Computer Graphics World

AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2010

Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/17873

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 36 of 51

Animation n n n n fall into a stream below. When he stands up and stretches, a horse neighs. Now fully awake, he strides jauntily, arms swinging, toward the right of the screen. Birds fly through the sky. When joggers run across the grassy field, he looks down and smiles. And then he walks past a sleeping character, a hand-drawn char- acter identical to him, but filled with darker blue and darker green. Inside this character, sheep are jumping over a fence. Day pokes him, and Night wakes up. Te two characters circle each other warily. When they stop, Night on the left and Day on the right, we hear frogs croak and an owl call. A songbird chirps, and Day pokes Night in the belly. Night wakes up and pushes Day. Day pushes back. Tey don’t like each other; they don’t accept their differences. Tey wrestle. Trough the film, the three-dimensional, animated world inside each character reflects their emotions. Day has a sun, Night has a moon. When Night sees a butterfly fluttering inside Day, he shows Day fireflies. Day counters with a rainbow. Night shoots fireworks. Tey continue one-upping each other. And then, Day shows Las Ve- gas in the daytime, and Night turns on the neon. Night joyfully grabs Day. Tey dance, and the characters become a metaphor. “A lot of times people see someone, or not even a per- son, that’s extremely different,” Newton says. “It chal- lenges their world a bit. You feel protective of your routines and what you do, and you don’t want to be influenced too much by another person’s way. But if you learn a little more about the person or custom, you might get excited about the unknown.” Creating the Characters A team that fluctuated from 25 to 50 worked on the film, with six animators creating the hand-drawn characters. Newton, who had drawn the 2D titles for Ratatouille, penciled many of the drawings on paper, with supervising animator Tom Gately providing most of the key poses. “It wasn’t so much like drawing a character and sending it into the world, like in Roger Rabbit,” Newton says. “It was framing a background with a character’s body. We had to be real specific about where we placed the character so we could frame the back- ground without having trees poking through the eyeballs.” While the characters moved, the elements in the 3D background inside the character moved as well—wind blew, water poured, characters ran through the scene. Sometimes, though, the charac- ters would hold a pose while the background animation carried on. If the animators worried that the characters were sedentary too long, Newton would remind them that there was another movie inside the character. “Usually you have the main characters do all the work,” Newton says, “so this was an unusual idea.” This scene, with Night’s wolf howling at Day’s bathing beau- ties, required artful modeling and composition to have the wolf look down on a round, rather than elliptical, CG pool. Images courtesy Pixar. August/September 2010 35

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Computer Graphics World - AUGUST/SEPTEMBER 2010