Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/17873
n n n n Animation (Above) Night, a line drawing scanned and applied to a 2D plane, sleeps in the foreground. Day, another line drawing similarly added to the scene, shows dismay at seeing a darker version of himself. The CG sheep jumping over a fence in the background appear inside Night in the film. (Top, right) Night’s and Day’s internal scenes grow deeper in stereo 3D. Often, the animators would do what New- ton calls a “moving hold.” “We would have them strike a pose, and give the characters a subtle bit of motion,” he says. For example, when Day frames a radio tower during a Night and Day swing dance toward the end, the ani- mators stretch the character’s arm into a single pose. “We get subtle expansion by how far he’s stretching,” Newton says. “He’s not moving his hands and legs; it’s more like a rubber band that’s reached its limit. Tat’s the way we’d use moving holds. You look at the internals and then we trade back to the foreground world to keep life in the characters. It’s like having two films running side by side.” Mike Fu, supervising technical director, might beg to differ. “What we have is three films in one,” he explains, “a short film made of CG backgrounds for Day, a short film made of CG backgrounds for Night, and the 2D char- acters. We ended up with three compositions: a composition for Night, a composition for Day, and a composition for all three.” Triple Play To help the animators, the CG team would start with Newton’s storyboards to see his timing, mock up the sets, and stitch them together. Ten, they printed out every frame and gave them to the animators to use as back- grounds on their light tables. “In the end, you’d never know if a shot worked until we put it all together,” Fu says. Fu uses the scene in the opening, with jog- gers running inside Day while he’s walking, as an example. “Te challenge was in getting everything to hit right,” he says. “Te camera path, the length of the set, how fast the joggers ran, how fast the 2D character moved. If the joggers were too close, we’d move them back, and then they were too small. Tere were a lot of things Teddy could do in 2D and get away with that we couldn’t do in 3D.” 36 August/September 2010 Another example: “On Teddy’s boards, when Day first meets Night, Night is sleeping on the ground. Day walks in front of him, and we fol- low Day. It looks great in 2D, but in 3D things on the horizon don’t move as far in screen space as Teddy had drawn. So, we had to solve that. Stereo Duality Director Teddy Newton envisioned “Day&Night” as a stereo 3D film from the start. In fact, he pitched the film as a stereo 3D film. “We designed everything to be in [stereo] 3D,” Newton says. “In the begin- ning of the film, we wanted the 3D to be played out quite shallow and symbolic of the characters, who look only at surfaces. When they become interested in each other, we play with depth. The sets not only become deeper, but the fire- flies peek out beyond the perimeter of the character and the jets come through the body. It gets more elaborate so that by the time the sunset scene comes, we have a glow of light breach beyond the edges of the character as the sun unifies them.” Although stereo added depth to the story, it deepened the challenges on the production side. “Teddy [Newton] had certain rules of the world that he had invented,” says Mike Fu, supervising technical director. “Even though Day and Night are cutouts, when Day walks in front of Night, he occludes him. We had to follow that, even in stereo. When the audience sees the film in a traditional theater, they see Day move in front of Night and block him. In stereo, they see that, but they also see Day move closer in stereo space. They see the characters actually circling each other in 3D space.” Also, stereo meant that the team needed to compose the shots in 3D. They couldn’t simply layer the 2D characters over the internal 3D scenes in composit- ing. “Stereo removed the cheats we could have done,” Fu says. “But, it added a lot to the stereo version of the movie.” Thus, to keep the pipeline consistent, the crew rendered everything, including the 2D characters in Pixar’s RenderMan. For most stereo 3D films, the crew ren- ders the shots from one eye and then, to add stereo, renders a second eye. This film required three renders. “For the 2D format, we split the difference between the two eyes,” Fu says. “Then we offset the eyes left and right.” “Fortunately,” Fu adds, “because much of the image is black, we could afford to do it in terms of rendering resources. We could use the 2D to mask out the 3D and render only what we needed. It was an extra process, but when you look at this stuff a lot, you see the difference. Composition is such a key point for this film.” –Barbara Robertson We introduced a pan, but we didn’t want it to feel like a pan. So we cheated the set and had it move in opposition to the camera.” Similarly, the CG artists would often cheat scale to have the images inside the characters read properly. Trees in one scene might be as small as people, and in another, as big as buildings. Come Together Fu joined the production early in the process,