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10 cgw | e d i t i o n 4 , 2 0 1 8 Although a practical marionette skirt, torso, and head were on set during filming, in most of the feature the marionette is fully CG, and when practical, enhanced with CG. CG steam leaks from the steam- punk pistons and chimney stacks of the practical marionette, and CG arms and mouth enliven the giant prop. Rather than children dancing from under the skirt, polichinelles tumble out. "They're like Russian dolls," Wood says. "They can split in half, open up, and jump out of each other. They had stunt perform- ers play polichinelles in the film, but in some shots, they're fully CG. We motion-captured acrobatic clowns bending and doing flips and turns." TIN SOLDIERS Everyone in the realms was once a toy that someone transformed into a living being by a toy machine. The key Clara searches for not only opens the egg-shaped box, it turns on this toy machine. So, of course, the villain in this film uses the toy machine to quickly create an army from toy tin sol- diers. The soldiers are CG. To create them, MPC artists referenced concept art and antique toys. "We tried to make something that changed from a six-inch toy into a seven- foot-tall character and still have details like scraped-off paint," Wood says. They also tried to preserve the toy-like movement of the six-inch toys without compromising the actions of the seven-foot soldiers they'd become. "The toy tin soldiers have simple joints that rotate on only one axis," Clegg says. "We tried to give our seven-foot tin soldiers enough flexibility to do things the toys couldn't do, but not so much it looked obvi- ous. The gag is that they don't quite convert into people yet because there's such a huge volume. They're almost like a robot army. They don't change as they grow. They just scale up to be seven feet tall." MOTHER GINGER VS. THE TIN SOLDIERS In one fully CG scene, the Tin Soldiers at- tack Mother Ginger's marionette, thinking she's inside. In fact, another character is driving the huge marionette through a small forest; the marionette towers above the trees. "We have tin soldiers climbing up the circus-tent skirt like the zombies in World War Z," says Clegg, who had worked on that film at MPC. "She's bashing them on the head with a tree. It's like whack-a-mole. It was tricky because the soldiers are climbing over a cloth surface and are pretty limited in their range of motion." The team started with animation for the marionette and with hand animation for several hero soldiers on top of the skirt. Then, working in Houdini, they did a cloth simula- tion of the moving tent, popped the soldiers on top, and ran crowd simulations for close to 100 soldiers climbing up the skirt. "Where there were intersections, we ran a secondary cloth simulation on top of the cache with a weighted input," Clegg says. "We simulated-in regions and applied restrictions, and those finer details fixed most collisions. When we needed to do manual cleanup, we'd raise the cloth up or lower it down to avoid any visual problems. It was painstaking work to make it look like the soldiers weren't intersecting with the skirt." Creating a fantasy is not easy. But, al- though some movie critics haven't appreci- ated this new take on the Nutcracker story, the film's visuals have been highly praised. "There was a lot of subjectivity in the work on this film, a lot of artistic free- dom," Clegg says. "Every shot is different. We'd give the moviemakers things and feed off their reactions to bring alive their imaginations." Barbara Robertson (BarbaraRR@comcast.net) is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW. SHIVER NUMBERS Mouse King by the Height: Nine feet more or less Shape: Indeterminate, changing Composition: 60,000 CG mice Types of mice: Three shapes with multiple variations Motion reference: Jookin by Lil Buck (Charles Riley) Time to develop: Six months Number of artists: 30-plus Simulations utilized: Cloth, crowd, rigid body Number of shots: 40 REALM The Fourth Spooky forests created on set at Pinewood Studios populate the dark, ominous Fourth Realm island. Once a Land of Amuse- ment settled by traveling circus folk, it has become a forgotten fairground. Artists at MPC extended the forest into infinity at the bluescreen edges of the set. Mother Ginger (Helen Mirren) rules this grim land with her army of mice.