Computer Graphics World

In the totally uninhibited fi lm Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the characters stand open-mouthed while hamburgers fall from the sky, tomatoes roll down sidewalks, chil- dren ride sleds on mashed potato moun- tains. It's diffi cult to imagine subject matter more fun for computer graphics profes- sionals: e colors look saturated in the way that only digital colors can look. e characters stretch the bounds of 3D ani- mation. Cartoon physics has never been so appetizing, bananas so aggressive. Directed by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the animated feature from Sony Pictures An- imation based on the popular children's book of the same name, tells the story of a young mad scientist who converts water into food to help an impoverished town. Meatballs rain from the sky and he becomes a hero. at is, until the welcome food showers be- come violent storms. An enormous pancake dripping with butter and syrup smothers a school. A giant banana stabs a building. "I like to say this is the fi rst cartoon I've ever worked on," says Rob Bredow, visual eff ects supervisor, who moved onto this fi lm after completing Sony's Surf 's Up, which received an Oscar nomination. For Cloudy, Bredow led a crew of 250 people at Sony Pictures Imageworks who worked on the fi lm. "It's our most ambitious animated movie to date," Bredow says. e fi lm features approximately 30 main characters who live in a world created with 4000 hard-surface models. "From the fi rst character to the last soda can took exactly two years," says modeling supervisor Marvin Kim, adding, "the can was a garbage piece that we crushed and put next to a dumpster." September 2009 14 ■ ■ ■ ■ CG I•Stereo Images ©2009 Sony Pictures Animation.

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