fmx ’11, Day Four

It’s terrible to say but I was somewhat glad this was the last day of fmx. There had been so much input, creatively, inspirationally and technically that my brains were running out of memory like my Maya scenes with MentalRay. And I didn’t get much sleep this night either and staggered like a zombie down to the breakfast, at least that’s what I think, it wasn’t quite there. Man, if I had feasted on brains I wouldn’t remember it.

I only somehow woke up after my caramel macchiato shot (that I would have preferred injected directly into my heart but the lame-ass barista refused to) and I found myself in the Großer Saal. Second row — How did I do that?

DAY 4 IS COMPLETE – W00T! (at least the text is)
Soon I will finish writing the other days’ reports, then add lots of pretty pictures and proof-read the whole grammar-abomination thoroughly.

The Studio

The STUDIO from New York were giving the first presentation, STUDIO as space. Interestingly you could instantly tell that both presenters, Mary Nittolo and Gary Giambalvo were from New York. And their names rhymed, they both had an Italian sure name, the same hair-length, and I think they even had the same glasses — charming! Mary and Gary started off by showing a digital mural from their website, that was a collaborative piece of some of STUDIO’s artists. The concept of STUDIO is creating a community of functioning teams, especially with artists and freelancers that join the environment for just a couple of weeks before they are off again. Mary was one of the few employers that really gave this a though, how such freelancers feel when they arrive as strangers in an already established community, “there’s no constant environment when you freelance.”

Mary had the idea to the STUDIO in Italy, when she was observing a painting in a small church: The painting was done by multiple artists that all built upon what was already there, different people came together produce a piece or art together. Twenty years later the STUDIO is operating that way, although “it has become a bit difficult in the current market. But we’re close to a new renaissance of art and science.”

STUDIO has 20 employed artists and also offers places for interns. “We want them to come with a project,” Mary added and showed “The Sparrow”, a project by one of STUDIO’s interns who had a very illustrative style and did some character development sheets, a colorful and well elaborated storyboard and a very elaborated animatic of it, complete with music and sound.

But Mary also wanted to engage in an exchange, asked the audience questions about their two cents about working freelance. How was it to work and live in New York? “The problem with New York is finding a place to live you can afford. But if you are persistent and really want it, there’s always a way to figure it out,” Mary encouraged the audience, mostly assembled of students and freelancers at it seemed, and one zombie running on caffeine¹ So why not just work from home as a freelancer then? “Working alone is isolating. It may be a bit tough to arrive in a new environment but exchange can and will happen. Working alone from home is the most alienating, because you will always have to find a person in the studio who can give you feedback, that the working experience becomes valuable to you. It should be you to initiate that contact, a lot has to come from you that way. So you should ask for it to prosper from it.”

Despite producing small projects of their own, the STUDIO started out as a storyboarding facility — and still is. “I have seen many storyboards of you guys here and the storyboards we do are much more specific and detailed.” Indeed, the stuff Mary showed was really well done and looked more like high-level illustrations than storyboards. The STUDIO does this mainly for agencies whose customers don’t get the ideas they are pitching to them. “Their clients are not very visual so they need to see a very specific visualization of what ouz client wants to present to them. So rough sketches won’t do.” Additionally the STUDIO produces CG-animatics for the same purpose that look like what some cheap productions sell as “finished project”.

But what was even more eye-opening than the quality of the storyboards, was the time frame the STUDIO usually has for such things. “It’s not uncommon that the client calls at four in the afternoon and needs some 12-odd boards with a complicated concept finished by noon the next day. And we can do that. But you have to be very fast. If you spend an hour or more on a single board you won’t finish.”
The strength of the STUDIO emerges from it having “insanely versatile” employed artists available all the time, also on weekends. To pull of the feat of producing a 30-second CG-animated animatic within a week are motion-captured animations and around 30 different rigged characters they can only modify a little. “The Sparrow” for example, with character development, animatic and edit was produced in no more than three days.

“In the US, everything gets tested,” sometimes your creativity is limited quite a bit by the client who tend to cling to the animatic once they’re happy with it. They see it almost like a casting. It can even be arbitrary things they like in it and want to keep, like “I want exactly that dog!” or “I like her shoes!” On the other hand even best and most interesting idea sometimes won’t do it because “they’re testing it against a Midwestern housewives.”
“How can you still be creative in a situation like that?” one question was asked from the audience. Mary agreed and said that it sometimes was hard. “There are different kinds of artists, some need to be creative and others are more crafty. For the creative such projects can be very tough, so we try to delegate the work as best as we can.”

