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n n n n Visual Effects At top, DNeg created crowds of green-skinned, double-armed Tharks as well as all the creatures in the film. At bottom, facial-capture data from actor Willem Dafoe helped animators create expressions for the hero Tars Tarkas, shown with actor Taylor Kitsch (John Carter), but the animators keyframed the tall, lanky character's performances. and The Incredibles, who shared his love of the "John Carter" books, and then invited Michael Chabon (Spider-Man 2) to join the team. Wall-E producers Lindsey Collins and Jim Morris, Pixar's general manager, became the producers along with Colin Wilson (Ava- tar). Filling out the group were production designer Nathan Crowley (The Dark Knight), cinematographer Daniel Mindel (Star Trek), and visual effects supervisor Peter Chiang (The Bourne Ultimatum) from Double Negative. Three Soho studios created the visual ef- fects for the movie: Double Negative (DNeg), Cinesite, and The Moving Picture Company (MPC). Legacy Effects provided physical ma- quettes and sent Pixologic ZBrush models to DNeg. Halon and NVisage did previs, with Halon handling the majority of shots. As for the visual effects, "We started by splitting the work between DNeg and Cine- site," Chiang says. "Cinesite did 860 shots with the red men, who are human actors tinted red with tattoos. They fly in spaceships designed by [art director] Ryan Church and Nathan Crowley, so Cinesite created that hardware and the cities. Double Negative took on everything with the Tharks, just over 1000 shots. But, at some point, there was an individual Warhoon sequence, in which John Carter meets these almost Neanderthal thugs, that we handed to MPC." In addition to the Tharks, DNeg cre- ated various multi-legged creatures. 10 February/March 2012 Tharks The Tharks' most noticeable characteristic is the second set of arms under their main two limbs, which presented an interesting creative problem: What would the second set do? Would the Tharks use each arm and hand to do different tasks or similar tasks? "Early on, we did a test with a Thark eating from multiple bowls on a table," says Eamonn Butler, one of two animation supervisors. "The animators did a great job, but Andrew [Stan- ton] said it looked like we were trying to prove how cool it is to have four arms. It was distract- ing. So we downplayed it and used the lower arms to support what the upper arms did." Adds Steve Aplin, the second animation super visor, "Initially we tried to stay away from twinning, from having the arms mirror one another. But as soon as we separated them too much, we felt that our brains couldn't handle it, so we went back to twinning. We'd separate the arms and try to find poses that worked symbiotically." Sometimes the arms worked together; other times they complemented one another. For example, in a scene where Tars Tarkas tries to persuade John Carter to jump to great heights, which is something Carter can easily do in the lighter gravity of Mars, he stands with his big arms on his hips and small arms across his chest. "We used the arms to reinforce his tone and atti- tude," Butler says. "That was the challenge—we can't have the arms all doing the same thing, but they needed to have the same attitude. If they are loading weapons, we'd have them hold the weapon with their upper arms, and have the lower arms load and unload. One of the great things about this film is that we were working on characters that were carrying shots." Riggers at Double Negative use an in-house system called Pinocchio, with which they could quickly assemble a bipedal rig with the extra set of arms. The challenge, however, was in moving the shoulders. "The rigs for the up- per and lower arms were exactly the same, but we had a bone that tried to act as a scapula and collarbone," Aplin says. "We considered doing a second scapula and collarbone, but it looked like the parts were swimming because we're so used to seeing a solid area." Ultimately, the riggers gave the lower arm a smaller range of movement that affected the skin area less, and then skinned the creatures so that secondary movement was visible, espe- cially in the back. That secondary movement was procedural, built into the rig. All the hero Tharks are CG characters voiced by actors who performed the Thark roles dur- ing filming. To provide the second set of arms on set, someone in a green suit stood behind each actor so he or she could, for example, hand something from one set of arms to another. "Andrew was keen to have a representation of the principal actors so all the eye lines were correct," Chiang says. "So, the hero Tharks were always represented on set." The Tharks ranged in size from 7 feet 6 inches tall to 8 feet 6 inches, so to have cor- rect eye lines, the actors playing the characters sometimes stood on boxes sized according to the eye height of each character, and the actors learned how to walk on stilts. "If they needed to do a 20-foot run, we would use Lego-like sets of decking," Chiang says. Although the crew considered using an optical motion-capture system, after analyz- ing the difference between the actors and the characters, they realized all the movement would have to be re-animated. So, they de- cided against motion capture for the physical performance. Witness cameras on set made it possible to later triangulate a 3D track from the footage for rotoscoping the actors on stilts or boxes, which helped animators, but gait differences often meant animators needed to create the performances from scratch. "The Tharks have extremely long legs, so they have a wide gait, which means they get to objects quicker than an actor," Chiang says. A human would have to jog to keep up with a Thark who was walking. However, rather than