Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1378252
SUMMER 2021 35 DROPPING ANCHOR By the time Space Jam came around four years later, digital animation was at a threshold, making the task of bringing animation and live action together much easier than it had been in the past. Still, given the amount of unanswered questions involved in putting hybrid scenes together, the movie's animation co-director Bruce W. Smith says there was a certain amount of "duct tape and spit" creativity. "There were a lot of happy accidents along the way, guestimations that sometimes would fail, but we would quickly recover and find a way to make the movie look as cool as it was," says Smith, who had worked as an animator on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. According to Smith, director Joe Pytka used a "loose camera," employing handheld camera effects. Register balls placed on the outfits of stuntmen and in locations throughout the studio helped track all the live-action shots which would eventually be anchored to the animation. Instead of traditional side- to-side movements, animation could now be tracked in any direction without becoming a distraction. In the film's first successful tracking shot, Michael Jordan had just landed in the Loony Tunes world, and a handheld camera was tracking him. So in order to establish Jordan as a character in a cartoon world, he had to be lit in such a way that he could be anchored in the setting. "I don't think that shot had any real animation in it, maybe some Tunes running around here and there," Smith says. "But the fact that we could anchor [ Jordan] in an animated world and still have it be believable was a huge stepping stone for us." And if you think it's difficult to have Michael Jordan maneuvering around a bunch of animated Looney Tunes characters and aliens, imagine the logistics involved with sending a couple of those Tunes back up into our world. For a scene that had Bugs and Daffy tunneling into Jordan's house to get his basketball kicks, Smith and his co-director Tony Cervone engaged in a constant game of "where's the rabbit?" "We would have to take a dry erase [pen] to the screen and draw where Bugs would be in each portion of the shot so they would get the eyelines correct for the kids," recalls Smith. "The kids come through looking for Bugs and looking for Daffy. What about the shoe? How big is Daffy compared to the shoe? That was a whole week of plotting that shot out." All Space Jam: A New Legacy Photos courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.