As Known As

Before the next presentation began, the room notably filled with people and having a seat in the front now was worth twice as much and you could tell why. Studio AKA‘s Philip Hunt was getting ready for his lecture on the studio’s experience with getting From Pitch to Screen.

How does everything begin? Basically with drawings. Lots and lots of drawings. They are the fastest thing to do (“The pencil is our most important tool), to shift from one thing to another and throw out a lot of sketches that don’t fit or they don’t like. “I’d say 70 to 80% is immediately discarded.” Then the storyboard phase begins and especially for the clients the 2D designs of characters are modeled in 3D because it is easier for them to visualize them in the final product. But many projects don’t make it to the end and eventually get killed after weeks of work. “You need to cope with that. Sometimes it’s hard. Sometimes ideas get accepted and everything happens very fast,” as it was the case with their commercial for SingUp, an organization helping kids find their voice.

Studio AKA‘s animation for the British Lottery, “The Big Win” set them into a certain direction and other clients wanted a similar style for their own commercials, such as Lloyds TSB, who became “our benefactor bank”, because the communication with the client is very fruitful and they quickly understand from small drawings what the idea is. The studio produced a number of animations for them, although “it is sometimes not easy coming up with a fresh idea after dozens of spots.”

To escape the colorful, friendly and maybe even a bit boring visual world of Lloyds, Studio AKA grabs every chance they get to do something different like BBC’s openerfor the Olympics, who wanted “something like SinCity only with sports.”

And less is often more, like the Love Sports films, whose characters are just some colored blocks. “Character is not about technical stuff or much defined by appearance, its what communicates and connects with the audience and tells a story. You can do so much with so little.

Studio AKA is mainly concerned with commercials, but they also made a name for themselves with their short films and more stylized animations, such as A Morning Stroll that he would present twards the end of his presentation. We all were looking forward to it. “We’re not so much an FX animation studio, as we’re focused on character and narration.” Currently in production is The Beast which is about a beast that lives in the basement and is visually much more experimental as well.

Lost and Found

Working on films is entirely different. They produce them over years and work on it when they have a break from their commercial work, which can sometimes mean a few days, but also not being able to get any work down for weeks. The film that was shown also shown at last year’s fmx as part of the Shelly’s Eye Candy screening. I remember not liking the sequence on the rough sea very well. I found it to be too long and that the appearance of the ocean clashed with the style.

“We really liked the book but we had to expand the story much to make it work. So we did a version of the book, not the book.” In the eleven months the project took place, the creators learned “the hard way about pipeline and planning.” A thing they prospered from was the involvement of Oliver, the author who brought himself in and enjoyed working and redrawing on his original story and set drawings and even small text for signs from New York via email.

The look of the ocean was a challenge of its own and one person worked nine months to get it right. The mass penguins on the South Pole were achieved by crowd animation but unfortunately this produced some “possessed penguins” whose animation was messed up and they dithered like they were, well, possessed. “I tell you, animating every last penguin by hand would have been less work than painting out those bastards!” Philip explained their solution to the problem.

They also got a complaint by the safety department why a kid was without a life-jacket and a guardian making his way alone to the South Pole. “So I explained to him that the trip was a dream the kid had, the rough sea part being a nightmare. And about the octopus,” he turned to the audience, “Do you remember when you were a kid and had a bad dream and fell out of your bed and then your parents would come and pick you up, you were still half asleep, and put you back in the bed and tug you in? That’s why the kid is dreaming of the octopus.” That really sounded like a reasonable explanation. “They bought it!”

One person worked really long on an automated and very complicated rig for the arms on the octopus. When the time came to animate it, all it would was wobble its arms, something that was not in the film at any point. So one of Philip’s colleagues looked at the storyboards what exactly needed to happen, considered it for a bit and said, “Yep, give me a week and I can do it.” And he did. “It’s a good example of what results blind panic can achieve!” Philip concluded.

