Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1192296
24 cgw w i n t e r 2 0 1 9 ated the ultra-successful 3D Despicable Me franchise and continued his work in char- acter design for the CGI animated film Rio. More recently, he was the original creator of the 3D film Smallfoot. Well-versed in both hand-drawn and CG animation, Pablos is a creator and a storyteller. He begins with an idea he finds intriguing, and only aerward does he ponder the best medium for that particular concept – whether CGI, live action, or hand animation. "Very rarely do you come across a story that you say, 'Oh, wait, the medium that would best serve the story is traditional animation,' " he says. "I was looking for such a project when I had the idea for Klaus, and I felt strongly – and this is completely sub- jective; there's nothing technical about it – that there's something about the story that would be better served through hand-drawn traditional animation." One reason was due to the film's nostal- gic components and its period-fantasy set- ting. Another reason is the subject matter, particularly a character who would be better represented in 2D. "You wouldn't attempt to do Wall-e hand-drawn; it wants to be CGI, so you let it," he explains. "As I said before, the answer in most cases when you have an idea is CGI. Could we have done it in CGI? Yes. But it was very clear to me that we had to do it in 2D, or at least try." Traditionally Untraditional Full-length CGI animated films arrived in the late 1990s, breaking box-office records and redirecting cartoon innovation. Ever since, hand-drawn animated features in Hollywood became kind of a lost art. It's been a decade since the last wide release of a 2D animated film: Disney's 2009 The Princess and the Frog. As such, finding skilled traditional artists presented some difficulty, especially when it came to 2D layout artists, according to Szymon Biernacki, who along with Marcin Jakubowski, served as produc- tion designers. Despite this, SPA Studios was able to as- semble a young team with a few veterans in the supervising roles, training concept artists to handle the 2D layout and backgrounds. "When we were recruiting artists, they would get so excited that they were going to be drawing by hand," says Jakubowski. To take on the film, the studio grew from close to 20 traditional artists to 250, and moved to a new location, setting up a brand-new pipeline that could handle a project of this magnitude. While CGI has enjoyed great innovation over the years, with the general lack of hand-animated projects, that compo- nent has been missing from its 2D cousin. "Instead of trying to look back and pick up where the traditional animated studios le off, I thought we should look forward and examine all the elements of the pipeline and question whether they are intrinsic to the process or a result of a technical limitation," says Pablos. During that process, the team found there were certain things that should not be changed. That was not the case when they got to lighting, though. As Jakubowski explains, in the traditional approach, the character animation is just a flat cel with an outline and a flat shadow on top, and then that's placed on top of a fully ren- dered background – and oen the two do not match. "Sometimes the background is like an oil painting or a watercolor, and the character kind of feels like a sticker on top," he says. "They look like they come from dif- ferent worlds because the backgrounds fully use light and the characters are very limited in how they are lit." Thus, the goal was to develop tools that enabled the artists to add the sensation of volume and light onto the hand-drawn character: to shade characters and to place lighting on 2D characters in a way that hadn't been done before, so the characters and backgrounds merge seamlessly. "We feel light and color are powerful storytelling tools," says Biernacki says. To that end, the group focused on bringing light to the animation world in a way that it would self-serve not just the beauty of the shot, KLAUS IS A TRADITIONALLY HAND-ANIMATED FILM, BUT THERE ARE SOME ELEMENTS AND SHOTS DONE IN CGI, PARTICULARLY FOR SCENES INVOLVING RIGID, HARD-SURFACE OBJECTS SUCH AS THE SLEIGH AND THE BUGGY.