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www.postmagazine.com 33 POST OCTOBER 2016 www.postmagazine.com 33 POST OCTOBER 2016 L ong ago, in a far purer time, storks delivered babies. But now, thanks to the relentless march of capitalism for ev- er-increasing profits, the once nobly-tasked bird has been pressed into a slightly less vener- able vocation: delivering parcels for online retailer Cornerstore.com. Such is the clever conceit behind Storks, the latest bundle of joy from Warner Bros. Animation and Sony Pictures Imageworks. The creators have described the film as the unlikely love child of Chuck Jones and Terrence Malick — a film that fuses the legendary animator's loose-cannon style with the ethereal-yet-tangible reality of the famed director. Visual effects su- pervisor Dave Smith, a veteran of live action, was brought on to help achieve that vision, along with co-directors Nicholas Stoller and Douglas Sweetland. To nurse this baby to life, Imageworks pushed the limits of its proprietary TweakIt animation sys- tem, and, armed with The Foundry's Katana, SideFX's Houdini, and the Arnold renderer (recently acquired by Autodesk), crafted a world of tangible, non-CG-like sur- faces photographed with the kind of contrast, darkness and depth of field normally reserved for art- house cinema. The high-flying story centers on Junior, the ambitious, top deliv- ery stork at the giant warehouse perched atop Stork Mountain. His efficiency-crazed boss, Hunter (Kelsey Grammer), is about to give him what he's always dreamed of — a promotion to the boss's chair — but first he must fire the orphan Tulip, the only human in the ware- house. Junior spares her the ax and instead invents a job for her in the long-shuttered letter-sorting office. Junior's mercy backfires, however, when Tulip receives a letter from Nate Gardner, a little boy pining for a brother to ease the loneliness of life with his career-focused parents. When Tulip accidentally reactivates the dormant Baby Factory, Junior helps her deliver a fresh newborn before the boss finds out. STRUCTURED EXAGGERATION Trouble shadows them throughout their journey in the form of Jasper, an elder stork seeking a second chance to redeem himself for past mistakes, and Pigeon Toady, a weaselly office snitch. Along with the Alpha and Beta Wolf, they join penguins, a rabbit and a Japanese macaque on the list of Looney Tunes-esque characters whose performances shine with the spirit of Chuck Jones. "We were aiming for a more struc- tured exaggeration than what we've done in the past," says character ani- mation supervisor Joshua Beveridge. "The characters are fun, pliable and squishy, pushing all the principles of animation, but we always wanted to tell where their home base was, no matter how far they went." This underlying structure to the exaggeration was one of Stoller's primary goals: grounding the action in reality. "Baby is the one that had the most design rules, who we had to be the most reserved with," says Beveridge. "The whole movie rides on the preciousness of the baby, so while we wanted the animation to feel loose and unrestrictive, and the baby to feel squishy and fleshy, we found there was a sweet spot." To hit carefully-set baselines and extremities of exaggeration for each character, animators worked with thousands of controls in Autodesk's Maya. Starting from loose Pixologic ZBrush sculpts provided by the development team at Warner Bros., modelers fashioned polygon meshes for each character in Maya, pairing them with highly-pliable rigs featur- ing bones, IK and FK switches, along with a robust system of blendshapes, set-driven keys, sculpt deformers, clusters and lattices for manipulating the body and face. In addition, animators also had access to Imageworks' proprietary TweakIt system. Fully integrated within Maya, the TweakIt suite of tools gives animators an arsenal of custom deformers, as well as the ability to pull individual control vertices for shot-specific tweaks without harming the mesh or the rig — a lifesaver in moments of ex- treme deformation. "Here at Sony, we have a workflow that's fairly unique from everywhere else," says Beveridge, "where anima- tors are not just animators, but sculp- tors. The TweakIt system allows us to make these incredibly-pushed poses that might only be on-screen for a frame or two, without having to go all the way through the rigging and modeling departments. So we'll use our standard, super-pliable rig for 80 percent of a move, but when we need a pose for a funny hit in the face that's going to be designed to camera, we'll just sculpt. We'll layer several differ- ent techniques over the same action, making the tools effectively invisible." A true testament to the effective- ness of this multi-layered approach is the soft fleshiness of the baby, which jiggles, squashes and stretches ever so subtly when, for example, Alpha and Beta Wolf lick its face. "There's no dynamics, no effects pass," he adds. "There's no silver bullet. If you try to solve every- thing with just one trick, it's going to feel transparent, like a gimmick. So the fleshiness you're seeing is a combination of a lot of things: controls on top of controls, large ones alongside little regional ones; and then the blood, sweat and tears of hand-shaping little corrections to make something really unique." The last character that artists tackled was Jasper, a big, bumbling holdover from a bygone era. "We started working on him after we had a healthy handle on Junior, applying all the same design rules to him but tailoring them for his big, underlying shape. He's a giant bird, so if you pay close attention, you'll probably see that [his size] fluctuates quite a bit throughout the movie. That's because we like to be a little loose with our propor- tions, which are always finessed for what feels right in the moment," explains Beveridge. This slight flexibility in proportion not only lends each character a sense of pliability, but reflects how an animator would actually hand- draw the scenes. "Which was our rule of thumb," Beveridge says, "never be rigid." To make Jasper's neck and belly feel fleshy and round, artists used some global gross fat movers incor- porating clusters, lattices and sculpt deformers (in Maya), along with TweakIt for sweetening the shapes to make the flesh jiggle around. To create the clothing for all the characters, including Tulip and Junior, with his office attire and the sling that hold his injured wing, effects artists employed Maya's nCloth solver, bring- ing in Marvelous Designer software near the end of the show to help drape some of the cloth with a clean, graphical look. "We were trying to bring that very cartoon, hand-drawn style to realistic 3D cloth sim," says Smith. "With Maya's nCloth, we added extra tools like the stretch-rest rig that allowed cloth to expand and shrink with the cartoony squash and stretch, while still retaining correct folding behavior." Imageworks relied on its proprietary TweakIt animation system to complete the film.