Then it was time to screen A Morning Stroll to us, the first public screening of it — yay! And it really was everything that I was hoping for: Funny, witty, experimental perhaps, and with a great twist at the end (that it wouldn’t quite need in my opinion though). In the animation there even was a fictitious iPhone game featured “and we’re trying to make that game” Philip closed. Some still chuckled from the animation.

MacGuffed

Even more people flooded in despite it being the last day of the fmx while Pierre Coffin from Illumination Entertainment was setting up his laptop for the presentation. He looked into the audience, the room was completely full. “You all came to see this? You people should get a life!” before he began with outlining The Making of “Despicable Me”.

Originally Coffin was approached by an US producer with some concept drawing and a rough idea he wanted to see in a big film. It were drawings of a villain in everyday situations, how he would live his day-to-day life. “He really wanted to get the project done, so we went to dinner, I had chicken which was really really good and he presented me some ARGUMENT$. And then more, he was quite A$$ERTIVE.” Coffin declined until he was promised to work with Chris Renaud as his co-director who had worked as a storyboard artist at Blue Sky and co-directed there a Scrat short.

Still, the story was non-existant it was just that idea and a couple of gangs, but “they were strong”. Concept artists drew upon this some more art and coneptpaintings of how such a person would live. It was all very dark and black and steampuk-ish. Some elements from these illustrations were built upon to develop a story, because there just was no script to begin with.

But then, the steampunk-look was toned down a notch because the production grew a little worried to lose some audience, because “it needed to be a family movie. And who in the family decides what movie to watch? Dads don’t decide. The kids do. But only when their mother agrees, the family will watch that movie. So our focus shifted from teenagers to kids and the villain became just some sort of grumpy guy.” Also during the concept phase it was clear, that the protagonist shouln’t be too successful in what he does. “He should be smpathetic. We like failure”.

The actual script came in late: In the last four months of the production the third act got written, not quite knowing where the story was headed. “And the ending came, well, in the end.” Pierre confessed. As the script progressed and changed, so did the animation. “In the end we more or less has to do everything at once”, also (re-)recordings of Steve Carell.

Gru

“We always had this tall, Transylvanian looking guy as our villain quite long in our heads as protagonist.” Pierre continued. The character had already benn built and posed with early models of the girls. This main character had also a clumsy Igor-like assistant who was much rounder and bell shaped. “In the end we decided against him because it just was too much stereotype. And the Igor-character we called Kyle looked friendlier” and he also looked better in the expresson and stating tests. The only thing that needed to be changed was his bell-shape, so they put his head in his torso a bit straighter and gave him the tall long legs of the Transylvanian looking guy. Then animatoros experimented with walkcycles and little stories. “What animators love most is a character playing a charactor, like Gru explaining his money problems to the minions.”

Girls

The girls really had a great design and Pierre was looking forward to seeing them modeld but unfortunately they looked totally unpleasant. Inly two month before the principal animation began they needed to be re-designed and recosidere. The three girls were very long though of as being just one character split into three people but, obviously, this wouldn’t work. So the small one became the true one, the middle one, they almost mute, boyish one and the oldest the reasonable one, “but boring. I know I shouldn’t be bashing on her but I never really liked her” Pierre said. The modeling was done and changed until shortly before the production, “in the last moment we pulled her mouth down for aesthetic reasons with messed with the mapping a bit.”

Minions

In the original concepts the minions were various kinds of baddies but the budget didn’t allow for esigningk, rigging and implementing them, so their design was thought over. The idea behind them was like little plumbers working for Grro. The simpler the shape, the more of them the production could afford and Pierre wanted to put them just everywhere. And as many thing, their final design came “super-late in the production”. The three Minions who get sent off to buy a toy from the drugstore ha a whole story arch around them, like they would get lost and travelled the world unintentionally only to come back at the end to save the movie in the most funny way, “but we never could think of something good enough. So we discarded it.”

A typical shot

Everything would start from a scene in the scrip or a recording of Steve (who also came up with Gru’s accent and the names for the minions) for the storyboard.

Pierre’s main direction to the animators was that he hated overacting and “illustrative physics” as he alled it, something quite different from DreamWorks. He also wanted to get to the point visually very quickly without just stating the obvious. Another philosophy was to get to get to the idea, to the core of something, instead of a very elaborate storyboard, for example. The storyboards sometimes only showed generic locations, axial jumps but, again “that is not the point of an animation storyboard.” Based on that, the set and the layout of the scene were designed and modeled, everything still very rough and just to make it possible to point out blocking problems and camera angle issues.

