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ONWARD www.postmagazine.com 16 POST MAR/APR 2020 of the character. "Soft layers are always hard in sim- ulation. In order to get dad to overlap properly and move like a ragdoll would, we spent a lot of our time dialing in physical properties to make him feel heavy and floppy. We worked with animation to make sure his funny moments were believable and physical." Technicians built a system that allowed animation to hit key poses for the character while still achiev- ing the ragdoll physics. The goal, says Brooks, was to "get him to perform in a physical way that was art directed." The upper and lower portions of dad's body contained two different rigs. In fact, there were two different versions of dad that the animators worked with — the half-guy version that comprised just the lower body, and the full version that had additional controls for the upper body. Depending on the shot, the animators would use one or the other, or even both versions, according to Sudeep Rangaswamy, technology and pipeline supervisor. Special tools enabled the animators to run simu- lations at their desks so they could see what the act- ing would look like. The animators could dial in how much sim and how much animation they wanted. "We could animate the rig fully, and we could dial in between the two, or in pieces or parts, but it didn't have quite the same physics [as a full simula- tion]," Stocker explains. Ultimately, the final simula- tions were done by the sim department. So, for instance, if the animators wanted dad to shake someone's hand, then animation had to drive that action, with a little simulation on top of it. A simulation alone wouldn't achieve that. However, for the lower part of dad's body, the animators keyframed it within Presto, the studio's in-house animation software. The lower body then drove the upper portion. "So if dad was just walking, we could hit a button for the upper body, and for the most part, the arms would move, the head would bounce, and the torso felt like a stuffed hoodie. But then that hoodie also came with animation controls. So if we then wanted dad to turn his head at a certain point, we could drive that exactly how we wanted to. We could get close, and then sim would take over and honor that." The legs were animated just like any character, and then the simulation department would run a typical sim to provide movement on the pants. However, the boys kept dad on a tight leash, so to speak, using a retractable dog leash to move and control him so he would not wander off. The leash was tethered to dad's belt; controls helped slide the attachment around the belt for continuity through the sequence. The group also built controls that could pull the pants so when a character tugged on the leash, that area would pull and "really sell the physicality of that action," says Stocker. While this would move the beltline and the belt, it would not move the upper body in that particular shot. "So in a case like that, the sim department would have to do some custom work to make the upper body react to the beltline being moved. Where the hoodie overlapped the beltline was a tricky area, and for the most part, the hoodie was over the top and purposely hid any leash interaction," he adds. "But, there were always times when we had to work to make that connec- tion look natural." The Dragon A "larger" animation challenge was the dragon monster, particularly due to its size and complexity. The dragon has a unique design. Its face is flat and resembles the mascot of the school, while its body was formed from the bits and parts of the debris as it wrecked the high school — cement chunks, pieces of metal and rebar, even nearby cars and so forth. So, its design was fluid from shot to shot. "It goes through a progression," says Rangaswamy. "It starts in one state and ends in another state. That required a lot of coordination to pull that off." Tim Best, supervising TD/lighting, notes that the dragon was especially challenging for the lighters, in part because there were so many different kinds of elements and effects that make up the character. Then came the challenge of animating it as one coherent object. One more thing, it flies, too. And it breathes fire. "From a rigging point of view, it was really challenging to build and then animate, but so was choreographing the sequence," says Stocker. "The tricky part about the animation was that we didn't want the dragon to feel like it was a real animal as it moved, one with muscle. We wanted it to feel like it was more machine-like. Finding that balance between animal and machine was not easy. At the same time, we wanted it to feel menacing and gigantic." The dragon spanned a number of sequences, cul- minating in a huge action sequence at the end. While bringing the creature to life, the work of many de- partments was directly affected by the work of other departments — animation, characters, sets, effects, lighting, simulation. The crew held what they called "dragon dailies," during which the teams examined these dragon sequences at least a few times a week, as all the departments tried to determine how they were going to approach the scenes — what anima- tion was going to do, what simulation was going to do, what effects was going to do. "Because, if any of us was going to change something that could change the set, the others needed to know," says Stocker. The artists also considered Barley's beat-up van, Guinevere, a character, too. "We treated the van like it's Barley's steed; that's how he treats it, even though it is just hacked to- gether and doesn't work that well," says Stocker. The van had all the physics of a vehicle, but animation also bestowed on it a quirky personality, too — for instance, making it rear up a bit when it would take off. The upper torso for dad (right) represents some of the studio's most complex work.