Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/466366
www.postmagazine.com 21 POST FEBRUARY 2015 with detail — hyper, hyper detail. In some shots, you can see pores where hair goes into the skin. We found that as long as we kept the geometry stylized, we could push detail as far as we wanted. We used displacement and bump mapping to extreme amounts. We never knew what would be in focus, so we had to texture what we could." Even though the characters had real-world textures, by stylizing them and making their geometry slightly different from humans, the elves and fairies never entered the uncanny valley. The enormous amount of detail in the characters and the environment created another issue, however: too much infor- mation in a single frame. "We had to take a photographic ap- proach," Plett says. "We used lighting to focus and isolate characters, and depth of field to help us see these small-scale crea- tures. It was very tricky at first. Your first inclination in CG is to see everything." To help the audience understand how tiny these characters are, the camera was often low. "We tried to play the scale as close to real world as we could," Plett says. "The characters are three to six inches tall. Ants come up to their knees. We tried to use a low-level angle and always have something recognizable — a daisy or dogwood plant or flower that would tell us the scale." CRAZY LITTLE THING CALLED LOVE "The movie had been around for years with different waves of people involved when George [Lucas] and [Lucasfilm CEO] Kathy Kennedy asked me to take it over," Rydstrom says. "There was a crew in place and an art department. What hadn't started in earnest was the anima- tion, aside from tests." Fortunately, modelers and riggers working in Autodesk's Maya had already prepared characters. "We had a huge catalog of assets set up within an earlier pipeline that used our Viewpaint texturing software and Lux lighting within Zeno," says Nigel Sumner, who had been a CG supervisor on Rango, and supervised the visual ef- fects created by a crew largely based in Singapore. "But, the studio had moved to [The Foundry's] Katana for lighting, Mari for lookdev and texture painting, and an Alembic caching system. So, we devel- oped a hybrid system. We had a conver- sion method that published the assets into the newer formats, but we could go back to the earlier pipeline if needed." The team used The Foundry's Kata- na as the primary lighting tool, Pixar's RenderMan for rendering, and composit- ed with The Foundry's Nuke for finish- ing touches. A catalog of HDRIs gave technical directors access to images at different times of day and in various lighting environments. Animation supervisor Kim Ooi led the team of approximately 40 animators in Singapore who worked on the film. A small group of animators in San Francis- co also contributed. STRAIGHT ON Because this is a musical, the animators needed to perform the characters' sing- ing. "At first I was nervous about going into a musical," Ooi says. "But Gary said the main thing is getting the right emo- tion across, whether dialogue or song. Of course, there is the technical side, having the character inhale correctly, but we had reference from the voice actors. And in singing shots where there is a certain kind of rhythm you have to hit, that is a restriction. But the emotional part was similar to dialogue shots." One of Rydstrom's favorite sequenc- es was the fight between Marianne and Bog, which happens while the two char- acters (Wood and Cumming) sing a duet, Heart's Straight On. The animators gave Marianne fencing poses and stances. Bog was a matador. The tricky part was the song. "We had to figure out the rhythm of it," Ooi says. "We couldn't do our own thing and hope the soundtrack would match. We shot a lot of reference and relied on Gary's input as well, and we put the jigsaw puzzle together." By the time the fairy princesses have found their true and unexpected loves, they and other characters in the film have sung 25 songs. That's down from the original 100 that Lucas gathered for Strange Magic. "But they are all great," Lucas says. "I loved doing this movie because I love the music. I loved coming to work on it. I love watching it. And that's the key for me in the end. I did it for the fun of it." ANIMATION A team of 40 animators in Singapore worked on the film, along with a handful of others at ILM's San Francisco studio.