Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/394837
www.postmagazine.com 23 POST SEPTEMBER 2014 where he is in the film now. "Meanwhile, Framestore was doing the same thing with Rocket Raccoon, it was the blocking of Rocket in the film, and at one point we had to actually exchange assets. So, they gave us Rocket and we gave them Groot, and we had to match their Rocket and they had to match our Groot; those were the big ones. "We also had a lot of environment work because we had the opening sequence in Morag, the title sequence at the beginning of the film, the temple with Quill at the beginning, plus the chase after the temple sequence, and then we had to do the Xandar planet and environment for the sequence when all the characters meet. "We had this massive battle sequence where we had to do the spaceships and all the fights, the explosions and the crash, where the ship crashed through the city. In all, we did [857] shots." Can you discuss Groot in more detail? "The Marvel art department had all of these designs for Groot and that was the one that was used in the Comic-Con teaser last July. When it was time to think about the film, there were ideas that Jim [Gunn] had about how he wanted the character to be more relatable; he want- ed to make sure that people were falling in love with the character. And so, there was this idea that Groot would look very gentle and agreeable, and at the same time, can turn into a feared, very angry and quite-powerful character. There was a challenge there. "The original concept for Groot was very tree-like — a little bit too much. It's difficult to relate to a tree [laughs]. One of the first things we did to change the design, to humanize him a little bit, was to change the proportions slightly, still keeping with the idea that it's a tree; he still had a lack of symmetry, but trying to bring him back to the human realm in terms of the shape. "Also, what we thought was one of the most important things was his eyes. I'm stressing this because we spent a lot of time working on Groot's eyes and we never go into that much detail into creating eyes — it was everything. We were looking at eyes all day for a month, trying to understand why, when you look at the human eye, you know it's real. It looks through you. But when you look at the CG eye, it's just dead. So we tried to bring as much detail as humanly possible in the time we had on the eyes. We made sure that the eyes weren't symmetrical — because CG will make them perfect, but people are not perfect, and I think that's one of those things we brought to Groot — and that helped him a lot. We really ended up giving him a nice look. His eyes were fantastic. I remember looking at the screen for like 30 minutes, at his face, it was just beautiful. "It was quite important that the char- acter needed to be understood through his facial expressions. These characters [Groot] were more complex characters than we ever built. Because he is made of branches and not just carved into one chunk — we actually decided to do every branch individually, so the whole body is made of hundreds of individual branches and all these branches, when we were rigging the character, we made sure that they wouldn't bend like rubber, but like wood. "Ultimately, we had to do five different Groots, because we had the one from the film, the main Groot; then we had the Groot with these little, tiny arms; then, after the crash, we had to do Groot 2, which was a twig; then we had what we called Groot bud, which was the tiny Groot in the ship at the end; and then we had to do tiny Groot which was the one that was dancing at the end credits. The Groots were fantastic." How closely did you work with Framestore? "Once we did all that, we shifted to Framestore to replicate it, obviously because we didn't incorporate the tools, the only thing we could give them was the model and a couple of animation tests and cache that they could use, but then they had to replicate every aspect of the rigging and everything that wasn't compatible between the two systems. It was a big, big task. "I think that was the best collaboration we ever had with another company. We actually worked hand in hand for a cou- ple of months. We were going to them The film's two most complex CG characters were created by MPC (Groot) and Framestore (Rocket Raccoon), above.