Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1434261
WINTER 2021 33 ne o the ecitin discoeries artine ade durin pro- duction was that dancers and animators speak the same language: "We are obsessed with how things move and where they initiate from." She remembers one of the first animated sequences she viewed and how the film's other Head of Animation Renato dos Anjos pointed out that [eldest sister] Isabela's hip was a little too turned out: "I was like, wow, you saw that too!" This was the first time Lehtomaki and dos Anjos had worked so closely, so early on, and for such a long period of time with a choreographer over the course of a film—an opportunity they appreciated since Martinez "really understood the char- acters and understood their drive," says dos Anjos. Martinez, in turn, loved working with the animators after the dancers had finished a reference because "we got to fine-tune each character and their movement. Really find the particularities of their footfalls or weight transfers." At times, says Woodside, what this meant was the animators showing her their work via video and "she would just stand in her living room and dance it out." GOING IN CIRCLES Encanto's collaborative process was not linear, with much of the back and forth relying on which stages the songs were in. "Until a song gets written, I don't think we know the full scope of what even the character needs to do in that moment," says Director Byron Howard. "So there was this great sort of circular workshopping of the characters and the story" with Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the film's eight original songs, the heads of animation, and the story team, being boarded and reboarded along the way. A similar approach was used in Netflix's Vivo, a musical about a kinkajou (rainforest honey bear) whose deep partnership with an elderly street musician named Andrés sends him on a mis- sion from Havana to Miami, picking up Gabi, a free-spirited tween, along the way. According to Story Artist Carlos Romero, the directors, layout artists, story artists, and writers would gather in a room and discuss their vision for how a song should feel. Then, says Co-Director Brandon Jeffords, the team had to be willing to jump around, from the songwriter (Miranda, who also wrote the original songs for Vivo) to the choreographer to various other departments—"then back into storyboarding again, and then over to layout again … it becomes this cyclical process until you find something that's working." š›œž Ÿ¡¢£, ¤¥¦§ š¦Ÿ: Kai Martinez (right) and a fellow dancer created references for sisters Mirabel and Isabela for Encanto's "We Don't Talk About Bruno" sequence. The sisters' dance moves can be captured using the enclosed interactive transparent overlay. ¦ŸŸ¦žœš£: Visual development images explored Encanto's Mirabel in motion. WINTER 2021 33