Computer Graphics World

January 2009 20 n n n n CG I as co-director, and the new team pushed the reset button. It was early 2007. "We stopped everything," Fell says. "We had a lot of visual stuff done by various people and some sequences. It didn't hang together. We went back to Gary's screen- play and worked with him as if we were starting afresh. We basically imagined the film together." Also joining Ross, Fell, and Stevenhagen was Framestore's cinematog- rapher and head of layout Brad Black- bourn, who had served in those roles at DreamWorks for Flushed Away and as head of previs for that studio's Kung Fu Panda. Working from Ross's screenplay, the group met in London, Boston, and Los Angeles as they decided on the camera coverage and essentially edited the film theoretically. "I shot-listed all of Seabiscuit, and I shared that process with the guys," Ross says. "We shot-listed this entire movie from scratch with lens lengths, camera angles, shot movement, and cutting patterns. "ere's always a moment in any mov- ie," Ross adds, "when you have to commit to a decision. e question is, when? If you can commit to some creative decisions early, I think it creates certain clarity. e cinematic, artistic intentions become more specific, and the production becomes more efficient." at efficiency resulted in both time and cost savings. For Blackbourn, it was an exciting, new process. As they talked, all four of the men—Ross, Fell, Stevenhagen, and Black- bourn—plus Len Morganti, an artist who had worked with Ross in the past, would sketch thumbnails. "We drove the staff of restaurants crazy ordering Japanese barbecue, tapas…what- ever as we worked through the script," Blackbourn says. "Len would quickly sketch out shots that Gary would describe with words and with his hands. 'What if we put the camera lower and rake the angle so we can push the perspective? What if the leg of the chair comes across here? What if we're shooting a small creature in the big world with a 12mm lens?'" At the same time, Stevenhagen drew thumbnail sketches of the character perfor- mances. e combination gave the team the acting performances and the effect the camera had on the characters and the set around them. And that turned the typical animation process upside down. "Usually in major, traditional studios, the films are storyboard-driven," Blackbourn says. "But by the time we went to storyboard- ing, we already had the camera language for the film, and that's never happened before in animated films. We had a bible that de- scribed every single frame in words like 'long lens tracking medium shot of Despereaux as he moves through the crowd, blurry backlit characters buzzing in foreground extremely out of focus moving through pockets of overexposed cool light from above, other parts of the frame fall off to black.' " Every shot in the 120-page script had notes on depth of field, camera apertures, and basic lighting elements. "Gary [Ross] thought in a film sense, not an animated sense," Blackbourn says. "I've been trying to push 3D animated films to embrace more of the language of live-action filmmaking. is was the process I had been aiming for." at live-action sensibility changed the look of the film as well as the process by which the crew made the film. Ross surprised the layout team with lens choices and com- positions rarely used in animation. "It was so strange for me to see a character, right in the middle of the frame, in animated films," he says. "In live action, that's anathema." us, in Despereaux, as in a live-action film, you will see a crowd that's not perfect- ly in front of the camera, bits of characters in the corner of a scene, camera shake, and out-of-focus props in front of the camera. You'll also see "Dutch angles," which tilt the horizon, and other techniques bor- rowed from live-action cinematography. To help accomplish this, Ross was a stickler for precise depth of field. "I fought early on for algorithms that accurately re- flected depth of field at specific f-stops and lens lengths so the plane would fall off in Flemish cities influenced the Kingdom of Dor's environments, while writer/producer Gary Ross influenced camera moves that mimicked live-action films and incorporated precise depth of field.

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