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THE WILLOUGHBYS www.postmagazine.com 20 POST MAY/JUNE 2020 that really felt tactile and visceral, like turning the pages of a book and smelling the ink." Adds Pearn, "I wanted the audience to think they could go to Michaels (craft store) and buy all the materials to make this movie." The characters are disproportionate in shape. But what stands out the most are the textures. The Willoughby family, as generations before them, have big red hair that looks as if it is made of yarn, a notion that is emphasized by the fact that Mother is obsessed with knitting. Nanny also sports a big head of hair, only hers is dark brown, curly and heart-shaped. Likewise, all the clothing looks handspun, too, like you would see on a stop-motion character — making them look like miniatures. That is, except for Tim, who is wearing a too-small explorer-like outfit he outgrew many years ago. "When I pitched the idea to Kyle McQueen, he immediately got excited by the notion of boiling down the shapes to simple cartoon principles with heightened textures, almost in the vein of stop-mo- tion," says Pearn, who spent part of his career at Aardman Animation, known for stop-motion pro- ductions such as Shaun the Sheep. "Everything in stop-motion is handmade, so we started wonder- ing, 'What if everything in this world was hand- made?' Hence, countless frames [are] overflowing with textures and toy-like components." Unique Animation Approach As big a role as stop-motion played in defining the film's look, it is Pearn's 2D animation background, with its hand-drawn approaches and pose-to-pose animation, that held sway when it came to making the characters move. "Early on we looked at 2D pose-to-pose anima- tion, and I challenged the animators to create a movement style for each character based on who they were," says Pearn. For example, Tim is very still, almost like a grown-up. Jane, meanwhile, rep- resents the future. She just wants to escape. She's like a bird, fragile but tough, which played into the way she moved through the use of arcs." While the film is informed by a stop-motion aesthetic and 2D animation principles, the world of The Willoughbys is neither in actuality. Rather, it is 100 percent CGI. And, "tricking" the computer into believing otherwise during the creation process was the biggest challenge Pearn and the crew faced. Textures were key to achieving the tactile aes- thetic of the characters. The way Pearn used the cameras also provided a stop-motion feel. To this end, McQueen devised an environment that could be captured without a lot of digital moving camer- as, and Pearn decided to use minimal motion blur, citing Hal Ashby's Harold & Maude and three-cam- era sitcoms as inspirations. "When we do move a camera, you feel it," says Pearn. "We tried to pick cameras and do setups that gave us a lot of width. We use a lot of depth of field so that your eye always knows where to go. It does kind of feel like miniature photography. And that's a big part of the stop-motion appeal." Creatively, the lack of camera motion also gives the sense that the children are stuck in the house. "I wanted to shoot the house like it was a prac- tical set, like a sitcom. Locking the camera allowed us to give the audience that three-camera setup feeling where there are long takes, you trust the acting and let the composition do the work," Pearn explains. "On the flip side, when we unpin the cam- era, it drives a story point. When the children leave the house, we let the camera dolly up because that telegraphs to the audience that we're now loose and out into the world. When the children make the choice to come back and stay at the house, the camera is locked again." To further implement the less-is-more approach of simple, graphic character designs, the crew coined a term related to The Willoughbys' cinema- tography: variable frame exposure. Today, standard features are filmed at 24 frames per second, with every frame displaying a different image. With variable frame exposure, the filmmakers showed certain images for one, two or three frames. "You might be giving them fewer images per second, but it never came at the cost of less infor- mation," maintains Aniket Natekar, one of the film's lead animators. Pearn explains this further: "Instead of splin- ing the animation so that it's full-frame range, 24fps, we would do it on twos for the characters, and then we would do our effects on threes and fours. The feeling that I was trying to achieve was similar to when [filmmakers] would use film and shoot their primary layer and roll it back, and do the effects on a pass-through. I wanted things to feel like they had a little bit of an off-timing. Of course, the computer really likes it when things make sense. So, trying to figure out how to work with the software and the pipeline to give us the robustness of the textures that we were after, and the timing we wanted, was really a challenge. But, we had some really smart people working on the film. Russ Smith (VFX supervisor) was able to get in there and add scripts and break the widgets, and get [the software] to do what we were cre- atively chasing. Plus, it was a small studio, which enabled us to be really collaborative." Bron Animation was already established as an Autodesk Maya-based studio, which The Willoughbys team used for animation as well. The artists also used Pixologic's ZBrush for modeling. In addition, they employed Maya's XGen geometry instancer for populating polygonal mesh surfaces with primitives — either randomly or uniformly placed — to generate the family's signature red hair, as well as the cotton-candy elements. The family has a history of greatness, but it seems to have skipped the parents' generation.