Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/663385
16 cgw m a r c h . a p r i l 2 0 1 6 was perfect and that we tracked all the changes." Prior to beginning work on the project, Ferrara had gone to Los Angeles to collaborate with Glass and, aer, decided to implement the methods utilized by the art department on set for the CG team, as well. "I realized that I needed to use the same process," Ferrara says. "Select the plants. Put them in place. Think about the action and what might happen in the scene. Build modules so we could change position, rotation, and heights if we wanted and if Mowgli interact- ed with them or not." When the environments in- cluded water, MPC's simulation artists turned to Side Effects Soware's Houdini, rendering the shots with RenderMan RIS. "There was quite a bit of wa- ter," Legato says. "But this new RenderMan re-creates what real water does. How much you see through it. What's reflected and refracted. When you see a shot with water, the water makes you believe the scene is real, all by itself. The eddies, the breeze on it, the flow all feels real. We had some frames that took 40 hours to render, but the result is photographic." Helping to make all this – the believable characters and the realistic backgrounds – possible was a reasonable schedule. "I'm glad Jon [Favreau] chose to make a movie of this length [90 minutes]," Valdez says "We could focus on making each sequence the best it could be in terms of storytelling and the quality of the finish. We didn't just blast out a movie as fast as we could. The work feels good, and it's engaging. It rides that balance between naked photorealism and an enhanced stylized, lyrical tone. It's a bit different and a bit special." "It wasn't easy," Legato says. "But the achievement was high." ■ Barbara Robertson (BarbaraRR@comcast.net) is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW. VIDEO: GO TO EXTRAS IN THE MARCH.APRIL 2016 ISSUE BOX C G W. C O M AT TOP LEFT, ALL THE HERO ANIMALS AND SOME SECONDARY CHARACTERS TALK, ALTHOUGH ALL THE ANIMALS ARE COMPUTER-GENER- ATED. AT TOP RIGHT AND BOTTOM, ENVIRONMENT ARTISTS AT MPC CREATED THE FILM'S 58 DIFFERENT CG SETS AND 224 SUBSETS.