“There is this myth of putting all and any of an actor’s performance into the character no matter what” Pierre explained as he was showing one of Steve’s recording sessions. “Overall he’s not really expressive all the time.” The artists sometimes filmed themselves and intercut the footage (like it had been donw occasionally on TRON Legacy with Jeff Bridges’ performance captures) and used that as a reference for their animation. Then they made blocking tests, just the keyframes of their animation to see whether it would work inthe framing and the set. Once this blocking pass was greenlighted the shot could evolve further. In parallel artists color sketched the scenes for the lighting artists. As said above, everything “kinda happened at once”.

Even despite the fact that the movie came out in stereo, it was not a particular technical challenge. “We did it in 3D because they wanted it and we made it work, that was it. But we didn’T invest months of heavy-duty-research like Disney on the use of stereo-3D” Pierre summed up and showed a very funny little short animation of the minions, titled Banana. We did a couple of them, it was like a TV animation and didn’t spend more than two to three weeks on each. On the feautre we worked three years in total.”

Chaos Theory

Then it was noon again and again I dropped my wallet, but this time I found it within minutes because I already expected it. Sounds like I should change something. Maybe I need more credit cards or something. So a strawberry smoothie and a box of rice later I was ready for some more knowledge. I just wish I had hurried up a bit, so I got a rather bad seat. Pixar’s lectures are always insanely popular, no matter what. If they just would present a new RenderMan version, everybody would be over the place. Wait a minute, that was the case three years ago!

This year again Variety‘s David Cohen said a couple of introductionary words and let Bill Polson begin with his lecture with the interesting title Chaos Theory: Making More than One Movie at the Same Time”. The first thing he threw on the wall was a roster of the release year and title of each Pixar films so far that showed that Pixar more or less released a feature every year in recent years.

Oh Shit!

But Pixar works four years on a movie, and those four years are split up into four stages, Bill lined out, Preproduction, Pipelining, Modeling and Shots, “or as I am going to call them Oh Shit!, Chaos, Stability and Crunch.

In your Oh Shit! stage you have no idea where it’s going and how to do it, the Chaos stage is defined by developing software, getting things to work and figuring out a way to put everything together. Stability means that everything is working and everybody knows what to do and where the project is going, and finally< in Crunch you pull over-nighters, some get carpal-tunnel syndrome and you just try to get the thing out.”

Then he gave some examples of the Oh Shit! moments with the corresponding Chaos stages in the last few productions, a slide I will reproduce here:

The Oh Shit! stage in Cars was figuring out how to make and animate cars and especially reflections; Ratatouille posed the problems of clothes, fur and rendering believable food; WALL•E asked for expressive robots and a world of trash and Up was set in the jungle — “The more things you do, the more things are going on.” Moreover these new additions to the shading pipeline needed to be implemented without braking what was already working. Pixar always tests new techniques against the models of the previous film(s) in order to ensure consitency and compability. So the shading pipeline of the last years looked like this:

So in 2007, for example, there were four different shading pipelines at play. In context of all the Pixar films, is has been that was since 2003.

Impact

Next up Bill showed how multiple films-overlaps at different stages overlapping affected the crew and culture, software development and the studio itself.

“Let’s see how the situation when we release one film every two years.” In this scenario a lighter would be in Crunch mode on a feature, the next year there would be nothing for her to do, only to join the following year another movie in Crunch. Since Pixar’s philosophy is to have the artists on staff at all time to ensure they share the same culture, they can’t have their lighters unoccupied for a year, so “they are encouraged do modeling work for the next movie.”
In an environment of releasing a film every year, lighting artists can either specialize in lighting or skip film, the latter not being encouraged because “when people skip every other film, their culture becomes fractured and this slowly adds up to an environment where people start losing touch with each other. A film means learning. Miss a film is missing an opportunity to learn.”

In terms of modelling and shading this fracture unfortunately inevitably appears because the artists need to be present in both Chaos and Stability stages.

But the worst break is evident for the technical leadership because they accompany a project from start to finish over the whole for years, “which would mean they can only work on a film every four years.”

So what can be done about that situation? The answer is a mix of generalists and specialists. Specialists work on projects of a short release cycle, whereas generalists can work on films with in a longer cycle. Cohesion is maintained only for single-year departments, as soon as multi-year departments come into play they get fractured. Worse, the technical crew gets fragmented and hyper-specialized.

