Animation Guild

Fall 2018

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36 KEYFRAME GLITCH PERFECT Throwing Vanellope and Ralph into a new environment—the Internet—came with a series of challenges for the effects department. "One thing that we really stress is creating logic for the world," says Cesar Velazquez, Head of Effects Animation. The team needed to establish, for instance, how people travel around the Internet or how they convey messages. Inspired by the idea of "packets of information" they envisioned a capsule that transports users. "The capsules are these mechanical things that just form around the users," says Velazquez. They also researched how electricity moves through a wire then examined WiFi and electromagnetic waves travelling through the air. "This led to a dramatic wave or pulse that would push them—kind of like surfing it—which is sort of analogous to what happens when electricity or data moves through a cable or air," he says. Creating a vehicle for movement was only the beginning. "How do you visualize different ideas so the audience understands things like a virus or a glitch or firewall?" asks Velazquez. A glitch already played an integral plot point in the original film. Vanellope's character had two kinds of glitches: one when she's nervous, like a hiccup, and another glitch, almost like a superpower, that transports her where she wants to go. The film's new renderer, Hyperion, allowed the effects team to update her glitch to a more refined and polished version. But it was also critical to the story to differentiate between Vanellope's glitch and those caused by a virus. In the film, the Internet is represented as a large metropolis with different websites and apps represented as buildings. The team wanted to visually show a website crashing without mimicking the destruction of a real building. "What does it mean if a Website is crashing? How is that conveyed visually?" says Velazquez. Coming up with a solution was a technical challenge requiring multiple tests and updates to the pipeline. "We're showing data traveling, you've got chromatic aberrations, this staccato motion—visual cues to say it feels like a building crashing but there are other visual elements to say it's a glitch that's crashing it." In order to achieve this effect, the team integrated a destruction pipeline from Industrial Light + Magic. They also had to build a system that could apply the effects to any geometry. Velazquez says he considers this large-scale glitch one of his team's biggest achievements on the film. PRINCESSES UNITE! In the film, there are more familiar faces than Vanellope and Ralph; the production revisited some of the studio's most iconic stars—14 Disney princesses. "I felt like had been studying for this moment my entire life," says Kira Lehtomaki, Head of Animation (with Renato dos Anjos), who counts Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid as major influences in her career. Of course, translating 2D characters into a CG world held its own set of challenges in order to stay true to the original characters while also updating them for an Internet world. Ami Thompson, Art Director, Char- acters, and her team re-imagined Internet versions of all the princesses—including those who were initially CG characters. "It kind of gave us this freedom to unify them in terms of making them all feel like they live in the same world," says Lehtomaki. F E AT U R E above: The animation team integrated characteristics of the original princesses in the CG versions. Courtesy of © Disney Courtesy of © Disney

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