Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1495163
j a n u a r y • f e b r u a r y • m a r c h 2 0 2 3 c g w 5 D reamWorks Animation's iconic swashbuckling feline re- turns for his greatest adventure yet in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, this new chapter follows the fearless Puss in Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas) as he realizes his peril- ous pursuits have exhausted eight of his nine lives. Teaming up with his nemesis Kitty Sopaws (voiced by Salma Hayek) and a friendly pup named Perrito (voiced by Harvey Guillén), the brave outlaw ven- tures into the Black Forest to seek the mythical Wishing Star that will allow him to restore his lives. Arriving 11 years aer the original Puss in Boots and 18 years aer the titular character's debut appearance in Shrek 2, this new install- ment takes the visual style of its fairy tale world in an exciting new di- rection. The sequel's creative team fully redesigned the original char- acters and environments to achieve a dynamically detailed, painterly aesthetic. At the 23 rd Annual VIEW Conference, visual effects super- visor Mark Edwards shared an inside look into the tools and tech- niques that brought this visually stunning new adventure to life. Edwards is a longtime member of the DreamWorks Animation team. "I've been at DreamWorks for 25 years now. I started back re- ally at the beginning of the CG animated features on Antz [1998]. I started as a technical director. I was more on the technical program- ming side and then switched to an artist role," he recalls. "I ended up doing lighting and supervising Flushed Away [2006], Monsters vs. Aliens [2009], and How to Train your Dragon [2010]. I was head of lighting on The Croods [2013] and then moved into a visual effects supervisor role on Kung Fu Panda 3 [2016], Abominable [2019], and now Puss in Boots 2." Laying the Groundwork Edwards, director Joel Crawford, and co-director Januel Mercado knew they wanted to take the sequel's visuals in a new direction from the very beginning. "When we were approaching the film, we wanted to think about what we could do that was a little different," he recalls. "The main focus was to create something new and unique, and build on this established world." The narrative is a contemporary fairy tale at its core, so the team began exploring imagery evoked by the genre. A painterly style of illustration emerged, solidified by a hand-painted font designed by visual development artist Claire Keane. "That was the handcraed look we were always trying to go for," Edwards explains. "Everything that the computer would want to do for us, we wanted to augment and make sure artists were touching it and putting their own spin on it." As they approached the challenge of craing an entirely new look for a familiar world, the team established a list of creative goals. The film would be animated as if it were shot through a camera, with distinctive lens characteristics like depth of field and optical effects. Physically plausible 3D space would always be used as a baseline. Action scenes would be heightened with anime-style elements such as stepped animation and action lines. All lighting workflows would remain intact, but new compositing tools would be layered on top. Pushed colors and graphic shapes would be implemented as an overall visual design element. 2D filtering would be kept to a mini- mum to avoid loss of detail and inconsistencies across characters and sets, and temporal noise would be excluded to keep solutions stable and eliminate distractions. Overall, the primary directive was to always make visual decisions that would enhance the storytelling. Reimagining a Hero Redesigning the look of the film's feline protagonist was a major part of the pre-production process. "You need to update the character and make sure the world follows," Edwards explains. Making adjust- ments to the style of such a familiar character was a daunting chal- lenge for the film's creative team. "That was the issue with having a known character," he adds. "We really wanted to not lose everything that was special about him." With vast improvements in technology since Puss in Boots' last cinematic outing, the design team had more creative freedom and fewer limitations to consider. "Are there things that we couldn't do back then that we can now do?" Edwards recalls asking. When Puss is first introduced in Shrek 2, he quickly removes his cape and tosses The film was rendered in MoonRay, DreamWorks' open source Monte Carlo ray tracer.