Computer Graphics World

October 2008 16 n n n n CG I Mapping the Drama All the key leads traveled to Africa, but the trip probably had the greatest effect on Cronkhite. "I didn't go to Manhattan or Madagascar for the first show, and I thought I didn't need to go to Africa," she says. "But I looked at the photos I took every day. It helped to understand the scope, the quality of the light, the size of the skies." Much of the film takes place at a water- ing hole within a game reserve, and Cronkh- ite centered the designs there. To create the production designs, the artists worked in Autodesk's Maya, Adobe's Photoshop, foam core, clay, paint, paper, and pencil. In addition to the watering-hole set, the artists designed a grassy savannah that lies west of the watering hole, a volcano to the north, the plane crash site to the southeast, and a jungle, the beach, and Madagascar to the east. "We built rough 3D models for the locations and linked them in space so we knew how they re- lated," Cronkhite says. is film is more emotional and dra- matic than the first, so the landscape and the color palette created by the production design team reflect that drama. e first area we see is the crash site. "We kept it scrubby," Cronkhite says. "We wanted to reveal Africa as the characters discover it. So, in the beginning we have an overcast day, monochromatic, and everything has hard edges and right angles." When the characters leave the crash site, they follow a safari jeep to the watering hole. "ey come up to an overlook that reveals Africa," Cronkhite says. "You can see all the way to the horizon. It's lush, soft; a warm, beautiful time of day." It's there that Alex discovers his parents, the other characters meet the African mem- bers of their species, and the zoosters be- come happily ensconced within their new tribes. But then, the watering hole dries up and the wild animals become scared. Zuba steps down, and Makunga takes charge. Crazy King Julien, the ring-tailed lemur (Sacha Baron Cohen) proposes a volcano sacrifice. And, things get out of control. When the watering hole dries up, the color palette changes into a dusty, flat, monochromatic space, and the landscape turns into cracked mud and bare trees. Alex, the former city dweller, walks off into the jungle to look for a clogged pipe, and in doing so, crosses the game-reserve boundary. "We wanted to keep the same, monochrome, flat look for the jungle, so rather than dust, we used mist and cyan and gray colors," Cronkhite explains. As for the animals, the style of the re- turning characters remained the same, but the character designers gave the new actors a little less edge. "Our African animals are more rounded," Cronkhite says. "ey have more curves than straights." e wild animals are also more ani- mal-like than the city slickers. "ey still express with their faces, though," says Grig- non, who organized the animators into five teams led by supervisors, all of whom worked on Madagascar. For Madagascar, PDI/DreamWorks made it possible for animators to create the animals' extreme cartoony poses by devis- ing an innovative rigging system that made it possible to do squash and stretch without having the rigs come apart. Software code in that rigging system used instructions provided by animation controls to build the exterior of a creature. Animators, in other words, sculpted the characters as they created the performances (see "Born to be Wild," May 2005). "We learned what it takes to do snappy animation, smear poses, squash and stretch," says Grignon. "But this story gets more deeply involved. e characters are still zany, but we have a chance to see their hearts." e two major additions to the rigs in- cluded a new generation of facial anima- tion tools that provided refined controls without changing the familiar faces, and a new bi-quad rigging system that was es- pecially important for Marty and Alex. "In the first film, Marty was on all fours only three or four times," Gluckman points out. "Now, he can do that anytime." For Madagascar, animators used two different rigs for each character: one when they walked on two legs and another when they were on all fours. Now, the new bi- quad rig made those transitions easier. "is film feels a lot more balanced," says Grignon. "It's goofy, but it's not Tex Avery all the time. We wanted to take advantage of the skills of the actors, so we settled it down. If it's too slapstick, you don't buy the real moments." …And Action To help plan character blocking and cam- era moves, the directors brought in director of photography Guillermo Navarro, who won an Oscar for his cinematography in Pan's Labyrinth. "Once a month, we'd act out scenes to find a way to tell the story," McGrath says. "We put wigs on the layout Artists used a new tree-growing tool to quickly plant the forest behind Melman, who looks like a witch doctor, and his new friends.

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