Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/30784
n n n n CG•Live Action Did you create the storyboards and previs for Hop at Rhythm & Hues? No, Chris Bailey, the production’s anima- tion director, handled the storyboard team and the previs. He also worked with Tim [Hill] on story points and hashing out ideas about how scenes could work out. I oversaw all the animation. It’s the same process we had for Alvin. Did any of the characters change during postproduction? We had to go back and change E.B. We were working on a teaser when that came to a head. We had found a way to take this rab- bit character and make him look like a good drummer; we hit on something early that everyone liked, which was an excited little kid having a fun time playing the drums. But, a decision was made to change him into a sophisticated drummer, comfortable and at more arms. It’s amazing how much they be- come part of the look of a character. We found that they were almost like a Mickey Mouse thing—you always needed to see two ears no matter which direction the bunnies are facing. If we didn’t do that, if we had the ears sweep down, the bunnies looked like another animal. Were you able to use the same rigs for all the bunnies—those on two legs and four? They all started with similar structures, but the proportions were significantly different enough that we handled them in different ways. Dad had a unique rig. The Pink Berets had re- ally large feet, even bigger than E.B.’s, and one was designed to be smaller with proportions close to young E.B. We designed one rig in such a way that we could move from biped to quad and still have it work, and it worked surprisingly well. Even for the Pink Berets. Their martial arts moves for E.B., who performs alongside a human actor? It was tricky. A rabbit has a large muzzle, and the trick of it was keeping the rabbit from looking like a dog or a cat, or some other kind of mammal. The bunnies have a kind of lower lip, but the upper lip is a rounded rabbit muz- zle. To make those lips read clearly as dialog, to do lip sync, was challenging, especially for E.B. and his dad. We basically figured out which angles looked best and came up with libraries of shapes that animators could start with. Then, to be hon- est, it took plowing away at each scene until we got the dialog to read correctly from the cam- era angle. We had to muscle our way through. We had reference of Russell Brand recording E.B.’s dialog and of Hugh Laurie, E.B.’s dad, and we referred to that a lot. We’d start with the preset shapes, but we could shape the faces, lips, mouth, eyelids, brows, and so forth any ease, like a professional drummer. So, we looked at drumming styles and settled on one for a confident, skillful drumming rabbit—if you can picture that. And you will. How did you organize the animation team? We started with four animation supervisors, each having between 10 and 15 animators on their teams. Eventually we added two more supervisors leading two more teams in our India facilities. Did the character designs present any particular challenges? It’s always a challenge to have a creature de- signed to be on all fours walk on two legs and stay appealing, and still incorporate the char- acteristics of that animal. The bunnies had re- ally long feet, so to make young E.B. work in an appealing way, we had him do some skip- hopping things to make him look cute. Also, we hadn’t done a lot of work with long ears before, and they’re almost like having two 24 April 2011 At top left, to have E.B. and the other bunnies always look like bunnies, Rhythm & Hues’ animators kept both ears visible no matter which direction the characters faced. At top right, animators kept the chicks’ beaks stiff in the middle when they talked, using rig controls to move only the outside corners. were tricky—they had to do acrobatic kung fu moves and then run on all fours. At default, they would look long-legged, so we had to use blendshapes to put them low to the ground in a kung fu stance. We looked at martial arts films for reference, and Kung Fu Panda, which is one of my favorite films, but we weren’t try- ing to have them hit specific moves. We were just going for a paramilitary feel for them. Bit, the little Pink Beret, was always sneezing and falling down. She would run, hit a pose, and then use her inhaler, so we had to puff her cheeks out. Aside from that, the Pink Berets were the same model and had the same rig that we used for the generic rabbits who work in the factory. The only difference was that they wear the pink berets. The Pink Berets had a couple utterances, but didn’t have dialog. Was facial animation and lip sync dif- ficult for the Easter Bunny and especially way we needed based on camera angle. The hard work was in tweaking the mouth shapes to read as dialog and still look like a bunny. worked? Could you see the furred bunnies as you That was another big challenge on a show where the look depends so much on the look of the fur. We have ways to simulate the fur when we animate, but it’s processor-intensive. So, in order for animators to work as fast as they want, we approximate the fur volume. A shell, a piece of geometry that represents where the edges of the fur lie, gives us an approxima- tion of how full the cheeks, muzzle, and ears will look when rendered. It isn’t completely one to one. And, what we show to the direc- tor doesn’t look exactly like the fully rendered product, so there was some back and forth af- ter rendering when a character didn’t read the way we expected.