Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/196542
CG Animation auditorium sequence, he says. "The directors wanted an over" all feeling that Flint entered a real world, not a simplistic world. All the characters mattered. And, even though they were generic, some had speaking parts. Beyond 4,000 it would be hell, but this is how to create crowds. " Beveridge led the team responsible for animating the sequence in which Flint brings his friends back together, and their introduction to the foodimal creatures in the jungle. "There's a reveal in Sardine Circle, he says. "When we had hundreds " of characters, we split the shots into sections and had five or more animators on one shot, with one animator responsible for the characters closest to camera. We tried to avoid that, but sometimes we just had to. By the end of the movie, we started sharing sequences with two supervisors per sequence. It might not have been the most efficient time-wise, but we got higher-quality work. Each of us brought different skills to the table, and we leaned on each other's strengths. " Appetizing Environments After a few scenes at Livecorp and in Sanfranjose, the action moves to the jungle. "In the first film, Flint's lab represented a mood ring for him, Pearn says. "It was always a graphic " response to where he was emotionally. So, when he first enters the jungle, we play it more like a garden with the camera low. Later, after he makes poor decisions, it's overgrown and feels more like Angkor Wat. " Adds Cameron: "We have some food-looking jungle plants – a take on onion shapes, and a pancake bog that looks like something from a John Ford Western – but it's more like a giant garden. " Unlike the first film in which many zany effects happen within one environment, Cloudy 2 's action has Flint and his friends encounter foodimals in many environments. "We reveal the foodimals in the Sardine Circle, and then Flint and his friends travel down the coconut river and there's a new environment in every shot, Travers says. "We built all those environments " from scratch. " The process began with Travers and Production Designer Justin Thompson looking at concept art. "It was Impression■ A TOOTHY Tacodile Supreme hovers behind Tim Lockwood, Flint's father, as Watermelophants, Wildabeets, Hippotatoes, Meatbalruses, Cantalopes, and various pickles and berries look on. 38 ■ CGW Sep t em ber / O c t ober 2013 istic with more of a storybook look than the typical precise CG environments, Travers says. "I loved the style. Justin " turned to me and asked, 'Can we do this?' I said 'Yeah, but it isn't one person working with Photoshop making a tree from a brushstroke. We need to quantify and translate it into the CG world.'" Fortunately, Travers had experience with Impressionistic computer graphics. As a CG supervisor at Mass Illusions, the seasoned veteran had supervised the first painterly sequence for the film What Dreams May Come, which won an Oscar for best visual effects in 1999, one of 20 films for which he has served as a CG, digital effects, or visual effects supervisor. Travers received a BAFTA nomination in 2005 for his work on The Aviator. "What Dreams May Come was a real eye-opener for me, Travers says. "I saw how imprecise you could be, " and that within the imprecision you can create beauty and capture a style. " The artists had a limitation with Cloudy 2, though: They had to relate it to the first film. The answer was to keep the similarity with the first film but create a more painterly environment in the background. Whisking the two together would require some magic. "We called it 'depth styling,'" Travers says. In the Soup Often, artists will create establishing shots by using a technique called "level of detail" in which they reduce the complexity of the geometry as it recedes into the distance until, in the far distance, the 3D geometry becomes a matte painting. The crew on Cloudy whipped up a new technique. "One of my pet peeves is to watch a movie with pristine, precise lighting on objects and then a matte painting takes over and there's a stylistic gap, Travers says. "We did a blend " based on Z depth. We render a depth map and strip out lighting as the jungle plants get farther away. " The environments in these establishing shots were 3D geometry that extended back into infinity. "The skies were matte paintings, but the rest is 3D, Travers says. "The back"