Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/225858
SIMULATION we couldn't bend them in the film. The beauty of that is it put him in interesting situations. Having him scratch his head or reach for an object becomes a complex, fun situation. How do you get a character with straight arms on Sven [the reindeer]? How does he poke up over an ice bluff to see what's going on?" The answer to the latter question is: He pops off his head and holds it up with his arm. Truth in Acting ■ AT TOP OLAF CAN bend his stick arms (and not melt) , only in his dreams of summer. At bottom, lighting artists used full raytracing to render Elsa's ice palace. And then one day, Elsa becomes queen. At her coronation, the teenaged Anna falls in love at first sight with handsome prince Hans (Santino Fontana). After knowing Hans only one day, she agrees to marry him. Elsa's emotional reaction causes her to lose control over her powers, and she flees. "The fear she feels has created an eternal winter, Lee says. " " After Elsa accidentally turns the world cold, Anna sets out after her sister. " Anna seeks to melt Elsa's frozen heart and bring summer back to the kingdom. And with that, the movie begins in earnest. On Anna's journey through the snowy mountain landscape, she meets Kristoff (Jonathan Groff), an ice harvester who lives with his reindeer. He offers to help her navigate through the mountains. Along the way, they meet the magical snowman named Olaf (Josh Gad). "What a lot of people don't know is that Elsa and Anna had created Olaf when they were little by hand-rolling him out of Elsa's snow, Lee says. "He represents their beautiful inno" cence. When Elsa thinks she's a safe distance away, she builds an ice palace, and in that freedom re-creates the Olaf from her childhood in a song, the song 'Let It Go.' In this film, we never start and stop for a song. Every song is a continuation of the plot; they drive the plot forward. " Olaf represents the love between the sisters, and in doing so, has an emotional role. But, he also provides slapstick comic relief in the film. "He's obviously made of snow, so we had to respect truth in materials in how snow moves, says " Lino DiSalvo, head of animation. " And, his arms are sticks, so 10 ■ CGW Novem ber / Dec em ber 2013 Olaf is a bipedal character with the structure of a human, but animators could disconnect and reconnect all his body parts. "The things that made him special were out of the ordinary for us, says " Frank Hanner, character CG supervisor. "Luckily, we knew those things early on. He was always going to be magical, and from day one or two we had reference designs of Olaf pulling his head off, or melting in a corner and rolling a new body. They were fun, cool ideas. But, it was a bit of a challenge to construct a system that allowed any part of this little guy to disconnect and arbitrarily reconnect. " The rigging team devised a tool they named Spaces that gave animators a convenient way to reconfigure the rig. "He has one rig with mechanisms for connecting and disconnecting, Hanner says. Working in Autodesk's Maya, an animator " could click a button to have Olaf's head fall off and still animate his body walking away. "His body parts could be in world space or local space, " DiSalvo says. "So, we could pull his arm off and pop it into world space and then continue working on his body. " DiSalvo led a crew of 70 animators by casting supervisors for each of the hero characters and then finding pockets of animators for specific moments. "Our animation department is so fine-tuned, I felt like a conductor of an amazing orchestra, he " says. "We'd be in review sessions and nine out of 10 times we'd find ourselves involved in the movie rather than critiquing lighting or whatever. We'd all be leaning forward watching the film, and I'd think, 'Oh my gosh, I think we have something special.'" Although all the humans, the reindeer, and, of course, Olaf, are caricatures, the animation team strived for what they call "truth in acting. "The first order of business for us was bring" ing in the voice actors, DiSalvo says. "I moderated a session " like 'Inside the Actor's Studio,' with the animators sitting around. And, an acting coach came here early in the process and we went through pages of the script. We wanted truth in acting, truth in the emotion. We wanted to make sure emotions crescendo at the right time. It's easy in an animated film to put the volume on 12 in every shot, with every animator