Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/42006
Education n n n n Jordon is one of three Green Lanterns that have their bodies replaced with CG suits. Image works artists also did a body replace- ment for Mark Strong, who plays Sinestro, and for Temuera Morrison, who plays Abin Sur and appears at the beginning of the film. "The bulk of our technical work was on these hybrid humans," Schaub says. "This is a tricky registration problem because the suit needs to blend seamlessly with the photographic element at the neckline, without any obvious sliding between the two." On set, the actors wore gray suits with opti- cal markers that tracking teams used to match there are a group of guardians that are stoic digital humans. And then there's Parallax, a huge amorphous cloud of tortured souls. Par- allax is basically a huge effect, but the founda- tion for the effect is an underlying animation system to give the character intelligence and intent." To produce these performances, Schaub oversaw a team of 80 animators, a majority of whom worked in Imageworks' Albuquer- que, New Mexico, studio. Three leads in each location supervised the work of smaller teams. "A typical approach would be to have "I had always drawn as a kid and was a big fan of Disney and Pixar movies," he says. "Bring- ing characters to life sounded like fun, but I didn't know you could make a career out of it. I wanted to receive more training on charac- ter animation, so I decided to give Animation Mentor a shot, and I got hooked." Tovar's first job was animating dinosaurs for a television series at 1080 Entertainment in San Antonio; he was studying at Anima- tion Mentor at the same time. "I was learning on the job and learning more after hours," he says. "I improved a lot." From that job, Tovar bounced to Sony in San Diego, where he animated cartoony char- acters for the PlayStation game Mod Nation Racers and worked as a cinematic animator for other video games, including the 2009 game of the year, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. Green Lantern gave him the opportunity to stretch his skills into feature films. "I had never dealt with Linux, so that was Sony Pictures Imageworks played a major role in bringing the the CG suit with the actor's body in the filmed footage, and positioned it in 3D space as seen from the view of the live-action camera. The track gave animators a character's position from the hips through the spine and into the head, with the neck locked into place. "The artistry comes into how the muscles move," Schaub says. "The animators manipu- late the muscles and tendons with great atten- tion to anatomical detail to make the characters feel organic. When people talk about motion capture or rotomation looking stiff, it's that lack of micro detail, the bounce, the jiggle…what you see in slow motion if you were to analyze it. We needed to get all that musculature working so the suit didn't feel rigid." Animated Characters In addition to the three hybrid charac- ters with animated bodies attached to live- action heads, Imageworks animators per- formed several fully CG characters. "All the other characters in the Green Lantern Corps are animated," Schaub says. "There are weird alien critters, some bipedal, some quadrupeds, and, of course, they fly as well. They all needed a unique quality to the way they move. Also, 's characters and worlds to life, and recent grad Matthew Tovar was able to contribute on a fight sequence. specialists, with one team working on the hybrids, and another group the animated characters," Schaub explains, "but, instead, we made a strong effort to give everyone a taste of everything. This was the first time out for many of the animators, and it was a good show for people who wanted to get their feet wet. Some of them were mostly doing hybrid characters, but as soon as they got through that challenge and showed capability, we tried them on more animation-heavy shots." One of those animators working on his first feature film was Matthew Tovar, a 2008 Ani- mation Mentor graduate. "I was working at Sony Computer Entertainment in San Diego and was on a break when I got an e-mail from Becca Romeo at Animation Mentor saying that Imageworks was looking for animators and that she had forwarded my reel to them," Tovar says. "When Imageworks contacted me, I told them I was interested. They reviewed my work and offered me a short-term job for the run of the show." Tovar had been studying computer graph- ics at the University of the Incarnate Word, a Catholic liberal arts college in San Antonio, Texas, when he discovered Animation Mentor. new," Tovar says. "The tools they use are a little different. And, when I worked in cinematics, we didn't deal with the lighting or rigging departments. At Imageworks, we went back and forth. Approved shots go to lighting and sometimes come back to animation. There's a lot of back and forth because, in the end, it looks better. I enjoyed getting into the fine de- tails to polish a shot and make the animation really shine." Tovar worked primarily on a long fight se- quence between Jordan and Sinestro, two of the hybrid characters. "I learned a lot from my lead, my supervisors, and the other animators," he says. "My lead, Rahul Dabholkar, was like an Animation Mentor mentor. We would get down to fine details from one keyframe to the next." Tovar learned, for example, when favor- ing one keyframe over another would help a shot, and how lighting, effects, and rendering could affect animation. "Rahul let me know that we needed to take motion blur into consideration," Tovar says. "We might create a gap in the animation so it wouldn't feel so smooth once motion blur was added on; it would make the action pop more. I enjoyed getting that detail into the shots." Once he finished work on Green Lantern, Tovar returned to San Diego and his former job at Sony Computer Entertainment to work in video game animation. "I definitely would like to get more feature experience," Tovar says. "But, right now, I'm doing cinematic ani- mation, and that's great, too. It's kind of like movies, but for video games, and it's fun." He adds, "It's definitely a good time to be an animator." n August/September 2011 25 Gr een Lantern