Software

The problem with software is to keep the versions stable over the course of a project. With a film every year the software departments needs to manage and keep track of four to, at worst, eight different versions of software combinations, which is a huge problem. Currently there are two different systems in each screening room, each for a different production, moreover the screening rooms themselves are dedicated to, either project A and B or C and D.

For the software developers the sweet spot is a release cycle of a film every three years: They come to it pre-production, work on the software through the Chaos stage and in the third year stay on the project until it reaches Stability. When the productions shifts into Crunch, the developers can get to a new project.

But in a two-year cycle this looks differently: In the stage they would be working on the stability of a software for one film, they instead are on a new project in the Oh Shit! stage already, which effectively means that they leave the software before it is stable. And fracturing developers is a bad thing, but in order to get things done, you need to have 2 pipelines.

Bill put up another table: “When you as a developer join a new project in the Oh Shit! stage you need to answer a few questions about the status of the software of the film you were previously working on. This works out pretty well, if your previous film is in either Crunch or Stability,” as outlined just before:

So if the Oh Shit! moment occurs during the previous film’s Stability or Crunch stage, you’ll likely be okay.

So what they want in a yearly release cycle is the software developers jump from Stability to Stability stage — instead they get them jumping from Chaos to Chaos:

That paints a pretty bleak picture: If the Oh Shit! moment occurs too soon, when the previous film is in Chaos, “you’ll likely whipsaw the pipeline and your crew”. Bad. Very bad. “Part of a solution is to only let go of the previous film once everything works. Otherwise there is nothing to test the new film against and you’re flying blind for two years. So getting the stuff working is critical.”

So what are answers, rather, are there solutions to the problems? Bill sent a last table on the big screen:

“There’s a thing to say about the specialists vs. generalists” Bill said as he touched the subject of what kind of Pixar is interviewing and eventually hiring. “Schools that force students into specialization in their last year have a much better chance to get hired by Pixar,” as compared to students who come from schools that train generalists.

An Answer?

It seemed to me that there were not many (if any) solutions the situations and the slide of the presentation was rather general in the solutions it presented: “Management, trust, etc”, “Department structures”, “Focus on stability rather than artistic reach”, and “Others ?”.

In the near future Pixar will be producing three films in two years, so all the tensions and problems will only increase, “so we got to standardize” which was difficult so far. Lucky for Bill, who is concerned with the more technical task of pipelining and management, getting the stories together takes currently longer. “The lack of good stories is the main thing that has kept us from scaling up” so having even more movies in production at the same time is currently not an issue. “Once they get solved the technical stuff is not ready yet. But we’re working on it.”

In Pixar’s early early days there only were generalists around, people who also flowed in an out between technical and artistic departments and groups. “Now the walls are high and you need to specialize. It was more fun in the old days” Bill reminisced. Still, Pixar’s philosophy is to get motivated and talented people and make them great.

Q & A

“And now I would love to hear your war stories” Bill finished and sat down in a chair next to David Cohen on the stage.

“How does the short film division fit in?” one guy in the audience wanted to know. Clever question! Bill explained that they had to slice up the production to fit the shorts in whenever they can to fill the gaps in the rolling production of features. “The difficulty is to have the inventory ready”, because (much like what I heard about Studio AKA that day) there are months when nothing is done on a short, then a couple of animators work like crazy to finish in two weeks. Again, the short hibernates until the lighting artists have a couple of days to spare. “It’s incredibly difficult to schedule so we now treat and plan shorts like miniature films.” Shorts are also a good way of keeping the artists motivated and help them getting out of a rut.

“(Why) do you need to change the pipeline every year? Is this really necessary?” Bill explained, that every film need things implemented, that the previous films did not need. “Between WALL•E and Ratatouille we changed the definition of the geometry and shaders, lighting and added post effects. This in a way broke the ability to test against the old productions and the production few blind for two years.” Also, there are a lot of dependencies that get affected when you change one thing, say the shading affects also lighting and rendering. So Pixar changes only a few things at a time, keeps things as stable as possible and still, those petty paced steps end up in a pipleline that has not much in common with the one from five years ago.

