Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/30784
n n n n Short Film If you look closely, you find most of what we seemingly added to the story somewhere in the book. Why was that important? Most children between the age of 2 and 12 in Germany and the UK know the story of the Gruffalo by heart, and so do their par- ents. I think they appreciate having the story’s universe fully explored, but they would have been rightfully disappointed had we taken the book’s popularity to jump-start something that has nothing to do with the book. What was the most challenging technical aspect of the project? Because of the rather tight timeframe, the building and shooting of the miniature set had to happen simultaneously with the animation. This parallel workflow required a lot of plan- ning and pretty solid previs. Also, the integra- tion of the characters into the shot footage wasn’t always easy. I’m not convinced we over- came the latter problems, but we’ve learned a lot for future projects. Did you have to invent any new technol- ogy or technique for the project? We had a self-made giant 3D scanner that On the CG side, the team used mainly Autodesk’s Maya for modeling and animation, along with Mudbox for modeling and texturing. me to try and go with CG animation (instead of stop-motion) was mostly that performances are particularly rewarding to direct in CG. You can collaborate with the animator a lot more easily, and discuss and hone the performance. All of that is possible with stop-motion as well, but for both the director and the animator, it’s often just a bit less fun of an experience. So the characters are all-CG. What else was done using CGI? The water is CG, as is the pollen and par- ticles in the air, and the snow in the end. Also, there are the two sets: the hilltop where the big chase sequence takes place, and Snake’s habi- tat, the reeds. What software did your studio use? Modeling was done in Autodesk’s Maya and Mudbox; animation was also done in Maya, and texturing with Mudbox. The compositing work was done in Autodesk’s Combustion, 38 April 2011 while rendering and lighting, and most other tasks, were done in Maya. What kind of reference was used for the models or animation? Klaus Morschheuser did one initial large- scale sculpt of the Gruffalo’s feet and belly to define how we would treat the fur. That sculpt was also used in the initial test, where that character didn’t have to move. Later, he cre- ated countless tiny, rough models of different characters’ heads to explore certain problem- atic aspects, like the eyes, which always point sideways in the original illustrations and had to be made workable from all directions. How true to the book did you try to be? The idea was to allow the viewer to go back to the book after watching the film and not find any contradictions. So we often elabo- rated on tiny details in Axel’s illustrations, which remain unmentioned in the book’s text. we used for the large-scale sets in order to ob- tain a solid CG geometry of the set’s floors for drop shadows in CG. The scanner was built by the nuclear physicist brother of Mathias Schreck, who’s our head of CG. It was a pretty solid scanner and worked fine, but we didn’t have to use it a lot in the end. Tell me more about the motion-control rig you used. Our motion-control rig was built mainly from LEGOs by the amazing Sunit Parekh- Gaihede. It worked very well and was fully functioning. We could have never afforded a typical motion control, yet we didn’t want to have to do this film without any moving cam- eras. As it was, there was still little use of mov- ing cameras—setting up these shots and com- positing them cost a lot more time than just shooting photos as backgrounds, so we opted for a comparably high editing rate instead of lots of flying cameras. What are you working on now? I’m currently doing some development work for a television series that we hope to get off the ground fairly soon. n Use your smart- phone to view video clips of the short.