Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1547068
have a very specific target. You can iterate and just scrutinize it un- til you get everything perfectly correct. It's much more challenging when you're being asked to do things that the real dog was not able to do, because you no longer have a reference. How did you tackle the shots that did not have a real dog ref- erence? François Dumoulin: There are two shots in particular. The first one is at the beginning of the movie, where we encounter the character of Watkins, played by J.K. Simmons. There's a moment where the dog feels the presence of that intruder and starts to growl. Our dog on set was just a really good boy and he was just too nice. He would never get angry or snarl or growl or anything. That proved to be one of the most challenging shots we had to do, because we had no ref- erence of how our hero dog would look if he was angry. We found a take where the camera was panning with the dog, and for just a fraction of a second he looked slightly angry at something. We managed to keep just a part of the eye and the body language, and replaced the lower part of his face—his entire jaw and snout. We created this hybrid shot where the upper half of the face is the real dog and the lower part is completely CG. We got the snarl in CG, but we managed to keep the eyes from the real dog. "if the personality is not there, the audience is going to tell right away that it's a CG asset..." We have something similar happening at the very end of the movie. There's a really emotional scene where our dog is weeping, and he has this very heart-wrenching, soul-breaking, crying-at-god moment. We did not exactly get the dog to do it, but we got some good things that were—just for a fraction of a moment—the right ex- pression of sadness on his face and the right kind of body posture. We gave that to Framestore and again, they created a Frankenstein where they put the CG asset in the right pose and they managed to get the expression very, very close. Every time we could, we tried to find—even if just for a fraction of a second—the dog getting close to that emotion. Close enough to guide our CG animation and make sure we were staying true to the character of the real dog. It's like an actor, it's not just a generic dog. It's a very, very specific dog with a very specific emotional range. And I think it's a testament to the quality of the work of the animators at Framestore, because you can get the best-looking asset with the best fur and muscle simulation, but if the emotion, if the personality is not there, the audience is going to tell right away that it's a CG asset.