“What do you do to maintain the culture, if it still keeps getting fractured so easily?” Pixar is assembled a groups of superiors who “own” teams of artists, like all the animators or all the lighters. This group also indicated community-events such as training for their employees, cross-show lunches or the monthly lighting-lunch where artists show, across the various projects, what shots they lit and get feedback from other artists. Further, there is a newsletter to keep everybody on the same level of information.

“How does standardization compromise creativity?”, a rather opinionated question arose. Bill smiled “In fact it does just the opposite.” He told the story, that even the shorts needed an adjusted and new pipeline to work. However, One-Man Band used the pipeline from The Incredibles without any adjustment because it didn’t need any. “It all worked, it was cheaper, it was faster and the animators had a great time” because everything worked like it should right away. On a related note, Autodesk organizes bi-annual meetings among the industry leaders to talk about what they want in future Autodesk releases, “but you don’t talk only about Autodesk products”, Bill assured and explained that in those meetings certain standardizations for core elements originated such as Alembic.

The Pixar Brain Trust is a small group of creative leaders at Pixar who oversee development on all movies. The group came about during the development of Toy Story. They meet frequently to watch the status of films currently in production and tell the directors their criticism. The directors have to listen to the Brain Trust, but are free to ignore their opinions (although this is rarely advisable). There also exists a Technical Brain Trust at Pixar who bring in their ideas to the Technical Supervisor who is also free to ignore the suggestions, yet implementing suggestions “its different with the Technical Brain Trust because the changes affect multiple films.”

“What if I have a real good idea for a story?” — Pixar doesn’t acquire stories, simple as that. Instead directors should come up with their story ideas themselves, “we want them to be passionate about their stories.” When the very first idea for Pixar-stories are thrown in for discussion by the director they usually are not the that good in first place,but have potential. “If you give a mediocre story to the best people, they can turn it into something great. Give a great story to mediocre people, the final result can only become mediocre” Bill explained. And basically, anyone at Pixar become a director. Usually people who have been observed being skillful in story and art get asked if they wanted to direct a film. If they accept, they are given the time to come up with some ideas for stories, which can be as simple as “What if a rat wanted to become a cook?”. Over time these stories get better and further developed until they are ready to be produced.

This culture of participation among all Pixar employees is what is unique to Pixar. There are oftentimes organized screenings of the films in production among the Pixar employees, from directors, to artists to security guards to kitchen staff. Everyone is encouraged to send notes and ideas to the producer like “I didn’t get that joke” or “that scene was boring”. This openness, it seems, served the integrity of Pixar’s storytelling well.

Layout

Next up was another Pixar presentation and again, the König-Karl Halle was packed. In all the chaos of people leaving and others coming in, I was able to catch a seat up front that left me more room to breathe and, more importantly, to take notes.

German Filmakademie Badem-Württemberg alumni Saschka Unseld and layout artist at the studio with the lamp was presenting Cinematography at Pixar. He was introduced by Terrence Masson who I observed tirelessly swiping away on his iPad the days before². Saschka’s presentation also featured a sneak peak of Cars 2 but mainly dealt with the opening sequence of Toy Story 3.

“When I get asked where I work the immediate response is: oh you’re an animator then? When I tell people that I am a layout artist they usually go ‘huh?’” Saschka laid out the situation of layout artists. Layout is all about camera, staging and cinematography, he summarized, “or visual storytelling.” Pixar employs 20 to 25 layout artists of whom 12 to 15 people work on the same feature together.

In principle the layout artist gets the storyboard(s) of a shot, creates very roughly the animation and interprets and explores it via camera angle, position and movement. This means for every single shot the artist tries out a number of different angles to give the editorial department plenty of stuff to work with. “It is not about recreating the storyboard as close as possible but to use it as a guide and to express its story point visually as good as possible.”

This starts with animating said sequence as a blocking pass and then putting cameras into the scene. An exchange between art and set-creation is always happening, for example when there is not enough space for the action to take place or elements obstructing it. Of course, there are some per-shot changes in the final film, but “we try to avoid it as long as possible.” in case you can’t tell: At Pixar work perfectionists.

Just like on a real set the action is filmed from different angles and in dialog scenes, there also are master shots rendered for the editorial department to cut together to their liking. The editors may also occasionally retime shots to make them work. When their work is finished, the shots come back to layout where the retimed shots are re-animated in accordance to the changes from editorial.

