Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469966
D E PA R T M E N T 17 KEYFRAME Into the Wild OPEN SEASON Sony Pictures Animation Landscape: Forest Production Designer: Michael Humphries In Open Season, Sony Pictures' first animated feature film, Timberline National Forest is the fictional backdrop for the comedic adventures of a domesticated grizzly bear named Boog, who's been returned to the wild just before hunting season. Its unique but familiar look was created by Production Designer Michael Humphries. Humphries recalls that when he met with the film's directors, he was asked, "Do you like Eyvind Earle?" Not only is Earle—the man behind Sleeping Beauty's aesthetic—one of his artistic inspirations, but he had just finished working on Home on the Range based on Earle's style. He was hired immediately and given artistic freedom as long as he kept to Earle's spirit. To do this, Humphries says he tried to put himself in the head of Earle while he worked. A large part of the visual development process involved doing an enormous amount of research. Humphries and his colleagues flew up to the Muir Woods in Northern California. "We spent an entire day just photographing the forest and sketching," he says. They observed the shapes, taking note of anything that would give them a sense of the environment within a forest. Very early on in his process, he started the design in a traditional way with acrylic paint on paper. "Once I got the look that I wanted, then I translated everything into Photoshop so I could share all of the files with the other artists," he says. Humphries designed several trees, many of which were based on pine trees and their triangular shape, playing around with different versions and making his own interpretations. "You translate the real tree into a graphic design," he says, "and then, when you build the CGI model, you can also do different positions of the tree [and] different heights and sizes." He adds that if they're placed properly in the environment, you don't really notice that it's the same tree over and over again. The big challenge was to make a 2D style work in a 3D CGI movie. All of the CGI elements, he explains, make everything look extremely real, yet the idea was to continuously maintain the overall 2D look. To achieve this, he would make brushes that were 2D flat shapes and incorporate their brushstrokes in the distant mountains and trees. Anything in the distance was kept almost entirely in 2D, "and then we'd put 3D elements in front of that based on what we needed to do," he says. Finding a balance was challenging, and he had to remind the CG artists not to let everything get super real or over-rendered, but to rather try to keep the imaginative cartoon feel. It was also essential to maintain the continuity of the style throughout. In terms of landscape painting, he says, a lot of it has to do with overlapping shapes, creating a scale and an atmospheric perspective, and looking at how you can push something back in terms of color. He points out that color is an important design element, one that is not used arbitrarily. Like music, color evokes an emotional reaction in the audience and for that reason, he adds, "We always control the palette as much as we can." Then, of course, there is the issue of characters. Humphries worked with Character Designer Carter Goodrich, experimenting with placing the characters in the environment as part of the visual development process. "That way we could see how the characters married into the scene and the overall environment," ensuring that the landscape felt organic to the emotional arc of the characters and story. Open Season images courtesy of Sony Pictures Animation. TRAVEL TIP TIMBERLINE NATIONAL FOREST may be fictional, but its inspirations are real. Using Open Season as a guide for your summer getaway, head to the nearest national park forest and discover for yourself the unique shapes and colors to be found in our woodland landscapes. SUMMER 2022 17