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PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH www.postmagazine.com 19 POST MAR/APR 2023 D reamWorks Animation's iconic swash- buckling feline returns for his greatest adventure yet in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, this new chapter fol- lows the fearless Puss in Boots (voiced by Antonio Banderas) as he realizes his perilous pursuits have exhausted eight of his nine lives. Teaming up with his nemesis Kitty Softpaws (voiced by Salma Hayek) and a friendly pup named Perrito (voiced by Harvey Guillén), the brave outlaw ventures into the Black Forest to seek the mythical Wishing Star that will allow him to restore his lives. Arriving 11 years after the original Puss in Boots and 18 years after the titular character's debut ap- pearance in Shrek 2, this new installment takes the visual style of its fairy-tale world in an exciting new direction. The sequel's creative team fully rede- signed the original characters and environments to achieve a dynamically-detailed, painterly aesthetic. At the 23 rd Annual VIEW Conference, visual effects supervisor Mark Edwards shared an inside look into the tools and techniques that brought this visu- ally-stunning, new adventure to life. Edwards is a longtime member of the DreamWorks Animation team. "I've been at DreamWorks for 25 years now," he notes. "I started back really at the beginning of the CG-animated features on Antz (1998). I started as a technical director. I was more on the technical pro- gramming side and then switched to an artist role. 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-direc- tor 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 want- ed 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 de- signed by visual development artist Claire Keane. "That was the handcrafted 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 crafting 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 ele- ments, 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 minimum 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 adjustments to the style of such a fa- miliar character was a daunting challenge for the film's creative team. "That was the issue with having a known charac- ter," he adds. "We really wanted to not lose every- thing 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 limita- tions 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 it off screen. Although the cape fits his heroic persona, there was a strategic reason behind its removal. "Capes are kind of hard. They were really tricky back then, so it was something that they didn't want to take on," he reveals. With an arsenal of new animation tools now available, the team was able to add the cape back to Puss' ensemble. The rest of the heroic cat's accessories were updated to add asymmetry and make more of a statement on-screen, from the feather in his jaunty hat down to the tips of his iconic footwear. The team also redesigned core aspects of Puss' anatomy to make him more cat- like. This included smoothing out the shoulders and streamlining his silhouette, as cats do not have rounded scapula bones like humans. Character designer Shiyoon Kim created sketches and paintovers to solidify Puss' re- vamped appearance. "We did all of this to try and get an idea of an update where he was still recognizable, a little more streamlined and a little more graphic in areas," Edwards states. "That was the model we followed." After all of the updates, it was important to de- termine the key elements of the previous character designs that should be carried into the new version. "Everybody would come back to the cat from the first movie being soft and furry, so that was something that we realized we really need to keep," he adds. "We adjusted the groom to get more in line with that first version." Pushing the limits The next step was building a 3D art model of Puss to convey his size and scale compared to other elements of the world. "We wanted to make sure he was small because his ego is so big," Edwards explains. "It's more of a nice contrast to have this legendary character fighting a four-story-tall giant when he's cat-sized." The team completed extensive iterations on the model to determine if any adjustments were needed for the groom, clothing materials, colors or lighting setups. "This was a way to also just look at the character and try to find out if he would work," he adds.