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C G W M a r ch / A p r i l 2 014 ■ 13 character in any frame," Modesto says. "You don't really see them – the anima- tors could control the transparency and intensity. But, they give a crazy feeling to the motion, like in a 2D drawing." Schleifer explains: "It's one of the things animators used to do in the 2D days to show fast action. Because they didn't have motion blur, they'd do a smear to stretch the drawing or some- times add extra limbs. They could get big, crazy action of a character waving his arms using the extra hands and arms. It's something we've always wanted to do in CG but never had the opportunity." All the characters in the film had the op- tional arms and legs, but only the main characters' limbs came fully clothed. "We added clothes to the other characters as needed," Modesto says. "The arms were there, but they were naked." Because the extra arms appeared only on two or three frames, that cloth wasn't simulated. In addition, to keep the models light, the animators brought in the limbs only when they wanted the extra motion, and could turn the limbs on or off. Performance Artists Two teams of animators worked on the film: 30 in Redwood City and 28 in Glendale. Schleifer organized the teams by se- quences, with five supervising animators working with groups of five to eight animators. "As we launched into a sequence, the supervising animators would meet with the team and split the shots," Schleifer explains. "We tried to have a sequence done in eight weeks. That was our generic schedule." Because all the characters used a standard rig, and because all the characters are bipeds (even Mr. Peabody most of the time), the animators could move easily from one character to another. "We built Mr. Peabody to be a biped, but we made sure he could function as a quadruped," Modesto says. Although in the original television segments the anthro- pomorphic dog was on all fours much of the time, the team chose to animate him more often as a biped for the film. "We decided he would be more appealing if he was a quadruped only when it was instinctual," Schleifer says. "We wait until he's overcome with emotion to have him wag his tail, not because he's thinking about it. During a sequence in Egypt, he runs as fast as he can as a biped, but just as he's about to be hit, he leaps into quadruped [mode] and runs away." Each time Mr. Peabody moved from all fours on dog legs to upright with more bipedal human legs, the character effects group handled the transition. "We decided to go with that ap- proach because he doesn't spend much time as a quadruped," Schleifer says. "We would do the structural work in animation, get the posing correct, change the scale of the bones, and try to keep the deformation as clean as we could. But it's hard to clean up the pinching, so character effects did that." His large snout presented another problem. "Every time we have a character with a snout, we have to add a lot of controls so the animators can move that huge volume," Modesto says. "His nose is in front of his eyes, so they need to move it out of the way. We also did a lot of development on his face." Most of the time Mr. Peabody talks from the front of his mouth, with the animators pulling the corners forward to open his jaw. "Sometimes, though, we wanted to pull the ■ THE SURFACE TEXTURES are simple, but the lighting is complex in the scenes. VIDEO: Go to "Extras" in the March/April 2014 issue box .com .com