Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/77744
VFX•CG Films n n n n when it came time to make a stuffy, we gave our files to the manufacturing company. Mark [Rappaport] made a number of foam bears with the same size, proportions, and look as the digital character. The hiccup for him was matching the fur." from root to tip of each strand, and fake fur didn't. "Mark could match the texture, but had to do handwork on the fur to dye it the right color." He had to because the stuffy appears early in the film when young John unwraps the gift, and also later. In addition, the crew had the stuffy on set for Mark Wahlberg to act with. Clark, who had puppeteered characters in Gremlins, Young Sherlock Holmes, The Fly, The Witches of Eastwick, Innerspace, RoboCop, Willow, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and other films, puppeteered the stuffy on set. "I had a metal rod I could hold onto and The fur on the CG bear had different colors turn Ted's head," Clark says. "The stuffy gave Mark and the other actors a clear idea about where Ted would be and approximately what he' voice and watching the monitor. Then after the stuffy pass, we' metal stand that had balls on it to give Mark eye-line reference. It was small enough that we could cover it with the CG bear later, or easily paint it out." For this pass, Seth would be off camera d do. Seth would be off camera doing the d usually replace Ted with a Ted's World During the opening sequence of Ted, the camera flies through the letters of the Universal logo and down into a 1980s neighborhood. It's Christmastime. "Seth [MacFarlane] wanted something reminiscent of early-'80s films, like The Burbs opening. In that movie, they pushed from the studio logo into a tabletop miniature of a neighborhood. Ours would be an updated photoreal version ending with a segue into an existing production shot of kids having a snowball fight," says Blair Clark, visual effects supervisor. "It was toward the end of production, and right about the time Iloura was starting on the shot, we found out that Universal was changing the logo. We had a couple weeks of nail biting, waiting for the final design. The files went straight from the ven- dor to Iloura, and it was tricky: The new design had land masses defined by city lights at night. The shot we had to transition into was daylight. So, Iloura had to bring the sun up, transition from nighttime to daylight, and transition to a snow-covered environment. We thought we'd have to use cloud cover to ease the transitions, but they did such a nice job, the shot has no cloud cover at all." Iloura also created parts of the stadium for Fenway Park. "During a chase, Ted climbs the towers that have big banks of lights," Clark says. "Seth want- ed to have shots looking down at Ted, but we couldn't get the camera high enough for sweeping shots." So the production crew built a lighting tower that was shot on stage. Iloura built a digital Fenway and areas of Boston around it, and comp'd the lighting tower into the CG stadium. –Barbara Robertson doing the voice, or he might be in a motion- capture suit doing the voice and pantomim- ing Ted's performance. And sometimes Clark would be off camera puppeteering the stuffy for the actors' reference. For motion capture, the crew settled on Xsens' MVN system. "Seth needed a system that could be portable enough to use on set," Clark says. "Xsens has a couple setups. One is the classic Lycra suit with balls on it, but Seth wanted something he could quickly put on over his clothes and take off." Clark describes the system they ended up using as looking like a rock climber's harness. "Seth could get in and out in 10 minutes," Clark says. "Our motion-capture specialist Darnell Williams had a tower computer with [Autodesk's] MotionBuilder and other soft- ware, and Seth was hardwired to this thing. He could be close to the set and actors, but off camera, like he would be anyway. The actors were in earshot or wore earwigs to hear him. It worked out really nicely. He was happy, and we benefited in visual effects because we didn't have to animate from scratch." During filming, Williams monitored the data capture by watching the CG Ted per- form MacFarlane's motion in real time. "The rest of the cast and crew used the playback to review what had been shot and to check for any issues," Clark says. "We did some motion- capture sessions later for shots that changed, or because of time and availability when some- thing got bumped, but generally, Seth chose to do motion capture on set when Ted was interacting with another actor. We could see the performance benefits from that. [Seth and Mark Wahlberg] didn't ad-lib a lot, but they played off each other." A stunt stuffy created from the CG model of Ted gave actor Mark Wahlberg something visual to react to on set. Writer/director Seth MacFarlane provided Ted's voice. all Ted's facial expressions throughout the film, and animated such details as the bear's hands and ears. In addition, animators at Tippett performed Ted for the physical gags. "When Ted jumps from car to car and in the big hotel fight, he was entirely key- framed," Clark points out, "except for the be- ginning of the hotel fight, before they come to blows. That started with motion capture." Animators at both studios keyframed June/July 2012 57