Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/763341
www.postmagazine.com 31 POST DECEMBER 2016 MOANA hen the artists, directors and studio began work on Disney's Moana, the first step was to soak in all the cultures they intended to portray in the film. Co-directors John Musker and Ron Clements (The Princess and the Frog, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin) and key department heads travelled to islands all over the Pacific such as New Zealand, Tahiti, Samoa and Hawai'i to learn the myths, eat the food, drink in the air, see the lush surrounds and hear the stories of the people who lived there. They recruited hit composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (of Broadway's Hamilton fame) to join the mu- sical crew, and hired screenwriter and director Taika Waititi (What We Do in the Shadows, Thor: Ragnarok) to help put the story together. The lion's share of the workload was distrib- uted among the artists and animators who drew, sketched, designed, spitballed and finally rigged and programmed 16-year-old heroine Moana (Auli'i Cravalho), demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson), their friend Hei Hei the Rooster (Alan Tudyk) and even the ocean itself for the production. For Clements and Musker it was something of a baptism by fire. After the 2D, hand-drawn movies they hit their stride with back in the 1990s, CGI was a new world. "We don't focus too much on the technology but we have wonderful, brilliant people who know about that so as gorgeous as the movie is I wish we could claim that was our job and our doing, but it wasn't," Musker says. "We have general directions, I had photos and made sketches when I was in the South Pacific and I was inspired by other things," continues Musker, "but then our art director went there and the lighting director studied the translucence the water came back with and did tests for the effects artists. "One of the producers said that in Moana, the jump from storyboard drawings to finished images seems better than any film he's been involved in. It's been our experience, too, when you see how mind-boggling the rendering of the water and the light is." Musker says it worked despite their relative new- ness to the process because of the input they en- couraged from their team, saying that if they'd had different contributors, it would have been a different movie. "The film's limited by what we thought it would be but by encouraging people to bring their own ideas the end result is much better." Something that animation offers that a live-ac- tion shoot can't is that the whole thing exists only on paper (or computer) until it's ready to be struck to film or copied digitally for projection on a screen — the whole process is your production period. "I feel like it's a slow process in animation where we keep ripping the movie apart and doing it again," says Musker, "but in live action that production is a much smaller window, it's a really concentrated time of three months and you're on the set and every minute there are cash registers turning." "In animation we also get to see the movie before we make it," Clements adds. "You put up all the storyboards and it's not really animated, some- times there are scratch tracks or they're not the real actors, but there's music and the sound effects and you can watch it and get a sense of what's working and where your problems are. If the movie you hope for isn't there in live action there's not a lot you can do — in animation, we can keep working on it until we feel really good about it." BROUGHT TO LIFE According to art director of characters Bill Schwab (Frozen, Tangled, Wreck-it Ralph), who was placed in charge of designing the characters ahead of time, there are two major aspects to his role. "One is coming on very early and working with the directors and production designer to design the characters with the design team. The second is to work closely with the modeling and rigging teams to develop it, then ultimately animation to stay with the character, to help transition drawings into something real." Before the virtual cameras start rolling, Schwab and his colleagues are busy pinning down the way a character will look, move, dress or talk. Even then, drawings are only proofs of concept — when the character rig is animated and actually does talk, dress or move it will inevitably show flaws that were never envisioned. "Once you have a drawing every- one loves, you're only a small part of the way there," he adds. That's where animation comes in, and animation head Amy Smeed (Chicken Little, Bolt, Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, Frozen) works with Schwab, the Advanced rendering of water.