Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1334563
26 cgw j a n • f e b • m a r c h 2 0 2 1 My-Makers "Tomm and I could adjust the camera, bringing it down to watch [at] level or bring it up higher, or have trees whip by the cam- era," notes Stewart. Once the camera previs was approved and locked off, McNamara worked with art- ists who used the 3D open-source Blender soware to build variations of the forest. Then the group printed the 3D model and fly-through frame-by-frame, and each one of those rough frames became a reference for the 2D animators while they hand-drew and re-animated it on paper with pencil and charcoal. So, what ends up on screen is actually pen and paper animation, and underneath that was a previs pipeline that took advantage of VR. "[McNamara] had a team of three or four people who would do a fully-ren- dered background, characters, and effects, everything, on paper, which was a huge task," says Stewart. "At that point, we had a stack of paper that had a beautiful rendered background, characters, and effects on every single frame. That was rescanned; we wanted that to very much be the finished product on screen. We didn't want too much pre-production or compositing on top of that because we really wanted that beautiful handiwork to shine through." The wolfvision scenes were intended to be a roller-coaster ride of sorts. To integrate a sense of sensory perception, the regular world appears monochromatic but sparks with phosphorescent visual scent when Robyn transforms. As McNamara points out, the nice thing about working with technology today is that it's not an either/or scenario. The weakness of hand-drawn animation is that in order to get fluid animation on screen, artists have to draw everything. And if there is any editing that needs done, even the tiniest bit, it's literally back to the drawing board. He further adds that by using 3D in previs to approve camera angles and movements, it was not a matter of letting technology rule, but rather to speed up the editorial process before the group got into the lengthy stage of hand-drawing everything on paper aer the previs was complete. "You can still use technology to help make more traditional animation faster. You can still do the full hand-drawn final look, but you can use technology to make it more ef- ficient and maybe more interesting because you can try different things," Moore adds. "So, it's a nice combination to use." In addition, for characters and especially objects in the distance, such as wagons, cannon, and other mechanical elements, the artists used the vector-based 2D animation application Moho, formerly Smith Micro's Anime Studio Pro, just recently acquired by Lost Marble. With Moho, paintings, etchings, or drawings on paper can be scanned and then applied to a 2.5D model, resulting in complex animation that would take a lot of time to draw frame-by-frame by hand, Moore explains. Stewart points to another scene similar in style to the wolfvision shots, which is a fly- through among the trees following a deer, only this was done completely by an animator, Em- manuel Asquier-Brassart, who first sketched out a grid and animated the camera fly- through, and then animated the deer on top. "It's fantastic, but that couldn't be done by a team. You can do that if it's just one amazing animator. But when it has to go into a pipeline for a team to do three and a half minutes of it, it's just not possible," says Stewart. For a fly-through of the town, where backgrounds were mapped onto planes and rotated, the compositors used Foundry's Nuke to keep the perspective from distort- ing and the imagery flat. "Nuke is usually used to make something look as realistic as possible, for effects and things like that. But, we wanted to use it to make things look as hand-drawn and hand-painted as possible," says Stewart. Maintaining e Course There are not that many studios producing 2D hand-animation today, Cartoon Sa- loon being one of them. Is it because they feel their stories are best served through hand-animation versus CGI? Not exactly. As Stewart points out, the more that 3D evolves, the more it can replicate hand-drawn anima- tion. So the answer is that Cartoon Saloon's pipeline and talent are set up for 2D, and the interest in 2D is extensive there. Whereas some 2D projects by other stu- dios might start with CGI and then bring in 2D elements (for instance, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and How I Lost My Body), at Cartoon Saloon, when CG is used, it is done so to complement the hand-drawn aesthetic. "I think there is something about a hand-drawn aesthetic that's very timeless," says Moore. Stewart admits, though, that 2D and 3D each have their advantages and disadvan- tages. "I think you should know your medium and take advantage of that medium," he says. "With our medium, it allows us to use the whole visual language of 2D – hand-drawn, mark making, painting, and everything else – to help amplify the mood, the tone, and the characters' emotions." Whether it is the story, the art, or the combination of both, Wolfwalkers has been receiving a lot of attention, including Oscar buzz, something not foreign to Cartoon Sa- loon and its filmmakers. The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea both received Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature. And, it's likely that Wolfwalkers will follow the same path, perhaps even running away with the top prize. Karen Moltenbrey is the chief editor of CGW. Although Wolfwalkers is hand-animated in 2D, plenty of technology was used.