Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/6179
January 2010 18 then linked individual scenes created in those programs to entire sequences. Effects artists also worked directly with Har- mony; however, layout, character animation including all the in-betweens, and cleanup all originated on paper. "We didn't have any automatic in-be- tweens," says Marlon West, visual effects su- pervisor. "We have been doing early develop- ment on automatic in-betweening, but we did this film just like we would have done before." One change: For this film, all the animators had a desktop scanner to scan in their own drawings and composite an animation test at any stage they wanted. What's Old Is New Again For painting and compositing the approved drawings, the studio enhanced Harmony with plug-ins and by using the program's scripting ca- pability. "Harmony comes with a set of plug-ins and compositing nodes, but we have the capa- bility of developing our own, and the interface allowed that, so we developed a dozen or more plug-ins in-house," Keech says. In addition, the studio asked Toon Boom to incorporate some new tools. "We asked them to implement the color picker and some func- tions we had in CAPS for color styling," Keech points out. e technical team at Disney also created plug-ins to mimic the look they had gotten from CAPS. "Because we have people in pro- duction who would say, 'I wish the software could do things like CAPS did,' we used the CAPS technology in our plug-ins to get a similar look, so the film would look more like a Disney movie," Keech says, adding, "I was a CAPS developer, so it was nice to see 2D come back." Using the plug-ins Disney developed, colors in Harmony blend from one region to another on the characters' cheeks, for example, as they did in the CAPS system, with a soft, rather than a hard, line. e effects teams also asked for plug- ins. In their case, they wanted to reproduce CAPS' "turbulence." "It's a noise that moves slow or fast that we got used to for rain or mist," West says. And com- positors requested plug-ins that imitated Shake functions. A Touch of 3D In addition to Harmony, the ef- fects team, in particular, created some 3D elements. "We wanted this film to look handcrafted," West says. "But there are some fireflies and some vehicle wheels that are 3D, and some 3D doors open and shut in Maya. But, it's a very, very understated use of 3D." Maya also worked in the background. Set designers built the non-organic parts of the film—the buildings, vehicles and other struc- tures—in 3D to give the painters perspective reference for paintings. "In the old days, we would have built models and photographed them," West says. Instead, the painters printed the 3D models and then drew over them. "e background paintings were 99 per- cent handcrafted," West says. "ey were done in Photoshop, but they were drawn or inked or painted one stroke at a time. e painters applied every brush stroke as they would with a regular painting." In addition, the effects team sometimes used the puppet tool in Af- ter Effects to move trees and leaves, and help bring the background paintings alive. "e challenge was to not have a hybrid movie," West says. "I thought Atlantis and Tarzan were really cool, and I don't see a prob- lem with integrating digital elements into a hand-drawn film. But the architects of this film wanted an old-school 2D film like Bambi or Lady and the Tramp." e directors and the crew believe the return to the rich look of the 2D films of the 1950s will be a novelty for children of the 21 st century. "A lot of television animation has moved into stylized graphics," Musker says. "We felt there was something about the fullness of characters in hand-drawn films that children haven't seen on a big screen with this caliber of dimensional drawing and atmospheric landscapes." Adds Clement: "We're kind of recapturing and reinventing at the same time." e same was true of the studio itself. "ere was a real desire to make a lush, beautiful, entertaining, hand-drawn film even though [traditional] animation had been pro- nounced dead," West says. "It wasn't dead to any of us. So, it was nice to have another time at bat. When the opportunity came to make this film, I had to participate. It was a won- d erful experience—the return of co-workers and good friends. I wouldn't have missed it for anything." n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. To give painters perspective reference, set designers built non-organic objects in Autodesk's Maya and printed those 3D models so the painters could draw over them. To give painters perspective reference, set designers built non- organic objects in Autodesk's Maya and printed those 3D models so the painters could draw over them. n n n n Animation