Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/18322
fter all the fuss and feathers died down in the 2007 Oscar race, live-action director George Miller’s Happy Feet, a CGI fi lm about dancing penguins, won best feature ani- mation. It was the fi rst full-length animated feature fi lm created at the Australian studio Animal Logic and the fi rst for Miller. But Happy Feet was chicken feed compared to the project Animal Logic recently completed: creating dozens of realistic owls for the CGI movie Legend of the Guardians: T e Owls of Ga’Hoole, directed by Zack Snyder and released by Warner Bros. “Everyone thought we pulled a one-off ,” says Ben Gunsberger, who was CG supervisor on Happy Feet and again on Legend. “T ey’d say, ‘Oh, they got an Oscar, but will they ever produce anything as visually stunning again?’ But, Legend was an order of magnitude more complex.” T e story follows a young barn owl named Soren. Kidnapped by evil owls that want to con- trol the world, Soren escapes with four other orphans. T e fugitives then journey in search of the Great Ga’Hoole Tree where, legend has it, the knight owls live. “T e bad guys are all about conformity, about the same species again and again,” says Damien Gray, character supervisor at Animal Logic. “T e good guys are about diversity, about individuals celebrating what each individual brings. T e Great Ga’Hoole Tree is a large community of owls, and we wanted to have enough distinctive looks to support that story. So, we have just about every species of owl represented.” Owl Change Of the 10 primary owl characters, three are Barn Owls, two are Great Grey Owls, and fi ve are unique species–an Elf Owl, Burrowing Owl, Whiskered Screech Owl, Boreal Owl, and Greater Sooty Owl. Secondary characters include three Short-eared Owls, an Eared Owl, two Snowy Owls, a Great Horned Owl, a young Screech Owl, plus another Burrowing Owl and two more Barn Owls. Several varieties of owlets and owls are tertiary characters, as are additional species of animals: bats, crabs, a mouse, a moth, and so forth. “We produced 70 diff erent characters for the fi lm,” Gray says, “Of those, a number had a re- dressing to change their color and patterns, and another 30 characters had extra surfacing. We had 100 diff erent surfacing variations.” October 2010 13