Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1529871
Modern Art In uenced by traditional animation techniques in Bambi and Sleeping Beauty, the team drew inspiration from painters like Tyrus Wong, who deconstructed landscapes to create focus and emotional resonance through abstraction. Similarly, they sought to make the environment feel organic and painterly, offering a contrast that emphasized Roz's out-of-place presence in the natural world. Another source of inspiration: Studio Ghibli. "It really felt emotional and personal, almost like an artist in the woods sketching and painting," says Production Designer Raymond Zibach. "All the [Hayao] Miyazaki lms depict nature in just such an amazing way." VFX Supervisor Jeff Budsberg explains that this distinctive style involved the intentional juxtaposition of Roz's sleek, metallic form with the lush, deconstructed landscapes of the island. The use of brushstrokes and painterly textures gave the lm a unique hybrid of 2D and 3D elements, enabling a vision that married the warmth of traditional painting with the spatial depth of CG technology. "You could have dynamic camera moves, characters walking through the space, wind-foliage interaction, dynamic depth of eld—you have all these sophisticated things that add so much richness to the world, but it looks 2D," says Budsberg. The technical challenges of realizing this vision of "a Monet painting in a Miyazaki forest" were signi cant. Budsberg describes how each CG department had to think about the end goal rather than focus solely on physical accuracy or detail. In fact, the team developed custom shaders that allowed them to recreate the look of brush strokes in 3D space. An internally developed tool called Doodle allowed the artists to draw assets like foliage in 3D that provide more freedom in the modeling process. "When you can build something with strokes, the artist's hand ows right through into F E AT U R E 26 KEYFRAME aBoVe: Roz decodes the language so she can achieve her programming mission to be a helper. BeLoW: Roz depicted in her clean armor.