Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1021376
FALL 2018 37 For added support, they turned to Hand-Drawn Animation Supervisor Mark Henn who has worked on more than half of the original characters, including Ariel, Belle, and Tiana. He would provide drawovers for the animators to make sure the team was being authentic to the character's movements. They brought back most of the original voices and asked the actresses to chime in on the action, asking them questions like: What would Ariel or Jasmine do in this modern- day situation? "They all had such terrific insight," says Lehtomaki. "We tried to sort of infuse that into the movement." Lehtomaki also scoured all the original films analyzing hand gestures and expressions. "We wanted every pose [to] be reminiscent of the original movies— maybe it wouldn't be immediately recognizable but it feels familiar," she says. For example, in the original film, Cinderella often taps the side of her cheek with her finger—it's her thinking pose. Sure enough, the same pose makes a cameo as Cinderella listens to Vanellope. "We think about the whole tableau," she says. "And so you have to make sure that the movements of the characters that are not supposed to be the central focus of the scene are more subtle." Usually the artists are animating one or two characters but in the princess sequence they were managing 15 (Vanellope plus the 14 princesses). With so many iconic characters in one room, the team had to figure out how to block each one's movement to work with the narrative. Lehtomaki's solution? Walk to the Disney store and buy action figures so the team could physically make sure the movement made logical sense and maintained continuity. CHANGE OF PACE It isn't often that a trip to the racetrack is part of your job description, especially when you work in animation. But for Nathan Detroit Warner, Head of Cinematography, Layout, learning to maneuver a racecar was just one aspect of research for the dynamic car chase between Vanellope and a character named Shank that takes place in an online game called Slaughter Race, set in a pseudo-post-apocalyptic wasteland. The directors described the scene to Warner: Vanellope and Ralph need to steal Shank's car in order to sell it and earn enough money to pay for their ebay purchase of the Sugar Rush steering wheel. Vanellope drives off with Shank in close pursuit, they try to best each other until one wins. The actual specifics were left to the layout department. Warner wanted the sequence grounded in reality so he compiled a 20-minute reference reel with clips from movies, such as The Bourne Identity, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Baby Driver. Though the action could serve as inspiration, Warner says, the pacing would never work in animation—"our shots often are less than a second and those are 30 second shots." Nevertheless, he and his team were up for the challenge. Warner broke down the action into seven distinct plot points then began blocking each move. Mapping it out on paper wasn't always enough so his production supervisor brought in a bag of Hot Wheels. The team also brought in Jeremy Fry, the stunt choreographer for Baby Driver, and peppered him with questions about whether the action was realistic. Basing the sequence in reality, says Warner, "adds jeopardy, it gives you tension and stress—including the way that the camera is held. That is what you're used to when you're watching live action." Rather than stylize the action from a camera view—which is what they do 95 percent of the time, according to Warner— they took a live action approach and mounted nine cameras onto Shank's car, seven onto Vanellope's and littered the streets with different styles of cameras. For a three minute sequence, they captured more than 100 minutes' worth of data, he says. "We were covering it from every which way imaginable." The result is most likely one of the fastest-paced, thrilling car chase scenes in animation so far. Courtesy of © Disney