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Personal Effects

Feb 1, 2007 12:01 PM, By Ellen Wolff

Animated Movies’ Unique VFX

 Digital Content Producer's and Millimeter's coverage of past and present award nominees/winners

It is arguable that with a computer-animated movie, the entire project is a visual effect. After all, such films depict digitally invented worlds. But in Oscar's three choices for Best Animated Feature Film of the Year, visual effects played a particularly prominent role. VFX gave Director John Lasseter stunning vistas for the Pixar Animation Studios/Walt Disney Pictures' film Cars, and enabled Animal Logic to provide George Miller with an awesome Antarctica in Warner Bros. Pictures' Happy Feet. And without Sony Pictures Animation's performance-capture technology, Director Gil Kenan couldn't have realized Monster House at all. The best visual effects are those that support an artistic vision, and in these three films that's especially true.

Imagery That Drove Cars

At Pixar, Effects Supervisor Steve May led the team that delivered the subtleties Lasseter envisioned to make the stylized world of Cars come alive. “We're always treading the line between realistic and believable,” says May, who previously oversaw effects in Finding Nemo and Monsters, Inc.

A prime example was the spectacular waterfall in Cars, which May says was guided by a video Lasseter shot in Yosemite National Park. “That was the glory moment in terms of effects. You believe it's water because it moves like water, but it had to fit in a film that was not realistic. In Nemo, we had large bodies of water, but we had to do new things for this waterfall. Anything with high geometric complexity is still unruly to work with. We animated tens of millions of water droplets. Just moving that data across our network gave us fits, ” May says.

Lasseter wanted the cars' dust trails to billow like a real dust trail would, so he provided rally racing documentaries as references for May's team. “We built extra intelligence into the cars so we could automatically generate dust based on how fast the car was going, or if it was sliding or braking,” May says. “We took the wind's direction into account, so although this was still artistic simulation, we could make it more automatic. The cars have pretty realistic suspension and we could adjust the tires' PSI.”

For May, a favorite effect was when racecar Lightning McQueen snags a heavy statue with barbed wire and drags it behind him, tearing up the road. For inspiration, May's team studied footage of water-skiers' wakes. “We determined where the path was going to be, and wrote software that ‘pre-broke’ pieces of the road, and then put them back into place like a jigsaw puzzle,” May says. “When we shaded them continuously, you couldn't tell the road was broken. All we had to do was attach force fields to the statue, which ruptured the pre-broken road as McQueen moved along. In Cars, everything was designed from the bottom up.”

Animal Logic Gets ‘Happy’

While Australian VFX house Animal Logic had previously worked with Director George Miller on the Babe films, the singing-and-dancing-penguin movie Happy Feet required 800 all-CG shots, showing hundreds of animals in huge, snowbound environments. “The brief was to be as photoreal as possible,” says Lighting Director Ben Gunsberger. “And it was such a blank slate.”

Gunsberger, whose credits include The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, and Shrek, says VFX were integral to the story. “Whether it was snow kicks, water splashes, or wind affecting the penguins' feathers, they're what sell the characters being in the space,” Gunsberger says. “Water in general was a challenge, especially when the penguins were underwater. We had really long shots with lots of characters swimming in complex formations.”

Crowd simulation was essential, and Animal Logic used Massive software to generate penguins that milled around autonomously, but 70 percent of Happy Feet depicted motion-captured characters, and a proprietary tool called “Horde” dealt with the mo-cap data. “Horde enabled us to precisely control a large group moving more or less in unison,” Gunsberger explains. “We could add noise on top of the mo-cap motion to vary the movements. The crowds weren't perfectly synchronized, so they looked more organic.”

Animal Logic's rear-projection tools made it possible to get 360-degree coverage of the sky, which accentuated the film's vast, blue-and-white landscapes. A rig of three digital still cameras — including one fisheye — captured high-res, time-lapse footage of skies. “We combined those images and re-timed them to a more natural speed and then re-projected them into each shot, so we had real skies where we needed them,” Gunsberger says. As with all of the effects in Happy Feet, he says, “We tried to get the best photographic look that we could.”

A ‘Monster’ Challenge

When Sony first screened Monster House, kids in the audience said they liked the special effects, which was just fine with VFX Supervisor Jay Redd, who also worked on The Haunted Mansion, Stuart Little, and Stuart Little 2. This film represented the first time that Redd and Director Gil Kenan had personally worked with Sony's performance capture system. The system proved ideal for capturing 3D data about the movements of the film's actors — data that Sony animators transformed into 3D CG characters. That may sound like the quintessential digital effect, but as Redd observes, “It let us bring a human element to the story, and still make a film that looks handmade.”

Redd calls Monster House a deconstructionist movie. “We had a script and a cast, but no set or lighting, and we didn't have to think about cameras when staging a scene,” Redd says. “We could shoot for four minutes without having to go in for a close-up. It was like recording live theater.”

After camera angles and takes were chosen, the blocked scenes resembled a low-res video game. The look they ultimately wanted, Redd says, was photoreal. “In the sense that if you're in a sandbox, sand will move a certain way,” Redd says. “We developed looks for water, fire, and smoke effects, and then stylized them for the proper scale. We thought of this like a miniature shoot; as if we were shooting quarter-scale.”

Though CG films can be in focus forever, Monster House used depth-of-field for maximum effect. “We wanted to be optical,” says Redd. “We even came up with a digital ‘film stock’ and added a little extra grain. We also turned off motion blur most of the time, which is a thing that happens with stop motion.” The final result of all these digital effects, he believes, “Is the best of both worlds — it's a live-action mentality with an animated style.”

© 2008 Penton Media, Inc.