience knows how Jackson moved, they know how he looked, and literally anything less than stunningly accurate wasn’t going to work.

Stephen Rosenbaum completed the project from his base in San Francisco. In fact, as fxguide spoke to Rosenbaum he was sitting much where he was when he started his career when it was ILM – an irony that was not lost on the visual effects supervisor. “This is the room where I started my career 25 years ago, so I am literally sitting back in one of my old offices where Joe Letteri sat, where Scott Anderson sat, where a bunch of us started back in the early days of ILM. And the decor has not changed,” he joked.

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​Prior this project, Rosenbaum and his team were heavily involved in modernizing a creature pipeline. It was this wealth of experience that made them a great choice for this production. The Michael Jackson Estate brought the project to Rosenbaum and Pulse Evolution (A specialist human animation company) in October of 2013. In light of the current migration of projects from California to Canada and beyond, Rosenbaum was particularly pleased to be doing such high quality work, but in a new arena and expanding the massive skill base of the artists still in California. “One of the things that is so exciting about this project was that we are applying our skills and expertise in an area that is largely untapped,” he says.

To help with accuracy in dancing, styling and approach, Rosenbaum was offered the chance to work with dancers, performers and wardrobe specialists who had all worked personally with Michael Jackson. This proved invaluable. In addition to a wealth of reference footage, Rosenbaum could talk directly to people who could speak to how Michael Jackson approached his craft and how he creatively solved problems. “I could turn to them and say here is a specific piece of performance, I was going to have him do this, and they would be able to say, ‘Well, actually Michael might have done this – turned his head to the side instead of back – because this was the way Michael would be thinking,’” explains Rosenbaum.

Rebuilding a legend

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The decision of what age Jackson should be in the performance was, at least in theory, wide open. The performer could have been almost any age, as his career spanned decades. In reality, an actual ‘plaster’ life cast of the singer’s face made in 1997 meant that this would be the age of the Jackson the world would see: 39. It was at this age that the veteran special effects expert Stan Winston made a life cast of the singer for the project Ghosts. The team got access to that original life cast and had the mold scanned. As great as Stan Winston’s work always was, the very weight of the material and the agents used to avoid it sticking to a subject’s face can fill in skin pores. So while the life cast was a great measure of the performer’s dimensions it was not as accurate as today’s techniques for accurate skin pore texture. “It got us only about 75% of the way there,” estimates Rosenbaum.

“The pressure from the alginate (plaster) not only pushed out some of the pore features but some of the facial features, chin, general skin,” adds Rosenbaum. “Michael has a very unique face, and part of his face was softer (thus it was more affected), so we had a bit of a challenge, we also had a physiological challenge of what we think Michael Jackson looked like at age 39, what we perceived he looked like, but from the hundreds of images we got from the Estate, we arrived at what he should actually look like.”
The other issue is that a life cast is just one neutral pose. In modern terms, if an actor is being scanned it would be normal to get multiple FACs poses in addition to the neutral pose, so that animators could see how the face looks in various poses. With just the one life cast the team was limited.
The combined issues of not having fine skin pore detail and no additional poses lead Rosenbaum to decide to get some additional reference in to provide extra detail. What would be important in the final is providing organic micro displacement maps to add to a traditional meso level bump that one might get from a cast. Interestingly this was most visible in creating a specular breakup and it was this that greatly improved realism. The team found various additional reference which could provide the missing texture details and provide reference for how a face moves between key poses. While these people were not, of course, the real Michael Jackson, the team only needed to extend in high frequency detail missing from the real life cast and get controlled reference footage. While a lot of real footage of Michael Jackson was used as reference, FACs poses are very particular and recorded under control lighting. The team also got additional key iconic expressions filmed to analyze and study. “Michael had a very distinct way of emoting,” says Rosenbaum, “so we got them to try and match some of the iconic expressions from his hero performances, and then on top of the FACs expressions do additional key concept expressions, and that was central to our success – not just relying on what the facial muscles technically do, but also how Michael might have emoted.”

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Unlike some earlier attempts at this performer re-creation, Michael Jackson’s mouth was very visible on stage. He performed without using a hand held mic held in front of his mouth as was the style of Tupac Shakur. This meant the mouth or lip sync needed to be much more accurate than previous staged ‘holograms’. Michael Jackson had very distinctive hair that needed to be recreated. “Unlike Tupac who was bald, Michael deliberately used his hair during a performance when he is dancing,” notes Rosenbaum. “He would use it as part of his expressive performance.”

Key academic research has been done recently in the area of micro-geometry for improved facial accuracy. Rosenbaum had the desire to use this new innovation in providing micro geometry displacement. These maps “proved to be hugely valuable to us and a significant step up in look development than what we’d done on prior projects,” he says. The logic of micro-geometry is very interesting. It would be reasonable to think at first glance that any character not seen in extreme closeup would not benefit from very small scale micro geometry. In fact it could be seen as adding to render times, disk space and something to easily be dismissed. But what has been found by the recent research is that while the actual pore detail is itself not read, the much larger specular highlight that a cheek or forehead may exhibit does change rather remarkably with the addition of the micro geometry of the skin of the face. While the skin pore resolution is very small, the highlight may be a quarter of a face in height in any one frame, with the textural quality and – more importantly – the realism, is greatly enhanced by modeling the skin to seemingly incredible levels of detail.

