Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/42006
n n n n Education n n n n Education HERO Animation Hammering out the details on Digital Domain's feature film Thor By Barbara Robertson The Mighty Thor, Norse God of Thunder, has a problem. Just before his father, Odin, planned to crown him king, Frost Giants from the ice planet Jotunheim disrupted the coronation. So, an angry and arrogant Thor sped through a portal to Jotunheim, where he led an unauthorized attack on the inhabitants. This did not please Odin, and he banished his son to live among humans on Earth. The audience watching the feature Thor learns this back-story only after the superhero lands in New Mexico and smashes into Natalie Portman's RV. Portman plays Jane Foster, an astrophysicist. Austra- lian actor Chris Hemsworth plays Thor, and Anthony Hopkins plays Odin. The production, directed by Kenneth Branagh, was a box-office hit. In postproduction, the story centers on Digital Domain, the studio responsible for creating visual effects for the sci-fi action-adventure, with BUF, Fuel VFX, Luma Pictures, The Base Studio, CEG Media, and Evil Eye Pictures also contributing. Kelly Port led the work at Digital Do- main, where Eric Petey, working out of Digital Domain's Vancouver studio, supervised the animation team. "The bulk of the animation on the show took place on the ice planet," Petey says. "We created most of the creatures and characters in that location." When Thor shows up on Jotunheim with his posse of gods and demi- gods looking for trouble, they find it—a planet's worth of trouble from enormous, muscular bad guys. "The Frost Giants are slightly exagger- ated humans, monster-y types, large, creepy men. Kenneth [Branagh] always talked about how they needed to be vicious and menacing." Some shots have more than 200 of these Frost Giants. "We can manage the crowds with in-house tools, but the shots were mostly done by animators, to be honest, using generic motion cycles," Petey says. Animators keyframed Frost Giants in the foreground, and started with motion-captured data for background characters. The ani- mated warriors don't have dialog: If they spoke in close-up shots, they were actors in makeup. "We had large guys for the motion capture, but we couldn't use the motion directly," Petey says. Images © 2011 Paramount. 26 August/September 2011