Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/19812
n n n n 3D•CGI toon. Te smallest muscle twitch. Te smallest movement in the brow or mouth. Tis character had that range.” On screen, the animators see a shaded, tex- tured version of the characters, with shado ws but not with final lighting. Tey could also look at any shot in ster eo 3D. “We all hav e a tendency to cheat to the camera, ” Donald says, “to maybe curl or stretch an arm that you wouldn’t see in 2D. B ut in 3D, you see all of it instantly.” To help with the subtle per formances, the Tighten, in red whispering in Megamind’s ear, is a superhero-turned-villain. To animate his and others’ capes, character effects artists filmed themselves wearing capes while flying down zip lines. Te character with the most personality is Megamind, the villain—who is Schleifer ’s fa- vorite. “He ended up being such a compelling character,” Schleifer says. “A lot of that has to do with ho w the animators per formed him. He puts his hear t on his sleev e and is such a wonderful character to watch. I love him.” Mega Characters Mark D onald was the character lead who oversaw the per formance of that compelling character, and he was also one of sev en super- vising animators who managed teams working on particular sequences for the film. “We’ve had supervision [of teams] based on sequences in the past,” Schleifer says. “I t’s important to help every animator grow as an artist over the course of a show. But, we also had character leads as a resource for animators so they didn’t have to figure out the characters on the fly.” Mega Stereo This is Phil “Captain 3D” McNally’s 10th stereo 3D movie and his sixth at DreamWorks this year counting the Shrek conversions. We talked with him about how stereo 3D has progressed and how the crew used stereo for Megamind. Where in the process did you begin working on the stereo version of Megamind? We worked closely with Kent Seki, the director of previsualization, who was kind of like a cinematographer. We have superheroes fly- ing about a city, so that was a great situation for maxing out the 3D. Ken did a great job of composing in a way that really uses depth and in thinking of ideas that will be spatially interesting. Can you give us an example? Megamind has an idea wall—a clothesline with bits of paper hung up on clothespins. There are so many things hanging in space that it gives you interesting spatial composition. It’s a sim- ple idea, but strong. Also, Minion is a fish in a goldfish bowl. The bowl is the character’s head. It is an invisible wall with a transpar- 12 November 2010 ent watery surface, which is interesting. You can really see the 3D in the refractions in the water. Shiny things, shiny paint, shiny windows are great in 3D. When you ask someone about reflections in a mirror, they tend to think the mirror is 2D until they really look. Of course, it isn’t. The image is not on a surface. Stereoscopic imaging can really hold a lot of detail that might be distracting in 2D. That’s why filmmakers use shallow focus so much in 2D, to simplify the shot. So, reflections are rich spatial environments that we can use. How, then, do you focus the audience’s eye in a richly detailed stereo image? We use other things. Think of a theater environment. They use sound, lighting. If one person is talking, the focus is obvious. Maybe some people move and others don’t. We don’t have a problem knowing what to focus on in real life. Did the stereo artists use your “Happy Ratio” software to set the stereo cameras? Te character leads worked with McGrath to cr eate a librar y of facial expr essions and poses that the animators could use dir ectly, partially, or as reference. To create a smile, for example, an animator might dial in a shape and then use lay ers of controls to improve it. All the hero characters’ faces have several hun- dred controls for mo ving predesigned shapes from the librar y, and D onald began r efining Megamind’s facial expressions once the riggers had the created basic controls. “Megamind had a range of expressions two or three times greater than the other characters, and he had a huge head,” Donald says. “We worked with the character technical dir ectors to tw eak expressions and fine-tune the rig based on direc- tions from Tom [McGrath]. We wanted to push his face into cartoony shapes, but we also needed a fine degree of control to sell the dramatic and emotional scenes, which are the opposite of a car- crew filmed actor Will Ferrell as he performed the dialog, using a small lipstick video camera affixed to the corner of the r ecording booth. “Te challenge is making it feel like his voice is actually coming from the character,” Donald says. “When you achieve that, you stop seeing it as an animated performance.” For the br oader performances, the anima - tors often filmed themselves. “Sometimes me- chanical things have to happen, so if you video yourself, y ou can study that and see what you’re doing,” Donald explains. “And, you can act in front of the camera and show the direc- tor how you intend to animate the shot.” In fact, to see how the supervillains and he- roes might fly and how their capes would flow around them as they did, several people on the team filmed themselves “flying” on a zip line. “It was super fun,” Schleifer says. “One of the things we wanted to do with these characters was to push the superhero iconic look, so we worked on trying to get cool graphic poses, to tweak the bodies to get the arcs in the legs, and sculpt mus- cles to get graphic lines. And, we wanted to have dynamic poses with the capes.”