Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/30784
CG•Live Action n n n n Also, we use lighting in a way that makes it easy for animators to work, but a lot of the shots would have final lighting from overhead, with strong shadows. So the way the light in- teracts with the fur, the sheen and coloration, and where the shadows fall impacted the look of the character. About half the shots required tweaking. What kind of changes would you see in the fully rendered and lit bunnies? Usually it was fairly subtle, but sometimes the look of the mouth, the mouth shapes, and the way it would read might be differ- ent. The mouth might look more closed. Or, it wouldn’t articulate clearly. Even the brow shapes could look different, and that would change the quality of an expression. The close-up dialog shots were tricky. In shots where E.B. is talking to Fred, sitting next to him as they’re driving along in his car, some- times his mouth looked like a black hole. E.B. has prominent teeth, like Bugs Bunny, but his muzzle was so thick that once rendered, we sometimes couldn’t see the teeth. So we had to adjust the shape of his mouth or reposition his teeth. We needed to see his teeth while he talk- ed, to have him read as a rabbit character and not a character with a human mouth. Some- times we did that with blendshapes, sometimes with rig controls to move the corners of the mouth, rotate the muzzle, and move the nose up and down. How did you animate all the chicks and bunnies in the factory? Initially we had a separate team do- ing the nuts-and-bolts work for the Mas- sive [crowd] animation, the cycles and ac- tions that would plug into Massive. Later, we relied on our India teams to do a lot of the Massive cycle animation and actions. For reference, we brought chicks and bunnies into the studio and filmed them. We couldn’t use reference for some of the stuff, though. The Massive chicks and some bunnies were on roller skates. In one shot at the beginning, we have a little chick on skates carrying a pillow with the ‘egg of destiny.’ The chick skates up to dad and presents him with the scepter. Other chicks are like little messengers. One of [Illumination CEO] Chris Me- ledandri’s favorite things was a walk cycle of a chick. It’s just a walk cycle, but it’s the cut- est thing. We also have chicks driving vehicles, chicks and rabbits in control pods operating machinery. Usually the rule was that if it was close to camera, it was a hero character. If far away or many, we’d turn it over to the Mas- At top, animators fed cycles for crowds of chicks, such as these with the Easter Bunny, to Massive software, which managed the flock. At bottom, during E.B.’s many lines of close-up dialog in this sequence, animators often needed to adjust the shape of his mouth after final fur rendering because his muzzle became too thick to see his teeth. sive group and they’d plug in cycles we created. We could adjust head direction within Mas- sive. And, we could add animation on top. The Massive chicks in the background didn’t talk. We had a couple scenes with murmuring, jumping up and down, and cheering, but they didn’t have lines. A couple of the background bunnies talked, but for the most part, they didn’t say anything. Were the chicks with dialog, Carlos and Phil, as difficult to animate as E.B. and his dad? They weren’t as problematic as the bun- nies. The beaks were more straightforward and easier to handle. We could shape them any way we wanted, but Tim [Hill] and Chris [Bailey] wanted us to keep their beaks stiff in the middle portion and animate the outside corners to create expressions so they wouldn’t look rubbery or artificial. We used rig controls for that, not blendshapes. We had some blend- shapes for Carlos’s brows, but usually we just relied on the rig controls for their faces. Everyone loved animating Carlos and Phil, Carlos especially. They were the comic relief. Hank Azaria did both voices, and they had a lot of good one-liners, so that was fun. We tried to incorporate chick- and bird-like move- ments as much as possible without making them too distracting, so every now and then they flutter their wings, do a little head shake, or wiggle like a chicken. How did the work on Hop compare to the work you’ve done on previous films? It was absolutely hands down the most chal- lenging thing I’ve done so far. One of the challenges was that we were feel- ing our way as we worked through it. Every previous project I’ve worked on has been based on an existing property: Yogi, Alvin, Garfield. This was the first with characters invented out of whole cloth. We didn’t have any history to go on. The directors and producers found their way through the characters as we worked. Almost every shot in the movie was a hero shot, and all the shots were demanding. They either had multiple characters or a demand- ing performance. It was nonstop difficult from beginning to end. On a scale of one to 10, this was an 11. n April 2011 25