Computer Graphics World

JANUARY 2010

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"Rather than waiting for a plate, I could sit at my desk, watch a shot, grab a frame, and do a quick TIFF composite to check it," Ledbury says. "If, say, a character's head was getting too close to a problematic area, I could run down and stop the animators, and they might move the head. It was quite nice to have that control." Although the animators worked two frames at a time, the overall production happened at a faster pace. "On a live-action fi lm, we might have three units shooting at one time," Led- bury says. "On this fi lm, they had 30 units running on diff erent stages at the same time. It was much busier than I envisioned. I thought it would be leisurely, but it was quite intense all the time—sets going up, sets going down, shots coming in at diff erent times, meetings about sets coming up next." Because Ledbury came onto the fi lm early as a concept designer, he continued working on designs all through the project, in addition to supervising the visual eff ects work. "Stylisti- cally, Wes [Anderson, the director] wanted as much as possible in camera," Ledbury says. "Our shot count was high. We touched 75 percent of the fi lm. But of the 617 VFX shots, only 400 have typical visual eff ects work. e others are fairly simple rig removals." A Sense of Scale An in-house crew of 28 worked on 500 shots. Stranger, now NVizible, did 30, and Lip Sync Post handled 80. In addition to removing ani- mation rigs, the visual eff ects crews extended sets, duplicated sets, lit and rendered scenes, painted skies, and composited characters fi lmed against greenscreen into CG and min- iature backgrounds built in various scales. "We had normal scale, animal scale, and hu- man scale," Ledbury says, ticking off the vari- ous-sized characters the compositors needed to deal with. "For the animals, we had full size, half size, micro and mini-micro. For the humans, we had full size and half size. e full-size human and half-size animals worked together, and the half-size humans and micro animals worked to- gether. And then we had a full-scale animal set, a micro animal set, and a full-scale human set. All those mixtures created issues." Ledbury takes a breath and continues: "Plus, although every shot is a main pass, we did mul- tiple passes for safety—diff erent lighting stages, sets with puppets and without puppets. e amount of shots and the volume of data coming at us all the time was the hardest thing about the fi lm. Working with the CG stuff , doing the set extensions, was the haven. at was the fun." Before production began, Ledbury had previs'd about 100 of the prickliest shots work- ing in Autodesk's Maya and Apple's Shake, which were the main production tools along with Mental Images' Mental Ray for render- ing and Andersson Technologies' SynthEyes for matchmoving. "We did previs for techni- cal reasons, not for story points," he says. For example, they used previs to determine how many sets of what size they needed to build. Perhaps the most expensive and complex set—and shot—the team worked on was one in which Mr. Fox comes up through the fl oor of a giant chicken shed. e shed was a miniature, so they could photograph it and use the photos as textures for set extensions. "But, we didn't have the full shed," Ledbury says. "We had to duplicate it and make it four times longer, add in CG pipes and feeders, and build the roof." e animators worked with Mr. Fox and a group of about 60 chicken puppets in front of a greenscreen, but the director wanted more, so the visual eff ects crew added another 300 or so CG chickens to match the stop-motion puppets. "It took everyone in the CG depart- ment because we had to turn the shot around in a week and a half," Ledbury says. "But we enjoyed the challenge. is, the attic, and the supermarket were the biggest shots." For the supermarket shot, the production team had fi lmed characters dancing on four shelves. e VFX crew built CG versions of those shelves to extend the set and mapped pho- tographs of the miniature shelves onto the digital shelves. " e model-making department made such highly detailed sets that we could use pho- tos of the models for textures," Ledbury says. Because the models are so tiny, though—the supermarket set was six inches tall, the attic was 10 inches by 12 inches wide—they had depth- of-fi eld issues. "We photographed multiple angles, and photographed the models in stages, starting with the foreground," Ledbury says. To complete the supermarket, they also extended the fl oor, built a ceiling, and added CG lights that the camera would have passed through on a real set. " e CG lights came from a photo of a full-size set that we mapped onto geometry," Ledbury explains. For other parts of the supermarket, they used CG ver- sions of various sets with photographed tex- tures projected onto the digital objects. Matchmoving the camera from the shots fi lmed on the stop-motion stages was straight- forward. "We had good measurements, and we didn't have any motion blur," Ledbury says. As they might have for a live-action fi lm on loca- tion, the group used tracking markers, but for this fi lm, they didn't need to worry about re- moving the markers from a main plate later. In- stead, because there was so little movement, they did matchmove passes. "Once the animator fi n- ished, we could put tracking markers all over the set and use those to track from," he adds. Lighting Passes ey also did lighting passes. For example, if a light would turn on or fl icker during a shot, the visual eff ects team would do multiple pass- es of the same frame. "I could go down to the set once the animators had fi nished a shot and talk to the DP, and then take a couple days shooting diff erent lighting conditions and angles," Ledbury says. "If I didn't get what I wanted, I could get the set back out and re- January 2010 29 Animation ■ ■ ■ ■ Animators working on 30 stop-motion stages kept VFX supervisor Tim Ledbury hopping, to be certain his crew—who would touch 75 percent of the fi lm extending sets, adding skies, removing rigs, compositing characters into backgrounds, and so forth—wouldn't run into problems.

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