Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/763341
www.postmagazine.com 32 POST DECEMBER 2016 MOANA character supervisor and the modelers to bring the character to living, breathing life. Schwab isn't an animator and Smeed isn't a designer, which makes the collaboration even more critical from the open- ing stages. "I saw some of the early costume designs for Moana and realized they might be too restrictive for her to climb a tree or do anything athletic," Smeed says. "We needed to make sure the costume would be able to fit what we're going to do in animation." NEW FRONTIERS Moana, Maui and their attendant animal sidekick (a Disney staple from decades back) aren't the only characters in the film. Another, as we saw from early clips and trailers when it befriended Moana as a baby, is the ocean itself. The very water that surrounds Moana and her home had to move and behave like the real ocean does, and yet also display flashes of distinct personality. The ocean represented a huge animation chal- lenge, so technical supervisor Hank Driskill was among the special effects wizards charged with pulling it off. "Water's a pervasive part of the movie," says Driskill. "Moana and Maui are on a boat, they're falling off a boat, they're in the middle of stormy seas. We have shoreline water, deep water, swim- ming, big cresting waves, lots of water interactions. The water is an important part of the movie and it's in a whole lot of the movie." All of which means that developing software to program and render the behavior of water com- manded a good deal of the time and computing power the Disney Company bought to bear. One of its recent hits, Big Hero 6 (2014), was comprised of around 45 percent effects shots. On Moana, it's 80 percent — a lot of it the management and depiction of water. Needless to say, Driskill says a big part of the effort was to automate the water effects as much as possible. Mathematical equations exist for the movement of ocean water that are pretty well understood and fairly simple for the kinds of computing power Hollywood wields on most blockbusters. When isolating or overlaying a foreground element like a boat with the attendant wakes, whitewater, etc. we see in the real world, the team chopped it out of the background plane and made it a little self-con- tained scene in itself. Not only that, Moana's ocean needed to have as many moods and forms as the real ocean. Many of the shots that don't take place out on the open ocean are set at or near the shoreline, and as Driskill explains, there are a lot of moving parts. "There's a clip of Moana walking up to the ocean, angry at it. You have the subtleties of the movement of the water, the breaking of the water against the shoreline, the water causing the sand to be wet and then pulling back and the sand drying as the water recedes." It all meant carving the elements that make up the animation into ever-smaller discrete pieces, an effort that called for a unique IT approach. "There was some effects we really wanted to surpass ourselves on," he says. "We knew we were pushing up against what we could put on [an individual] Bill Schwab was art director of characters. Story meeting with creatives. Driskill, Odermatt, Mayeda and West.