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ANIMATION 14 ■ CGW M a r ch / A p r i l 2 014 corners back to have a nice open mouth, and that was a chal- lenge," Schleifer says. "We had a lot of geometry to move around and compress without having it bunching. And, when we opened his jaw all the way, we had to pull the front back so it didn't look like a crocodile's mouth. To make sure the jaw didn't feel too long, we had an extra joint in the middle. We spent a lot of time pushing and pulling. But, the character TDs gave us a lot of controls, and we found a medium place that worked." In addition to finding ways to manipulate Mr. Peabody's muzzle into appealing shapes that conveyed emotion, the animators had a second problem: Mr. Peabody wears glasses. And Sherman does, too. "They have big, round, thick-rimmed glasses," Schleifer says. "The top falls right where eyebrows would fall naturally. We had to constantly lift the eyebrows up and down, so we spent a lot of time focusing on how to keep them from having strange graphic tangents and not moving too fast to track the motion." Sherman's big head and skinny neck offered another chal- lenge for the animators. "If we did something simple, like turn his head without involving his body, it would feel like his head would snap off," Schleifer says. "So we had to incorporate his body without having it be distracting. But, he is such an ap- pealing character, it was a fun challenge." The third main character, Sherman's classmate Penny, had her own interesting animation quirk. "We always tweak our characters for the camera, to make them appealing and to keep them on model," Schleifer explains. "But, Penny needed more tweaking. I'm not sure why. It was just one of those things – she would look like herself, but depending on the angle of her head, we needed to move and rotate and scale her eyes to keep an appealing shape and make her feel more alive." In addition to these three main characters – Mr. Peabody, Sherman, and Penny – several other secondary characters pop up through the film: Mona Lisa, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Van Gogh, Trojans, Greeks, and many more. "We rigged 94 heads total on this movie, counting the generics and special characters," Modesto says. "It involved a huge amount of rigging and lots of clothes. The only loca- tion where we didn't have crowds was Florence, but we still had generics in the background. We had to rig them all. And, we had different outfits for each time period. We were rigging until a week before animation finished." Maintaining the same topology for each character helped speed the process. Time Travel To move the characters from one moment in time to another, a group of effects artists and painters developed and pro- duced a unique design. "As usual, when we design some- thing that doesn't exist, we play with different ideas," Denis says. "The wormhole idea came up pretty fast, to have them move through a circular element. And since we're making a movie in stereo, we knew it would be nice to play with the depth. There are a few shots where everything becomes re- ally, really deep." To experiment with timing and speed, the artists moved drawings into a 3D space and tested variations there. "We had simple rings at the beginning, but if we moved them too fast, we had a stroboscopic effect, so we had to test that," Denis says. "When we found an element that worked, we'd paint over it. We wanted to have something that looked like a field of energy, like electricity. But at the same time, we wanted the wormhole to look alive and organic, and not too crazy electric. So as the WABAC travels through the wormhole, the rings become perfect circles; the WABAC drove the animation of the rings procedurally." As with the characters, the environments in which Mr. Pea- body and Sherman land at the end of a time-travel trip typically have a simple, graphic look, but one that takes advantage of the complexity that computer graphics can offer. "We followed the same rules for both the characters and the environment, and tried to make them more graphic," Denis says. "Mr. Peabody's apartment and the WABAC room have a modern, minimalist architecture. Even the wood grain is graphic in nature. But the older houses in Florence and the Egyptian environment have more richness in texture. Those were the two exceptions." Similarly, the artists designed simple surfaces for the char- ■ AT TOP LEFT, SHERMAN'S classmate Penny and her parents. At top right, Sherman and Mr. Peabody consider eating cake with Marie Antoinette, one of 94 characters rigged for the film.