Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/990677
D E PA R T M E N T 43 KEYFRAME GETTING UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL WITH SONY ANIMATION'S 3D VISUAL DEVELOPMENT STAFF Sony Animation's 3D visual development group is tasked with testing aspects of the film before it's sent to Sony Pictures Imageworks. All of the 10 or so artists who make up the crew have a strong enough mastery of 3D animation that they could spend one project on character development and the next on effects or lighting. Among the handful of team members who worked on Hotel Transylvania 3 was 3D visual development artist Omar Smith, who specialized in the film's characters while others focused on environments, props and layouts. He predominantly worked with character designer Craig Kellman on villain Van Helsing. "It was vital to extend the design and exploration process into 3D with character sculpts to pinpoint and resolve any issues before a character is handed over to animation," says Smith, whose tasks included creating a 3D design for the Tesla-coiled steampunk- style musket that the character uses in a flashback scene. "It was no different than designing in 2D, and we were able to pitch many different variations of the musket designs very quickly with the added benefit of seeing them textured and interacting with light." Smith says work like this was essential to director Genndy Tartakovsky because they served as what he calls a 'test bed' for ideas and concepts three dimensionally before sending assets into production. "Utilizing 3D in visual development is a natural bridge, considering that the final medium is ultimately going to be in 3D," Smith says. "Obviously this makes a great resource for the director and visual development team, but it's also a huge benefit to the producers and executives when you save time and ultimately money for the studio." indication of where it might logically come from within the space lends the environment a lot more realism and appeal." Nichols admits that she's still fairly new to the business—this is the first film she's worked on where she spent more time designing than painting— and she's grateful to people like Wills and Tartakovsky because "they allowed me to take risks and try new things, but gave excellent guidance and direction when I needed it." Tartakovsky and story artist Reccardi say that Wills' ability to produce such hue combinations is a gift to the film. It's so good that the untrained eye might not even notice the amount of work that went into it. After all, as Reccardi reminds, this is not a film about moonlit cruises. This point could not be more obvious than with the film's climax, an elaborate kaleidoscopic DJ battle that involves controlling the mind of a lounge-singing kraken. It's the scene Tartakovsky's most proud of because "it's so huge and there's still funny elements and the action is super cool." Reccardi, who also has experience directing, says that he used Toon Boom StoryBoard Pro to digitally board some sequences "with timing and synced to the rough music track." This was particularly useful for the dance scenes and montages. He used the software for an early version of a light-hearted bit where Drac, having embraced the laissez-faire vacation lifestyle by shedding his drab duds for Hawaiian-printed leisure wear, struts his stuff along the ship to the tune of Bruno Mars' "24K Magic" while en route to a dinner date. All of this action also had to jibe with the ship itself, an Old World- meets-New World hybrid that art director Christian Schellewald says he was inspired to create after a visit to the historic Queen Mary vessel in Long Beach and after researching the Titanic. "First and foremost, the Dracula world has a lot of modern things," Schellewald says while we thumb through his bound pages of intricate sketches that include details of anchors, portholes and crowded staircases. "It has smart phones and things like that, but there are a lot of retro [influences] … We looked at modern-day cruise ships and they all look like floating casinos and they don't have much charm. So we went back to the golden days of ocean travel." The end result is a multi-tiered white behemoth with sharp angles that allow for the acrobatic stunts of Captain Ericka Van Helsing. Yet somehow, just like a real cruise ship, it still looks crowded once you add in all those monsters. "One of the fun things is that you do a design and it looks great from all sides," Schellewald says. "But when you actually have tall monsters populating this ship, you realize, hey, this is fairly compressed and now they have to all get down the stairs." Little facts like overcrowded ships can be headaches to design, but they also help tether the film to real- world experiences that both add to the humor and decrease chances that this movie about the creatures usually relegated to nightmares will scare children. "The fun thing for me is there is a fair amount of real physics working in the movie, but there's all kinds of crazy stuff happening too," Schellewald says, describing a scene he sketched of the Bermuda Triangle that features a "stockpile of original ships" to which he was able to "add weight and rust" for believability. He says the goal was to take a "setting with the most outrageous material [and] make it realistic." SPRING/SUMMER 2018 43 >> More original artwork can be seen at ArtOfHotelTransylvania3.com