Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1485933
28 KEYFRAME F E AT U R E Strike a Pose When it comes to the movie's characters, the Art Director Characters Jin Kim says, "I wanted them to look like my neighbors, my family. Like real people." Kim notes that Hall is a big fan of classic French comic book artists like Didier Conrad, and this influence can be seen in unconventional choices like the oval faces and bulbous noses of the Clade clan, from Searcher's 16-year-old son Ethan, who is torn between farming and a life of adventure, to Searcher's father, Jaeger, an explorer who disappeared on an expedition long ago. Kim also borrowed from early Hayao Miyazaki films in designing the costumes, which are "ambiguous in their time period," he says, making viewers wonder if they are in the future or the past. The purpose of Kim's off-the-beaten-path details was to craft a more exaggerated look than is usually found in Disney's contemporary, naturalistic-looking films. "Without those character designs being stylized, I don't know that we could have sold the stylization we were going for," says Amy Smeed, who served with Justin Sklar as Heads of Animation. "[We were] trying to reconceive all the little in-house rules that we have about how we animate," Sklar says. To get the look they wanted, they examined old-school Disney films, studying how to draw 2D design poses from every angle. "We're stepping through every frame and seeing, okay, here's a key pose and here's a key pose, and how are they getting from one pose to the next?" says Smeed. "What is the spacing? What is the timing? We were really dissecting and figuring out some fun ways that we could push on stylization for this show." Sklar says that the poses are much broader and describes lines that are long, simple, and flowing, with an emphasis on making "really beautiful transitions. The choices are surprising and unexpected, because they are often less concerned with reproducing reality and more concerned with big bold shapes." Smeed and Sklar also knew that if they pushed broad, comical movements, they had to do it in a way "where you weren't going to laugh it off when danger showed up," says Sklar. "If a character feels like you can drop an anvil on them and they're gonna just get back up [and] be fine," it's difficult to convince an audience that they're in peril. The goal was to make interesting choices but ensure that the stakes felt real. "We were always looking for what was at the heart of these characters, so that even while we were stylizing, there was still that truth," says Smeed. Crowd Control It's not unusual for an animated feature to have large crowds in the backgrounds of scenes, but the ones in Strange World were unique. According to Crowds Supervisor Yasser Hamed, approximately 90 percent of the crowds in this film are creatures, from flying organisms shaped like red water drops to flying dinosaur-type beings. "That included the most diverse and largest scale of crowds we've ever done at Disney Animation," he says. Hamed estimates that roughly one in four shots has creatures in them—and in total, the movie uses approximately 56 million creatures. A notable example are the flying creatures that look like red drops of water. "Tens of thousands of these creatures, tightly packed in formation, produce a walkable surface for our main characters to interact with," says Hamed. In order to achieve this, he explains, "we developed a toolset within our department that would automatically instance thousands of creatures along an art-directed path and compress them tightly by using some collision-avoidance algorithms. Each creature had to behave and act in a unique way to ensure it had its own identity while still behaving as part of this overall formation." Because it would be impossible to animate the huge number of creatures used in various scenes by hand, Hamed's team worked closely with the animation department to build differing "swim" cycles. These cycles were then incorporated into a simulation that allowed an entire formation of creatures to behave like a fluid. "We programmed the solver to artificially switch each character from one cycle to the next, blending it seamlessly," he says. "Some cycles had creatures moving faster than others, while some cycles were animated so that they could break away from the main formation of characters, do something unique, and then rejoin the formation all automatically as part of the simulation."