Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1485933
D E PA R T M E N T 29 KEYFRAME Along with the challenge of having these creatures come together to give the illusion of a solid surface, "another added level of complexity was that the speeds of the formations defined the speed at which the main characters would traverse through the scene," Hamed says. To sell the physicality of characters walking or running on a moving environment "we had to work closely with the layout department to get the timing of the creatures just right as it played a big part in the cinematography." Going Green Compounding this, the creatures weren't the only things moving. Countless plants moved too, beginning with pando, which grows pods that can be picked and used as a power source. "Whenever you see pando on the screen, there's always a glow, there's always a motion," says Sean Jenkins, Head of Environments. Plants played such a physically active role in the story that an entirely new role was created to deal with them: Animated Environments Supervisor. In the way that Hamed dealt with creatures, Ben Fiske was assigned to come up with new ways to deal with the plants. Typically, the effects department might animate the same plant a hundred times for different shots, according to Fiske, but the scale of Strange World made that approach especially unwieldy. So, they did animation in the asset phase, rather than in the production of shots. "What this means," says Fiske, "is that I worked with a crew of really talented plant animators from effects and from tech animation, and they provided me with cycles." Software developers and technical directors then used these cycles to create libraries that enabled "animation on the entire environment," Fiske explains. "If you think about the modern CG pipeline, we would wait until almost the last step to have plants animating. Instead, now, the directors are able to see animated plants [moving] pretty much right out of layout." With so many plants in motion throughout the story, this enabled the filmmakers to visualize early in the process how the characters would interact with the background, making the production more efficient. Fiske says that when he finally had the opportunity to flip a switch and turn on the whole environment, though, the immediate response was, "This is too much!" Sklar says it looked like a rave, and Smeed says it was "distracting from the characters, and you always want to be with the characters." That the environment could compete with the characters was something the filmmakers had discussed, and Fiske was prepared for it. The system provided different options: low, medium, and high for every one of the plants. With 600 to 700 shots of moving vegetation, each shot was tailored by an artist in final layout. "[They] could either offset the animation of the plant or turn down the plant's motion," he says. This solution did more than just "take the weight off a lot of really talented artists," says Fiske, so they didn't have to animate the same plant over and over. It also provided a manageable method of trial and error to find the best ways to forefront character performance. The result is a movie that honors animation techniques of the past and evolves technology of the future to tell the story of a family trying to figure out how much of the past to preserve, what kind of future to embrace, and how to find harmony between the two. WINTER 2022 29 opposite page: Characters include the malleable Splat, who was the first and trickiest character Jin Kim designed. this page: (from top) So many animated plants led to a new pipeline to streamline the process; Toolsets were created to turn sentient creatures into surfaces for characters to move on.