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S P I R I T U N T A M E D BY KAREN MOLTENBREY In June, DreamWorks Animation trotted out Spirit Untamed, a reimagined cinematic version based on the DreamWorks TV series Riding Free, itself inspired by the 2002 DreamWorks feature Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, about a wild mus- tang in the American Old West. In Untamed, a young girl named Lucky moves to the Old West with her aunt, who hopes to tame Lucky's rebellious streak. There, the young girl meets a kindred spirit, a wild mustang named Spirit, which shares her independent nature. When an evil horse wrangler captures Spirit and his herd, Lucky and her friends set out on a wild adventure to rescue and reunite these amazing animals. Untamed is directed by Elaine Bogan (herself an experienced rider) and co-directed by Ennio Torresan Jr., and is based on the screenplay by Aury Wallington, who wrote Untamed and Riding Free. Taking the animation reins for the period-set Untamed was London-based Jellyfish Pictures. Untamed comprises just under 1,300 shots, all but 25 of which were animated by Jellyfish. "It was an ambitious endeavor, especially with the timescale we had, both for DreamWorks to develop the film and for us to do the animation," says Luke Dodd, director of VFX and animation at Jellyfish and executive producer at Jellyfish on the film. What's more, this was Jellyfish's first feature film — the studio had been doing episod- ic work. Time frames, tools and aesthetics have evolved since the first feature was released — the original film used a combination of 3D CGI and 2D, and the TV series a "mixed" look, a style Jellyfish took to a feature level in Untamed. In Untamed, all the imagery in the foreground and midground was crafted in 3D with hand-painted textures. "Everything was based from a shading point of view on how real the materials needed to look," explains Dodd. "But everything that sat beneath that was very painterly and had the artist's hand behind every texture. In the backgrounds, the distant part of the shots, were mainly digital matte paintings, so there were 2D drawings for the skies, mountains and so on." The environments, in fact, contain a delicate mixture of realism and artistry. DreamWorks drove the design and story, handing over artwork that set the tone for each sequence's look, the characters and environments. "Our modeling team then brought all these characters off the 2D page and into the 3D world," says Dodd. The film features a number of characters, with six hero characters in all: three girls and three horses. The girls have long, flowing hair and beautiful period clothing, while the horses have manes and tails that blow in the wind. The 3D modeling and animation was accomplished in Autodesk's Maya, as was the lighting. Rendering was done through Maya with Arnold, and compositing through Foundry's Nuke. SideFX's Houdini handled all the simulation, particularly for the cloth and hair, as well as the 3D effects. Meanwhile, the artists built the clothing assets in Marvelous Designer, and used Foundry's Mari and other software for the textures. The artists approached the hair as they would simulating realistic hair in VFX, then worked with DreamWorks to dial the sim back to an aesthetic that fit with the painterly environments. Artists also paid particular attention to the horse rigging and the play of their muscles. "We had over 10 different layers of body deformation and 40 different layers of facial de- formation built into all the hero rigs," says Dodd, noting that Jellyfish collaborated with VFX house Minimo, which created rigs across the show. "Each rig then had four levels of detail and functionality, allowing for realtime playback at 25fps." In terms of the 2D, the group largely used Mari and Adobe Substance Painter and Photoshop for all the texturing and shader work. "Our artists handcrafted all the textures, some- times scanning in our artists' physical watercolor artwork to use as reference or even a starting point for a texture," Dodd notes. All of the final textures were either hand-paint- ed or hand-drawn. SUMMER MOVIES www.postmagazine.com 27 POST JULY/AUG 2021 quel to the 2019 thriller, directed by Adam Robitel, who returns for this new Columbia Pictures release. Once again, unsubscribed players are put in life and death scenarios that require smarts and skills to overcome. Each 'room' presents a different 'challenge' — electricity, lasers, quick sand, acid — and while each participant is a past champion in their own right, the difficulty level has been raised considerably, thinning out the pack with each progression. The film stars Taylor Russell, Logan Miller, Indya Moore, Holland Roden, Isabelle Fuhrman, Carlito Olivero, Thomas Cocquerel and James Frain, but it's SpinVFX's (www.spinvfx.com) work that helps sell the dangers that the competitors face. The studio, with locations in Atlanta and Toronto, signed on to create more than 500 visual effects shots for the movie, which was filmed in South Africa, but that number ultimately surpassed 1,000 (1,002 to be exact). "We were hired by Sony," explains SpinVFX's visual effects producer George Macri. "We've done quite a few features with Sony. They hired us to be involved from prep right through to post." As many as 150 SpinVFX artists worked on the show over the course of its production. Kyle Menzies is a VFX supervisor at the studio and says they approached the project as if each room chal- lenge was its own little movie. "All the rooms were so unique," says Menzies. "We had a few supervisors at Spin working on the other rooms as well. The 'beach' was probably the biggest challenge because the scope of it grew a lot between what we left South Africa with and what we ended up with. There were a lot more ef- fects added and a lot more substantial work added during the post process than we thought we'd be doing during the filming of the show." The beach challenge actually takes place in a studio that is dressed to look like the outdoors, complete with a lighthouse and snack stand. The competitors quickly learn that there's more to what they see, as participants are swallowed up in quick sand. "The beach definitely was the hardest — trying to figure out how to make that room work," recalls the film's VFX supervisor, Whitney Richman. "So that was probably the last (sequence) to be turned over, and then the 'acid' room. "We talked a lot about the movie Tremors," she says of the look. "I kept saying Beetlejuice. What is going to be scary but not sci-fi or creature like? And how do you move in sand? You move slow! So how do you pair speed and danger? I think it came out great considering, in the beginning, we were all saying, 'How are we going to do this?'" "We did do a lot of CG sand and effects simu- lation sand with Houdini," Menzies explains. "We also shot a lot of elements that we did end up using in the end. There was a while where we thought we weren't going to use any of the ele- Jellyfish Pictures handled most of the film's animation.