“What we found is that the specular contribution to skin is vital,” indicates Rosenbaum. Previous research had suggested two specular lobes contributing to the overall response on facial skin, “and we in fact incorporated three,” says Rosenbaum. “You don’t, at first glance, realize that you are looking at three levels of specular contribution. What you see is subtle grading and fall-off across different surfaces such as the cheek or the forehead or chin – they all have different responses within the highlight itself. It is actually the key contributing factor we found to realistic looking skin.”

Highlights seen across micro geometry, while being more realistic, can actually be more intense – in a way that a make up artist might want to reduce if seen on a real set. For this reason, and for the realism of what a performer such as Jackson would actually wear, ‘digital’ makeup was added to mimic the correct look that the singer might actually have used. This was a key part in moving from general realistic skin to a realistic skin on Michael Jackson, performing at a major event. This digital makeup was based on “a lot of tests we did with real makeup,” says Rosenbaum. The team examined someone with and without makeup to note the differences in specular contribution that professional makeup would contribute and the final solution actually involved multiple layers of this subtle but important ‘digital’ makeup.

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The final maps were 6 x 8K, and rendered in RMS 18 (RenderMan). “Everything was ray traced,” Rosenbaum commented. While the team used high end SubSurface Scattering (SSS), “what was giving the most realism was the micro-geometry.” Additional R&D or work in SSS would not have made much difference, especially given the performer’s makeup which naturally reduces the effect of SSS, according to Rosenbaum. The face did have a varied SSS across the face, but for the lips, which are normally central to any SSS discussion, the team still found that it was the micro displacement based on the new research work that lead to the greatest return in realism. “The fine amount of displacement that was being revealed by the specular contribution,” explains Rosenbaum, “you get this additional octave of specular response – that is what made them realistic – versus say varying amounts of sub-surface contribution.”

For the singer’s eyes, the team got great help from the Estate and the dancers and performers that had worked with Jackson. “He always commanded the crowd,” says Rosenbaum. “What we found is that someone may dance for themselves and where they might be going, but Michael was such a consummate performer, he was less thinking his performance than feeling his performance. He would look out and make eye contact deep into the audience.”

“While the face was where we emphasized critical look development efforts, a lot of time and energy was put in to the overall body and character performance to reinforce accurate Michael likeness,” commented Stephen Rosenbaum.

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Costume

For the great skill as a singer and dancer, Michael Jackson was also a showman and his costumes were always important. Here the team were lucky enough to able to work with Michael Jackson’s costume designer, Michael Bush. Not only was this helpful in planning, but the designer was accessible right through production to advise. Bush had created most of MJ’s personal and concert tour wardrobe in the past. The costume seen on the stage is a new design of an outfit that might have been worn during this period of the singer’s career, he created this original piece just for the show. “We had a lot of conversations about how Michael wore his clothes and the types of clothes he wore and how they fitted on his body,” says Rosenbaum.

The new work had an eye to the future. In many respects just as the life cast became invaluable years later, the team wanted to make sure this work would be well documented in case this was wanted or needed for any future project. ”We went in building the highest quality assets,” notes Rosenbaum. “We built in facial detail, the hair, the eyes – everything to the highest quality. In fact, we were working at 7.5K resolution,” a resolution significantly higher than was projected on the night.

“We built the asset to be re-used,” adds Rosenbaum. “I’ve always been a fan, and I think he looked great.” The results were well received. After the performance the team showed it to Jackie Jackson, Michael’s brother. “We replayed it to him after the show, and he was smiling throughout and he kept saying ‘That’s Michael, that’s Michael’ – you could tell he believed what we had done was true to Michael’s persona and his style of performance.”

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Fantastic in-depth article on the technology behind the MJ Billboard performance! Hi-res images can be found in the article :)

Source: http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-technology-of-michael-jackson-reborn/
 
OMG, the quality of the video that they have uploaded on the website fxguide.com is awesome! Also the HD photos of the animated MJ! Sadly its only 30 seconds. But I was only focusing on the animated MJ in that short clip and I liked it much better! It is so clear that I finally had to wipe my laptop screen clean because of all the dirt spots that were becoming a hindrance lol :D IMO, they should upload the best quality of the performance so that people can only focus on the illusion!!
This is a reupload of the same clip.. easier to share.

edit :
YouTube is killing the quality. -.-
I hope they can upload the performance of ONLY the animated MJ! The video clip that they prepared for the Billboards, IMO that had be much better, that way people can appreciate it better!
 
I'm not buying that the movements were animated in anyway.. I'm still convinced it was an impersonator with a superimposed face... The movements were too non-Michael to be created like that... If the movements were created the movement should have been way more spot on... Not to mention the (what would be) pointless mistakes in te dance moves..
 
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