Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1453602
20 cgw j a n u a r y • f e b r u a r y • m a r c h 2 0 2 2 in terms of its technical capabilities. "I decided I would write to its strengths and collaborate with Tangent [on the anima- tion]," he adds. For anyone familiar with Gutiérrez's style, it is jam-packed with detail, and Maya is no different in that regard. The designer him- self says he once heard someone describe it as "Mexican chaos." "I kinda like that," he says. And just as he enjoys a wide range of cuisine from different cultures, Gutiér- rez's animation palette extends to various styles, as well — anime action, the reality of stop-motion animation, the freedom of CGI with snappy, subtle acting, and more. "But I also want all the craziness of 2D animation, the cartoony-ness of Tex Avery type of stuff," he adds. Then, it was up to the team at Tangent to bring those designs and styles to life, converting them into three-dimensional imagery that would functionally work in a CGI world. "For instance, take a simple thing like a bush design – we had to translate that into 3D so it would work for multiple camera angles," says Tangent's Mark Theriault, over- all visual effects supervisor on Maya and the Three, noting the work involved a big art task for the studio — a much larger job than was required for Next Gen. While Maya is indeed a CG series, it does have some 2D elements, mostly for the far backgrounds. To get the feeling of stop motion at times, the sets were shot in a certain way, and the textures more or less mimic that of puppets. "But then we went out of our way to do things that stop motion struggles with, which is action. So, we went crazy with the action sequences and things you can't do with certain mediums," explains Gutiérrez. "When you watch stop-motion animation, action is really tough because moving the camera and pushing those ma- quettes are super difficu ." Needless to say, generating 270 minutes of feature-level animation is difficu . "The volume was unrelenting," adds Gutiérrez of the work involved — not only pertaining to the characters, but the show as a whole. Every chapter (episode) con- tains a large-scale figh , culminating in the big battle in Chapter 9, which is 45 minutes long. "That was more complicated to make than the Book of Life," he says, referring to his 2014 feature film "That's how big the volume was." What appears in the final version of the series is, in fact, a scaled-back rendition of the imagery, generated by nearly 300 artists at Tangent during the peak of production who handled the 6,000 or so shots in a matter of 18 months — and did so with an abrupt shift o remote workfl w due to COVID restrictions. "With the scope of these characters and the complexity of all the sets and the design, complexity reduction and management really was huge. That and trying to get the quantity of work through while maintaining that high excellence that we wanted at Tangent. It really was a big technical execution of the data," says Theriault. "But one of the benefi s of having a director like Jorge is that he understands both the art and the process, and the need for trade-off." For instance, many of the female char- acters originally were designed with long, fl wing dresses, but swapping out those garments for something more akin to a pencil skirt eliminated the need for fabric simulations on those garments and enabled animation rigs to be used instead. Similarly, some of the male characters initially were designed with full battle armor, but by mak- ing them shirtless with pieces of the armor strapped on, the character complexities were reduced signifi antly. Characters with Character Maya and the Three features mortals as well as many gods and various armies. "There's so many characters," says Gutiérrez. The series stars Zoe Saldaña as Princess Maya, Gabriel Iglesias as Picchu, Allen Mal- donado as Rico, Stephanie Beatriz as Chimi, Diego Luna as Zatz, Gael García Bernal as The Jaguar Triplets, Alfred Molina as the God of War, Kate del Castillo as the Goddess of Death, Danny Trejo as the God of Earth- quakes, Cheech Marin as the Gods of Wind & Storm, Rosie Perez as the Goddess of Gators, Queen Latifah as Gran Bruja, Wyclef Jean as Gran Brujo, Jorge Gutiérrez as King Teca, Sandra Equihua as Queen Teca, Isa- bela Merced as the Widow Queen, Chelsea Rendon as the Goddess of Tattoos, Joaquín Cosío as the God of Bats, Carlos Alazraqui The animated film emb aces Mesoamerican history and legend.