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s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 6 c g w 1 1 Scrapbooking Poppy tells her story in part through the scrapbooks and cards she assembles throughout the film from pieces of felt. "The scrapbooks became the way to narrate what she was thinking," says Production Designer Kendal Cronkhite. "One of our artists, Priscilla Wong, actually made the scrapbooks with real materials, felt, buttons, and that sort of thing." The crew then photographed the scrapbooks and brought them into the computer. "The resulting images were flat, but felt has some thick- ness, so we added that with 3D to make the scrapbooks tan- gible," says Visual Effects Supervisor Philippe Denis. "Then we animated them with [Adobe] Aer Effects and did some color correction." "And keep the narrative go- ing," Dohrn adds. S O N G A N D D A N C E David Burgess headed a team of 32 animators who worked on the film, 20 in Glendale, Cal- ifornia, and 12 at DreamWorks Dedicated Unit (DDU) in India. Rather than assigning animators to particular characters, anima- tors worked on all the characters in a sequence. DreamWorks' proprietary animation soware Premo helped facilitate that. "Premo's sequence browser made it easier to cast animators with five or six shots in a row," Burgess says. "We called it work- ing chunky style. The animators were responsible for everything in a chunk of shots. Premo made it possible to look at the teensy parts or at the chunk holistically and make sure the shots flowed together seamlessly. And, the real-time manipulation at high res is just so huge. No matter what you do, you can see how they will look and feel. You don't have to go to a low poly count mode. The high res is there and ready for you." Whatever the shot, though, the trolls were the most difficult characters to animate. "The Bergens were easier because they were more human and naturalistic," Burgess says. "The trolls were the biggest challenge because they were so small and pushed. They had stubby arms and legs and big heads. We had to cheat like cra- zy. And because the movie is a musical, we had choreography." The crew brought in dancers who performed the choreog- raphy for reference, but that wasn't as much help as the animators had hoped. "Some choreographers had made cool dance moves that our stubby little trolls just couldn't do," Burgess says. The felted environment also gave the animators a new world of challenges. "Everything had texture and was fuzzy," Burgess says. "We had to make sure we could see the environment so the trolls wouldn't end up sunk to their knees. We tried to get high-res versions of stuff they'd directly interact with or shadow layers to see the depth of the fluff." It's amusing to think of animators worrying about trolls sinking to their knees in fuzz, but in fact, it's a perfect example of how far CG has come. "We couldn't have done this movie 10 years ago," Producer Gina Shay says. "We didn't have the tools for the hair, for the fuzziness of the environment. We had to create a whole new system just for glitter." Many CG films attempt to bring the visual language of live-action films into the ani- mated world. This film does not. "That's what was so exciting for me," Denis says. "We were trying something different. The light still responds to the world, and the world feels tangible, but there was room to design, to interpret, to try different ideas." Trolls is DreamWorks' first CG musical. There are dance routines with trolls doing im- possible things with their hair. The characters travel through fabric-art worlds populated with strange creatures made of felt and glitter. There's danger. There's irreverent humor. "We wanted to create a signature world," Shay says. "We decided the trolls are the happi- est, most joyful characters in the world, so we created a world just for them." "This movie comes out just before the [US] election," Mitchell says. "I think people don't want to see a movie at that time about destroying the world. I think they want to feel good. This is a movie for people who want to be happy." ■ Barbara Robertson (BarbaraRR@comcast.net) is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW.