Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1334563
j a n • f e b • m a r c h 2 0 2 1 c g w 2 5 My-Makers and Irish people had once identified strongly with wolves, and because they were erad- icated, so was the folklore and everything pertaining to the animals. We wanted to rediscover that for a new audience," explains Moore. One bit of folklore in particular, focused on the werewolves of Ossory, about pagan people cursed to become wolves, especially caught his attention as it was a tale from Kilkenny, where he and Stewart grew up. Wolfwalkers features two very different, contrasting worlds. The austere Puritan town, where everything within it is rigid and straight, depicted in sharp, hard edges, horizontal and vertical patterns, and straight black lines. "We wanted to reference the woodcut art of the 1600s, which have a very aggressive shape, angular markings, and very big, black lines and big, solid colors underneath," Stewart says. To this end, the town is a cage-like environment for Robyn; she's not permitted to do what she would like, and she feels trapped. To reflect that, the filmmakers shot from the perspective that made the environment appear very flat. They even went so far as to avoid showing the sky in town scenes, always looking down, trapping Robyn within a little box. In contrast, the forest is very energetic, wild and free, and instinctive. Here, the lines are sketchy and loose, with under-drawing and Impressionistic watercolor painting that gave it an organic feel – warm, curvy, exciting. The respective designs carried over to the characters. When Mebh enters the town, she lacks the thick outline present in the other town characters, and instead has a pencil-scratched line illustrating she belongs to a different world – without the contrast being too jarring. "It's really about pushing the cels as far apart as we possibly could, while still keep- ing them consistent enough so that it [looks like] one film," Stewart notes. According to Stewart, there was a lot of thought that went into the actual move- ment that helps explain the different worlds. "It ties into the whole art direction of the film that there are two worlds. One is control and order, turning all the people [especially the soldiers] into robots of society who are told what to do and do what they are told," he explains. "Then the opposite is the world of the forest, where it's all freedom, instinct, and wildness. So you sit on one side of the fence or, as in Robyn's case, you go from one side of the fence over to the other." Tradial wh a Tech Twist Moore and Stewart, childhood friends, came up with the basic story nugget for Wolfwalk- ers seven years ago, picking at various dras and versions until about three years ago when they made a trailer; pre-production began a year aer. When most hear the phrase "hand-ani- mated," especially in features, they auto- matically assume it means no technology is involved. In terms of Wolfwalkers, that is incorrect. In fact, a good deal of tech, includ- ing 3D and VR, was used, though in such a way as to retain the handcraed aesthetic. "Our studio is known for hand-drawn [an- imation], and we really value the fact that everything we do looks hand-drawn and timeless. But, we do use technology," says Moore. "Our whole pipeline is semi-digital, even if we are starting with paper and pencil. [The technology] is used all the way through in subtle ways, in ways that are invisible, and a bit obvious other times." For the traditional 2D animation pro- cess, including posing rough animation and cleanup animation, the team used TVPaint Animation from French company TVPaint Developpement. In addition, they employed Adobe's Photoshop for the backgrounds once the initial work was done on paper. (The line work of the background is done in ink, charcoal, or pencil on paper, and then the painting is usually applied on paper, scanned in, and modified in Photoshop.) Insofar as 3D is concerned, it was mostly relegated to some design and visualization. The most compelling use involved scenes using what the studio calls "wolfvision," whereby the world is presented through Robyn's eyes as she runs free in the natural world in her changeling form. "We wanted to treat wolfvision almost like a little short film within the feature film, maybe with a different pipeline and different means of production, because we knew it had to be something that would be so special in the film that it would make the audience perk up and go, 'Oh, wow. What's this? This is different.' Also, it had to be so immersive that once we see Robyn's expe- rience, we know that she can never really go back to living her normal caged life in the town," says Stewart. Conceived by Irish animator Eimhin McNamara, the wolfvision process involved the use of Oculus' Quill, a VR painting tool typically employed for sketching out scenes in VR to determine scale, the proximity of objects and characters, and so forth. McNamara built a forest environment in Quill first, allowing him and his team to do camera previs fly-throughs of the forests, trying different easily-adjustable flight runs with rudimentary markers for trees and so on, improving the work at that stage. Images from the village are hard-edged with a thick black outline.