Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/259450
SHORT FILM 36 ■ CGW Ja n u a r y / Fe b ru a r y 2 014 picture is so full of detail we needed to make sure the face pops out enough." During the design phase, Unseld and the team resolved the issue of whether the umbrella canopy would be the character's head or body. "When we made the face big, the canopy would look like a head," he says. "When we made it small, it felt like the body. We ended up with something in the middle. And, because we wanted to have the face stay between two ribs of the umbrella, we faked the front gaps bigger." The last steps of the design phase were animation tests, and for this, Unseld brought Animator Christopher Chua onto the team. "Chris drew 2D faces on top of our CG umbrella to help us figure out what the faces looked like," Unseld says. "He helped us explore how much expression and detail we could get from these two dots and lines. The problem with CG is that you can't animate before you rig, but the rig takes so much work. And, you have to know what the face should look like before you rig. How big, how small, how readable." "So much was in the face," Unseld adds. "It was an interest- ing challenge. The faces are cartoony, so it was clear how to animate them. The challenge was in the rigging. We needed such clean shapes, circles, and lines. 'Simple' sounds simple, but it isn't. So much lies in where to put the apex of the curve and how it tapers off to the end. With a pencil, you have con- trol. But, if you have values to adjust, you want to adjust every- thing. You end up with a thousand controls, and that's hard to handle for animators. So, we had a lot of back and forth." The animators also needed to create performances for the entire umbrella and the hero characters beneath. In doing so, they had to decide who controlled the movement. "We had to be sure you would never get suspicious of the movement," Unseld says. "So, as long as the owner holds the umbrella, the owner controls the overall movement, the big movements. But, to a certain extent in animation, you want to move the character. [Blue] had no arms or legs, but we didn't want the audience to feel like this is a character with no arms and legs." Thus, if Blue's canopy body moved on its own while still held by the owner, the viewer needed to attribute that to the wind or someone bumping into him. That helped when Blue meets Red and in the beginning of the storm, but we see their reactions largely in the facial performances. A second challenge was the relation- ship between the faces and the surfaces beneath. "That movement was a nether world," Unseld says. "A cartoony face can make fast moves, but the umbrella need- ed to feel real. So, the question was, Do we sim the cloth or not sim the cloth? We ended up simulating the cloth only in a handful of shots when Blue lies in the gutter. There, we needed to feel the canopy sag- ging and hanging down. Otherwise, the animators controlled the movement of the cloth. We were afraid the simulation would move it too much and the face would swim around." For the gutter shots, the effects artists used FizT, Pixar's in-house cloth simulation software. "Most of those shots were animated by hand," Burrows says, "But, there's a part where Blue is lying in the gutter, rocking back and forth. For that, we ran the cloth simulation and blended it into the hand animation. We also did some cloth sims on the hero humans." The hero humans are the two owners of the blue and red umbrellas, and while subtle, the story is about them, too. "Even though we don't see them much, they needed to move and act," Unseld says. "Mostly, they're defined by their Wel- lington boots. Everyone else wears shoes. And because their gloves and boots are the color of their umbrellas. At the end, we slightly shift the attention onto them, to their story line. We needed those details for the payoff in the end." For the crew, the payoff is in the accolades and experience. For Pixar, it is, as always, the chance to experiment in short form with ideas that might make their way into feature produc- tion. "We used global illumination on Monsters University," Burrows says. "So, that's here to stay. We're moving toward using Katana on a more full-time basis, and what we learned on this short film has had a strong impact for features. And, the shot dailies concept was intriguing to the feature-film group. They are experimenting with a more iterative workflow." As for the style…will we see a photorealistic animated feature someday in which elements in a city are characters like Lisa the outlet cover, Greta the downspout, the triplet awnings, Carsten the mailbox, and the others who brought the city alive in this film? It's hard to predict. But if another potential director happens to take a photograph that inspires new kinds of characters, whether at Pixar or somewhere else, thanks to "The Blue Umbrella" crew, we know that magic is possible. ■ CGW Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net. ■ THE SIMPLE CARTOON FACES created surprisingly challenging rigging problems.