Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/763341
www.postmagazine.com 34 POST DECEMBER 2016 machine. We could do 50-100 million particles, but we knew we had to go to hundreds of millions or maybe billions of particles for some of the big cresting waves, so we did a big research push into distributed computing." The water solution ran across multiple machines, all in concert and sharing the data crunching as if they were a single central processor, and it turned out to be the answer to automating the process like the effects crew wanted as well. Driskill says the 50 or so people in the effects department were so good at their jobs everyone wanted to make sure they could focus their energy on the really exciting effects. It led to an advanced form of what he calls "foundational effects," a prac- tice Disney started a few movies back. "Foundation effects are inspirational," he says, "the layout artists would place foundation effects in a shot and then we give the idea of where the effects will eventually be so that the director or the produc- tion designer can get an idea of it, approve the idea for it and then the effects team will take it and cre- ate the actual effect that would go into the movie. "We took that step further, actually creating a library of simple effects the layout artists can place in the movie that can actually make it all the way through to the final frame without the effects de- partment having to do the work." It meant creating library effects where — for example — the team could place a boat in the water and it would move with buoyancy, the animators could place the characters on a boat and the water would respond to their effect on the environment. THE SECRET INGREDIENT Any director will tell you animation is a lot like special effects, costumes and all the other below- the-line arts — you're not supposed to notice them, they simply exist to portray the world the story is taking place in. Animation offers a further opportunity to estab- lish a visual language that's different from the one we know in our world where characters can look a bit weird or things can move a bit strangely (like in the clip where Moana and the ocean high-five one another). But an awful lot of design goes into making sure that visual language is consistent and makes sense in the framework of the story which, therefore means that lots of data wrangling goes into making it seamless. For better or worse, we might have left the hand-drawn era of 2D animation behind, but if the success of Frozen, Big Hero Six and Zootopia are any indication, Disney still understands that the only special effects that really matter are characters and their conflicts in a world all their own. The ocean befriends young Moana. Lead characters Maui and Moana. The ocean was an animation challenge. MOANA