Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1120864
D E PA R T M E N T 37 KEYFRAME SUMMER 2019 37 STEVE MARKOWSKI SUPERVISING ANIMATOR Markowski first met Bird while working as a storyboard artist on The Simpsons. Later, he started working at Turner Animation, developing a film called Wolves, where he did a CG wireframe animation test of wolves being chased by a helicopter. "Brad had seen this test, and when he chose to do The Iron Giant he asked me to do the animation of the giant," says Markowski. In the design stage, knowing I would be the supervising animator for the Iron Giant, I was coming at it not only from the aesthetic point of view but with an eye toward functionality. How do I express emotion with this thing that we design? Brad always posed two extremes—C-3PO, very un-emotive in his face, and on the other extreme the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, clearly a man under makeup. We had seen some early tests before Brad came on and they had a lot of mechanical parts on the face to force emoting, but we thought it felt contrived. We tried to figure out what was the most we could get away with using the least amount of moving parts. I came up with some theories about the mouth—we didn't want lips—but if we took our simple hinged jaw and slid it up and down, we could make it express different mouth shapes. And of course there was no reason why the giant would have expressive eyebrows. He's not designed to emote; he was designed to be a weapon. But we could believe that he would have protective eye shields. So we used those as eyelids, and by angling them correctly we could use them to express emotion like eyebrows. We also treated the eyes like a light behind a piece of frosted glass—you could make them get brighter or look smaller. Between the two concepts, we were able to get some pretty good expressions. The body was less restrictive but we focused on how to build a robot that is designed to be a weapon which is at the heart of the story. Brad was always going for a 50's robot kind of look and because it's the Iron Giant there was a tendency to make it iron colored and covered with rivets but that started to give it more of an Industrial Era feel. Joe Johnston did some early design sketches where he utilized 50's like elements—fins on the shoulder and grill work on his chest. We could go a bit more "alien" when he turns into the battle mode giant—embrace the slick style of 50's sci-fi conceptual work—like when the chest opens he has a more organic shape, and also having a big bubble helmet form around his head. Brad also asked for the The War of the Worlds cobra head tentacles to come out from his back. Brad wanted to do the giant in CG because he thought it was better suited for a computer but he also wanted it to blend in with the traditional, hand-drawn animation. So, we tried to do as much of the animation on two's as possible. The technical crew, in particular Brian Gardner, wrote a cel shader that was remarkably good even to the point of giving it wobble in the line like a human hand would draw. We did our best to force as much human aspect into the treatment of the technical aspects, and make it look less CG. At the time, CG animation tended to not be as refined. It tended to have a very floaty feel so we decided to time it just like 2D animation. We wanted to treat him like a robot—stiff and mechanical in his movement. Emphasizing his weight became vital. His basic walk cycle was 13 frames up and 8 down so his body felt very hard to lift and heavy to drop. The Iron Giant evolves emotionally and the stages are very clear in the story. The first time you see him he's just a wall of steel in front of a ship. When Hogarth meets him, we wanted to indicate that there's some thought process, the tilt of a head, but he's still mechanical in his motions. Next, he's watching Hogarth, imitating him, and trying to communicate. In the next stage, we thought of him as a giant puppy who follows the boy home. Then he becomes more of a childhood friend to Hogarth, and as he's humanizing we started slipping in things like blinking. We have a wonderful scene where he's questioning whether he's alive and has a soul. By the end, the giant has, in some ways, moved beyond Hogarth. As he flies up towards that missile and he closes his eyes ...we understand that he's sacrificing himself so that he can live up to his heroic ideal—Superman. Making The Iron Giant, we felt like a ragtag team doing something outside the norm and we loved every minute. That's a rare experience. I remember going to see the movie with my wife on opening night in a theater that was largely empty. But there happened to be a father and his young daughter sitting in front of us. Near the end of the movie when the giant destroys the missile, my wife nudged me; I looked and saw the father had his glasses off wiping his eyes. I said, maybe a lot of people aren't seeing it but what we did really worked. It took a while, but I think the giant's getting the attention he deserves, finally. "Making The Iron Giant, we felt like a ragtag team doing something outside the norm and we loved every minute. That's a rare experience."