Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/663382
ANIMATION www.postmagazine.com 15 POST APRIL 2016 How many characters had to be created? Kaytis: "From the various games, there's the flock. There are nine core birds that you can play in the game. We started with those and they are all in the film. And from there we started expanding this world. Obviously, we need characters for certain roles in the film, and were able to invent new birds with new talents and skills you wouldn't see in the game. Maybe one day they will show up in a game. There are some pretty great characters. We end up with a village of birds on an island — I'm guessing about 100 different characters. I worked on big films like Tangled and Frozen. There were big crowds in those films, but this was a far larger canvas to fill in terms of how many characters we had, and that's just on the bird side of things. We have the pigs, and there are recognizable characters from the game, but we also had to fill an entire city on this island with pigs, so there are literally hundreds of pigs in shots. It's on a scale that I never had to deal with before." From the trailer, it looks like the pigs have a pretty unique jiggle to them? Reilly: [Laughing] "We're the experts on jiggly, piggly fat." Kaytis: "That comes from SPI's workflow. They have a lot of great tools in there where they can manipulate the characters from their faces to the feathers and the skin. It's a very robust tool set. I was impressed with how much they could actually do within shots. A lot of that hand-done work was by animators within shots. It's really impressive." Where is the film now in terms of post? Reilly: "We're actually starting our DI this week, and we are going to London to record the score with Heitor Pereira, our composer, at Lyndhurst Hall and Air Studios, which is a fantastic facility. It's like a converted cathedral. Lots of big movies do their score there." Kaytis: "They are recording with the London Symphony Orchestra, which is exciting. The animation and story is done. We've locked our reels." Reilly: "We are starting our final mix very soon as well." How early did the voice actors start recording their lines? Reilly: "We started recording the main characters — that's Red, Chuck, Bomb, Matilda — we started recording those fairly early on in the process. We scratched the dialogue in for every charac- ter, and then we started with the main characters. We must have done 90 to 100 sessions. Recording the dialogue for an animat- ed movie, there is a lot in play — not only lines of comedy, but improvising. We looked at each session as another opportunity to write. We had a great script by Jon Vitti, and we had the great work that our board artists had done. But we also looked at each session with our cast as an opportunity to write. The reason for that was, we had the best comedy cast in the world." Kaytis: "It was really like having a dream come true. We would always cover our script pages as written by Jon Vitti. We'd do a few passes and step off and have the talent just ad lib. That's actually where we got a lot of our most funny stuff. It's amazing how all the guys dove in with all their hearts and minds, and take what we had and elevate it. It's what you'd expect from Jason Sudeikis and Bill Hader and Josh Gad and Danny McBride — they are incredible." Reilly: "That's why we had so many recording sessions. We would test out jokes, and try out stuff, and look to connect the chemistry of the characters on-screen because we recorded them all separately. You'd find these little sparks of comedic en- tertainment that were so funny. It didn't take us that long to find the voices, but once the character puts on the suit, that's when the fun begins." Was the whole film storyboarded? Kaytis: "Absolutely. Like with any traditional animation film, we boarded the whole thing. And in this film in particular, we pre- vis'd every shot." Reilly: "That was a very conscious choice because on top of using the storyboard process for the comedic potential — we must have done 60- to 70,000 boards, at least — we had a full previs depart- ment. The previs department was sort of an extension of story. "One of the things that Clay and I talked about at our first meeting was how we wanted to visually translate the Angry Birds world — the camera angles used, the timing of the anima- tion choreographed to a camera move, and creating a different type of visual language for what is a very simple idea of shooting a bird from a slingshot." Kaytis: "We definitely came into this wanting to create a film that excites us visually, emotionally and comedically. It's a film that we would want to go see. We created our own previs department that Fergal closely supervised." Reilly: "Todd Heapy was our previs supervisor and we spent a good deal of time doing a very elaborate reel, blocking out shots and trying cutting patterns and things like that. Also, for the animation team, we blocked in a bit of the perfor- mance and handed that off to Imageworks. We didn't have the traditional layout schedule. We spent a good deal of time exploring in previs and then we had a fairly locked idea of what we wanted by the time we got to layout at our facility. We had less time than you would normally have to make these movies. We were making it at a good pace. That was actually an advantage to us." Where was the previs done? Kaytis: "It was here in Sherman Oaks at Rovio. We had a couple of other partners in Vancouver as well, because that's