Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/17873
n n n n Animation Giacchino, comes from the world: from pass- ing radios, for example. “We only breached that maybe once when the sunset happens,” Newton says. Te voice-over happens toward the end, dur- Director Teddy Newton designed “Day&Night” as a stereo 3D film from the beginning. When projected in stereo, the airplanes appear to fly toward the audience in this shot. when Newton knew he wanted 2D fore- grounds but still wasn’t sure how to do the in- ternal images. “He thought about doing stop motion or live action, but we decided on CG because I knew I could have the control Teddy wanted,” Fu says. Because the animators drew the charac- ters in pencil on paper, Fu’s team scanned the drawings and then used Vector Magic’s software and proprietary code to convert the bit-mapped images to vector art. “With any vectorizing software, there are still some bits that aren’t exactly what the artist drew,” Fu says. “Te software has to guess at some point. So, we’d pre-process the images to give the vec- torizer better information and help it as much as we could.” For example, the pre-process- ing technique might enlarge some areas and sharpen others. Te crew also used Toon Boom’s Animo to help with digital inking and painting. “We had to build a whole 2D pipeline,” Fu says. “Tat in itself was a big challenge.” Te larger challenge, however, was insert- ing the 3D scenes into the 2D characters. “We built a kludged pipeline,” Fu says. “We rendered out planes and brought them into our proprietary 3D system. Depending on what we needed in the scene, we’d attach them to the environment or the camera. It would have been faster to do this in com- positing, but we would have lost the interac- tion between other departments, such as the lighters and the animators. And, we wanted the ability to render the film in stereo.” (See “Stereo Duality,” pg. 36). With the characters rendered as 2D cards, the animators could adjust the timing within the 3D system. “Te first version the anima- tors saw had floating lines in a 3D world. But 38 August/September 2010 as we refined the process, we’d scan the images and cut out the character holes. Tey could work with an animated texture card in the 3D system that was attached to the camera or the 3D set, depending on what they needed.” Even so, it took a lot of back and forth to get the timing right. “It was like a Rubik’s Cube,” Fu says. “We’d solve one problem in Day that would mess up Night. We’d fix something in CG to fix the 2D, and then something else would break.” Lighting also became a “night-and-day” prob- lem, one that production designer Don Shank and lighting supervisor Andrew Pienaar ad- dressed early in the production. “Tey knew it would be a challenge to get both characters to read at the same time, because the black back- ground is such a predominant part of the over- all image,” Fu says. “We had to light [the CG scenes] for Day and then light again for Night, and still have both characters read well.” Sounds True Only one scene in the film has “dialog,” but even then, it is a voice-over. Te characters never talk. Otherwise, the sound, designed by Barney Jones with Gary Rydstrom con- sulting, sometimes accents the action, some- times doesn’t. “We often hear sounds in the distance,” Newton says, “frogs, trains. Tey didn’t re- quire internal visual action; we hear things in daily life that we don’t see.” In the theater, moviegoers hear night sounds on the left and day sounds on the right until they trade places. “I think it’s the first time I’ve ever heard two sets of ambient sounds simultaneously—the nighttime ambience and the daytime ambi- ence happening together,” he adds. Te music, too, composed by Michael ing the swing dance, when the characters come together. We see a radio tower appear inside Day and hear an excerpt from a speech by Dr. Wayne Dyer: “Fear of the unknown. Tey are afraid of new ideas. Tey are loaded with prejudices, not based upon anything in reality, but based on … if something is new, I reject it immediately because it’s frightening to me. What they do instead is just stay with the familiar. You know, to me, the most beautiful things in all the universe are the most mysterious.” Te newest idea in this film, was, for argu- ably the first time in a short film, placing CG animation inside animated 2D characters. But, the metaphor elevates the film from a cartoon into a significant work of art. “One thing my crew said was that they re- ally enjoyed the message,” Fu says, “seeing people’s differences and appreciating them. It was fun to work on a meaningful project.” For his part, Newton is a bit shy about the response people have to the film. “I’m glad that the people who love this film love it quite a bit,” he says. “It’s hard to know when you do a film. I’ve never seen this kind of story in an animated film before. It’s about people grow- ing and coming together, yeah, but the sunset is more or less about them being able not only to unify, but trade off. One can see the world through the other’s eyes a little.” Like peeking through a keyhole into an- other person’s mind. n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. ‘Day&Night’ Content Creation Software 3D Tools Autodesk Maya Apple Shake Pixar RenderMan Pixar proprietary software 2D Tools Adobe Photoshop DigiCel FlipBook Toon Boom Animo, Pencil Check Vector Magic conversion software