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20 cgw j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 1 3D with a Twist character artists and animators due to their ability to shape-shi. In some shots, these characters appear in blended form. "It took us about a year to figure it out," says Skaria of the transformations. The goal was to make the transformation bold and crazy, but not creepy. The group began by looking at various character transformations that have oc- curred on-screen, such as Mystique's trans- formation in X-Men, which involved feathery, scaly textures. Yet, Pixar wanted something that was more exaggerated and stylized look-wise, as their character scales needed to be much bigger to fit into the style of this movie. The team also was inspired by the ripple that runs through Gigi the cat's fur in Hayao Miyazaki's film Kiki's Delivery Service. The artists used its 3D pipeline to achieve the desired look, which includes tools that have evolved from previous shows, such as a silhouette sketching tool used on Inside Out. Also, there are new tools that were built for this film, such as robust controls to make the eyes more graphic, as well as the transformation rig used to shape-shi Luca and Alberto. During the transitioning phase, both the human and sea monster rigs are present, along with a third, the transformation rig. As parts of that rig are turned on, those elements from the two rigs (human and sea monster) are revealed. "It's like a magic trick where we're kind of just showing parts of the human and parts of the sea monster, but we give that control to the animators so they can slide things and turn things on and off, and show bits and pieces of each character," says Skaria. "We literally have two Lucas in the same space and show parts of each." Typically such transformations would be hidden off-screen or would be obscured by adding smoke in front of the character, for instance, due to the effort involved. Howev- er, the director was very specific about this occurring on-camera in Luca. "It's the core of the movie, it's about Luca as a human emerging out of the sea monster, and we want the audience to see it," says Skaria. When the character becomes fully hu- man or fully sea monster, the transforma- tion rig was not needed and the shot was animated normally. Transformation and Animation The transformation occurs in and around 50 shots, so the artists spent a good deal of time and effort on it. Mostly, though, the char- acters appear in one form or the other. "We wanted to feel the hand of the artist in every- thing we did on this movie," says Albright. For instance, all the sea monster scales were hand-painted by an artist. Those paintings then were used to derive the geometric scales the artists used as part of the trans- formation process. In total, the sea monster Luca has 3,436 scales on his body. Luca's animation style is inspired by 2D animation. "For animation, we wanted to incorporate the bold, illustrative choices and stylized timing of 2D animation, while pre- serving the richness we've come to expect from a Pixar film," Venturini says. In all, the film features 1,500 shots, but artists produced an average of 10 drawings per scene (amounting to about 15,000 drawings) to help the animators stay true to the illustrative design with their poses. According to Venturini, the facial rigs were especially different, particularly in the mouth area. The characters have fun, graphic Part of the film takes place underwater, such as here when Luca's parents discover him missing.