Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/6179
January 2010 30 shoot. We'd have different lights coming on in the same frame so we could mix them together in compositing. I suppose I was treating this like trying to get render passes." For example, to deal with green spill from the greenscreens, Ledbury would have the crew shoot two passes: one with and another without the greenscreen. "We could use the greenscreen shot for the matte, and the other, without any spill issues, for compositing," he explains. "e compositors also had to be care- ful with the saturated colors because we knew the color timers would push the grade. It was quite an orange-red film; when I was in the art department, our intention was that there would be no green or blue in the film. But, that was good for greenscreen shots." One of the problems unique to stop- motion animation for the visual effects crew was removing animation access holes in the set. "We'd put in a foreground and shoot mul- tiple passes of the set again. But, the sets were wood, and if they had been shooting anima- tion for two weeks on one set, the wood would expand and move." is was a particular prob- lem if it was rainy or damp, which was not un- usual in the UK, where they made the film. "If we sped through the shots, we could see the set breathing," Ledbury says. "In the morning, it dipped down, and then came up during the day. So, we had to deal with that in compositing. We'd cut out patches of shots and do 2D tracking to stabilize them so they wouldn't bounce around." Initially, Ledbury thought one of the big- gest concerns for the compositors would be the furry characters because hair is never easy to lift from a greenscreen background, but one advantage of having no motion blur was that it made this easier. e other was the director. Wes [Anderson] wasn't as picky as I thought he would be," Ledbury says. "He was con- cerned about sky color, as you'd expect, but he wasn't worried about matte edges. His main concern was with art direction. He left it to us to get the shots done." And Anderson's art direction always moved toward preserving the handcrafted look of the film. Even so, as Mr. Fox proves, the most handcrafted films still rely on CG artists. n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. The VFX crew built CG versions of four shelves to extend the set for shots in the market, adding the floor, a ceiling, and CG lights, including those the camera would have hit on a real set. n n n n Animation