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j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 1 c g w 2 5 3D with a Twist let the emotional moments breathe." And that peculiarity not only encompass- es the story, but the animation as well. The film utilizes two different animation styles: an illustrative, hand-painted approach used for the human world, and a slick, realistic approach typical of CGI for the robotic world. Plus, there's a cartoony approach for elements craed by Katie, who has a penchant for expressing her thoughts and emotions onto the screen during freeze- frame moments. Says Miller, "One of the amazing things about animation is that its only limit is the scope of the filmmaker's imagination. It feels like only now do we have the tech- nological tools to make it so that truly any visual style or language conceivable can be represented on screen, and we're just at the beginning of a golden age of creativity." Mike Lasker, visual effects supervisor on Spider-Verse, had just finished work on that film, which he calls "unique and different from anything else. It was so bold and graphic, and we had to reinvent how we did everything, which was challenging but so much fun." And immediately aerward, he was presented with a new challenge, this time as VFX supe on The Mitchells. He accepted without hesitation. "Once you get used to reinventing things, you almost become addicted to it as an art- ist. You don't want to do anything the same way. You want to keep coming up with new looks and new ways of doing it," says Lasker. "Creatively, it's been great to push things in a completely new kind of artistic direction." Craing a look for The Mitchells was cre- atively challenging, requiring the Imageworks artists to collaborate with the visual develop- ment team of directors. "When we first start- ed, they had a lot of beautiful drawings and artwork, but hadn't landed on the final look. Once they gave us a painting that illustrated exactly what they were looking for, we broke it down into components — outlines, brush- strokes, depth of field — and had to figure out how to achieve those things," says Lasker. Once the team finalized the unique look along with a plan to achieve it, the entire production had to be instructed on how to cra the aesthetic. "We were going to have hundreds and hundreds of artists who were going to produce 3,000 shots with that look," says Lasker. The Human World From the start, Rianda wanted the human world to look very different from the robot world. He wanted to portray the Mitchells' suburban Michigan home as honestly and realistically as possible — a bit messy, with dog toys on the chairs, unwashed dishes in the sink.... It was to look handmade (where you could feel the hand of the artist) and reflect the humans and their flaws. To this end, Lindsey Olivares, production/ character designer, integrated a lot of herself and people who she knew into the de- signs — just as Rianda did in the story — to resonate with the audience. "Everyone really fell in love with her illustrations," says SPA Production Executive Kurt Albrecht. "Her work has this wonder- ful, handcraed, illustrative quality, and we wanted to make sure we preserved that as we translated them to CG animation." Thus, the artists relied on line textures wherever they could add them, such as the squiggly lines on dad Rick's jacket or his hair. According to Lasker, the team developed three major tools for this cozy, familiar, tactile world: an outliner, a brushstroke tool, and a patch projector for simplifying the various forms of vegetation. "Everything we did was pretty much a new workflow — from the ink outlines, to the brushstrokes, to the patcher simplification, to how we treated depth of field," he adds. The group used an illustrative outline style, one that highlighted a character's form in an artistic way and mimicked the texture and variation of watercolor. These lines also respected light and shadow, inheriting a character's coloring and lighting in order to feel more cohesive and connected. "The outlines had to inherit color from the object they lived on, but they also had to be lit. That was a very new thing for us to develop that we hadn't done before," Lasker points out. The TDs additionally had to find a way to layer the outlines, which were Artists used an illustrative, hand-painted approach for the human world. A painterly process was developed for the vegetation, which was then simplified.