Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/225858
trying to outdo the other. But, we didn't want clichés. " Before committing to CG animation, the animators spent time looking at hand-drawn animation. "We went through explorations of the hero characters for a year and a half, DiSalvo says. They " also shot live-action reference, drew thumbnails, and pulled from their own life experiences to dig into that truth. DiSalvo provides an example from his life experience that informed the animators' performance of Kristoff in an emotional scene. In the sequence, Kristoff and his reindeer, Sven, are travelling through frozen tundra. Sven slips on the ice and falls into the water, and DiSalvo remembered a similar situation. "My dog was walking around my parents' backyard and fell through the ice in a koi pond, he says. "I had to run across the yard " and jump into the frozen lake to save him. We discussed that moment and knew that Kristoff wouldn't be just surprised or Braid-y Bunch Anna and Elsa, the two stars of Frozen, wear their long hair in braids, and Elsa, in some sequences, braids her hair into an elaborate updo. "A lot of the hairstyles are heavily designed, braided, or wound," says Frank Hanner, character CG supervisor. "The traditional CG hair interaction techniques, which involve curves, digital brushes, and digital combs, didn't work well. So we wrote a new software package we call Tonic. It gives our hair artists a sculpture-based tool set." Typically the modelers would first create rough proxies that showed shapes or rough directions. Once approved, the hair artists began refining those shapes with Tonic. In Tonic, they could see pipes or tubes that represented hair and could toggle individual strands of hair within to see the flow. "Working with these volumes gives hairstyles complete fullness," Hanner says. Once groomed and structured with Tonic, the hair moved into Disney's simulation package called "Dynamic Wires." "The transition is automatic," Hanner says. "But, the artists can rearrange and procedurally regenerate subsets of data the simulation works with." – Barbara Robertson sad. You see fear on his face. He potentially lost his best friend. We didn't over-animate. We didn't caricature. He has a specific expression of fear. " The crew even had a reindeer come to the studio so the animators could research Sven's movements. "We got all the 70 animators outside together, DiSalvo says. "We brought in " the reindeer. And he just stood there eating grass. We realized reindeer don't do much. So John Lasseter and I started talking about what we could caricature. I talked about my French bulldog, and John talked about his two dogs, and we started exploring Sven as if he were a dog. Sven became everyone's favorite fun moments with their pets. " As for the lead characters: "The most important thing was bringing the nuances and subtleties of the hand-drawn characters to the CG characters, DiSalvo says. "To be able to " animate a film about love, about someone who is driven by fear, and someone who is fearless, to have one sister wanting to get her sister back – we couldn't wait to get a shot with these characters. Acting-wise, there is nothing more satisfying than animating characters with so much subtext. So many of us here wanted to get into animation because of Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, The Lion King. And all of a sudden, here we are about to animate Elsa. " Elsa's Magic Elsa's conflicting emotions, which provided such depth for the animators, created a flurry of challenges for an effects team that needed to produce her magical snow and ice. "Elsa's magic is emotional, Lee says. "We wanted it to have a lan" guage that was part of the storytelling and help express when she's feeling joy, when she's gnarly, when she's grieving. " That intent was so strong the effects team became involved with the story and animation departments early in the process. "We put the film up in storyboards every 12 weeks to get notes from our colleagues, Lee says. "We wanted to know " how they felt and what was possible. We had them hand-draw what Elsa's magic would look like, and the drawings were stunning. Some of these hand-drawings are still in the film because they fit so well in this magical, not real, world. " Visual Effects Supervisor Steve Goldberg, who came onto the show soon after finishing Tangled, led the teams of artists who would create the stunning effects. "Michael Giaimo [art director] and Chris Buck [director], who was solo on Frozen at the time, took me to lunch two and a half years ago, told me about the show, and asked me to be a Sherpa guide for all things CG. We had all worked together on Pocahontas – Chris was an animator and Mike was the art director. I thought it sounded intriguing, but I was still recovering from Tangled." The more Goldberg talked with Giaimo, though, the more smitten with the project he became. "The studio was interested in what it calls 'creative R&D,' and asked me to join with Mike on Frozen, Goldberg says. "They were having traditionally-trained " artists with little CG background do animation tests in paper and pencil – all 2D exploration. I got to work with this group and C G W N ove mb e r / D e c e mb e r 2 013 ■ 11