Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1120864
WILLIAM FRAKE HEAD OF LAYOUT Frake had just wrapped up Quest for Camelot at Warners when producer Max Howard mentioned a new project called The Iron Giant with Brad Bird, a name familiar to Frake. "I remembered him from when he was 16 in the training program at Walt Disney Studios— everybody was in awe of this little kid. I said, 'Yes, whatever he's working on, I'd love to work on it.'" It was such an innovative idea and only a few people knew about it. We went up to Rockport, Maine to go through the locations, the junkyards and the small towns. Brad was a big believer in having the experience first and then drawing from your experiences. When we walked through the towns, we really got a sense of the environment, of the people. It was like an emotional scouting trip. One of our realizations was that it was 1990 in Maine, but it felt like the '70s. I asked Brad, "What period is this taking place?" He said, "In 1959, 1960." And I said, "If that's the case, they would have stuff from the '30s and '40s." I also brought in my collection of Saturday Evening Posts from the 1950s and the 1960s, and we laid them all on the table. You could see the toys, the clothes, the people, the events, the concerns of the Cold War—and we really got everybody up to speed. It wasn't like making tires; it wasn't a factory. We had the vision of the car without even building it. I was head of layout on the Toontown section of Who Framed Roger Rabbit so I was familiar with a lot of the restrictions. The idea was to create CG grids on the ground for the Iron Giant to walk on, and then the technique would be kind of like Roger Rabbit—to then paint an actual 2D background on top. When the giant walked, he would walk in a 2D background registered to the character. Once they animated the giant—that was the God mode—basically everything tracked to match where the giant was. We'd draw around the character, which is kind of opposite of standard 2D, rough it out, put a background, and then animate it, and then you put your backgrounds over top and clean it up later. But to save a lot of time it had to be figured out in storyboards first—how you want to frame it on the screen? It's a vertical character on a horizontal environment, which was really hard to get scale on. I did a lot of staging and composing to get the giant to feel really big. Mark Andrews' storyboards were just right on the money but once he got done in story, how do you make sure it fits in this little box? We were always going back and forth, and Brad was a big fan of—you don't have to show everything to see everything. If you see the foot of Iron Giant next to a human object, like a car, you know he's really big. Everyday was a challenge, and I really loved it. We didn't have the technology they have now so I called friends at LucasFilm, took a week and I built the entire town in a model with the streets and the little diner and forest so we could now literally have a visual interpretation. I also got an architectural program, F E AT U R E "There's a couple of films in your lifetime if you're lucky to work on them, they last beyond your lifetime. It wasn't a job, it was an experience, it was a kind of love affair." 34 KEYFRAME