Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1313527
D E PA R T M E N T 33 KEYFRAME WINTER 2020 33 clockwise from top left: Concept art by Leighton Hickman, a butterfly forest envisioned by Sebastien Piquet, the crows nest by Frederick Stewart, and a chase through kangadillo canyon by Peter Zaslav. effects team to play with. "The splashes have beautiful, stylized shapes to them almost as if an illustrator had drawn the silhouette," says Visual Effects Supervisor Betsy Nofsinger. "We looked at splash reference in high-speed commercial photography and sculptures of breaking waves, along with shape sketches from Nate. At the same time, they're very physical, real splashes." One major animation challenge was executing a sequence where Eep and Guy steal a romantic moment while inside the Croods' sleep pile. From Guy's point of view it's as if his girlfriend is part of a huge Italian family crammed into a tiny studio apartment, but the story team run by Mercado had the idea to push it to where the pile seems somehow much bigger. The animators had to design ways to ground the stacked and shifting bodies in reality while also opening it up to a private moment between the lovebirds. "For those sequences, to create the nice graphic pile we had to put stunt bodies in there, an extra limb here and there, to maintain that nice spherical silhouette," says Head of Character Animation Jakob Jensen. "That was one of the first scenes we animated. It was baptism by fire." "Tonally, we described it as like two teenagers sneaking out at night to have this lover's rendezvous in the moonlight— but surrounded by their family," says Wragg. Fragments of moonlight and off-screen firelight spill between the bodies to achieve a romantic feel. "I love when you have a stupid cartoon idea, and all these genius minds try to crack it," says Mercado. "We hand it off to these smarter guys who build it, rig it, light it. Jakob took it as a fun challenge." A WHOLE NEW TOOL SET Not long after The Croods opened, the studio rolled out upgraded animation software called PREMO that Jensen calls the "Lamborghini version" of the previous software. Since it offers real-time full 3D cached playback, it opens up more time for the animators to experiment and refine their work. It also allows them to build shots with a greater number of characters while still making real-time adjustments to the animation. "Having the entire Croods family riding on the back of [their pet macawnivore] Chunky would have been nearly impossible for us to achieve in our old software, not to mention some of our wilder shots at the climax of the film with people riding on all sorts of creatures doing crazy stunts with the camera flying about," says Jensen. An upgrade to the raytracer Moonray meant the effects crew could render things in real time as they altered them and handle increased complexity, such as a sequence in a vine-strewn monkey town with choreography that slows into bullet time and a scene of the Croods riding together on a sabretooth tiger. "We can throw tons and tons of stuff at this renderer, and it'll just gobble it up," says Head of Effects Li-Ming "Lawrence" Lee. They stretched the rendering of things such as water features, banana peels, cave crystals, and goopy fruits around the Betterman farm to find a fresh balance between stylization and believability on a large scale. "We didn't hold back anywhere," says Nofsinger. "Even in our 'easiest' sequences, we were continually adding detail work because of how good our rendering looks and how easy it was to focus in on all those details. Those effects really add so much layering and complexity." At the same time, the pipeline Images courtesy of DreamWorks Animation.