An important factor of this work is “Shot Hygiene” which means that every file that leaves the layout department must be clearly built and named, cleaned up, properly linked and have the exact frame range because the files files then are given to the animators who place their work right in the file, and so does the lighting department, for example. “When it leaves layout, the film is done.”

With every feature there also come certain cinematographic concepts and principle, one applying to all Pixar films: “Restrict yourself!” just because a camera can fly around everywhere and do crazy stuff, it shouldn’t. I guess we all have seen amateur works with nauseating and impossible camera movements and that it what they want to avoid, to “feel” CG. Many such real-worked developments were introduced in WALL•E as Danielle Feinberg explained two years earlier. So in addition to having a specific lens-set (ranging from 10mm to 150mm), the use of certain lenses in Toy Story 3 was restricted to either toy perspective or human world. Since the world of the toys should not feel too small, the DoF was kept high to avoid a macro look like in Toy Story (1)³ and to have the human world and the toy world consistent.

But staging is also a matter of framing as well. A character’s high point can be emphasized by putting him or her really on top of everything in the framing, in the low-point the arrangement and composition might be weighing down on the character and isolating him or her ⁴. You can also imprison your characters when they are trapped also visually and so on. Again, layout is visual storytellling and the link between the story department and animation.

Sequence Evolution

How does not a sequence evolve from a story board to the finished and locked layout? Sashka laid this out (pun intended) in detail on taking the opening sequence of Toy Story 3 as an example, were everything started out with the “Set Scout”> where the script and storyboards of a sequence are reviewed by a artists from layout, lighting set-design with the DP.
In the “Location Scout” phase the art department roughly designs the set on a plan where director and DP often propose changes. This very early and very basic set model then gets blocked out by producing a number of still frames to check the proportions and sized of the characters against their environment. The results are presented to director and DP for feedback and changes are made in accordance to their feedback once more.

“Shot Blocking” follows, the actual layout stage. Again, the angles from the storyboard are not simply copied, the blocking must tell the story beats as good and clear as possible. Sometimes it is possible to combine two or more story boards, at other times, the action needs to be broken down in more shots than anticipated. Since there is a lot of exploration happening, a layout artist might not have all the assets she or he needs for an idea, “if you don’t have something you want, temp-in something” Saschka encouraged.

What camera angles and shots end up on the big screen gets decided in the editorial with director and DP. Layout supplies them with as many interesting ideas to chose from for each beat as possible.

In the end, Saschka presented a short sequence from another feature’s opening sequence, Cars 2 where he showed the evolution of an action-laden scene from storyboard to final. It was stunning, how visual ideas Pixar managed to pack into it. “Are you sometimes not satisfied when you seen the final?” Saschka was asked as the clips had finished. “Always,” he answered instantly “every time I watch it I find something that I could have made better. The longer you explore a set, a shot, a beat, the better your ideas get” he concluded.

My mentor and former Disney animator Fraser MacLean is finishing his book about The Art & Evolution of Animation Layout which will be out in August this year. Highly recommended!

Megacity

The audience’s transition from Pixar to DreamWorks took a little longer and I found myself sitting next to some American college students, as it seemed to me. Almost instantly after the lights dimmed down and Philippe Denis began on “Megamind” — The Creative Process, the one next to me whipped out her Blackberry and launched Texas Hold’em Poker, her other hand found yet another cell in her purse via which she was heavily involved in keeping up what was new and cool on Facebook — the entire presentation. I really am thankful that my social life and craving for distraction are not as demanding, so I was able to take quite a few notes.

Without losing too many words about it Philippe verbally rolled up his sleeves and got to work, displaying an abstract slide with circles and lines on a jagged grey shape. It was the basic street layout of Metro City. Just like Blue Sky for Rio, they came up with a procedural approach for generating the city. Based on the rough boundaries and boulevards laid out beforehand, the tool created the street grid, then populated it logically with blocks and lots. “And in the lots the buildings could get placed.”
On the city map different colors indicated different types of buildings, residential lots were red, commercial ones where blue⁵ and so on. To control the height of the buildings a simple height-map was plugged into the script that would select a building type and then scale it to the desired height.

“Scale to the desired height?!” I thought but of course there wasn’t mundane scaling at play. Instead, the different types of buildings were coded, so that scaling the height effectively meant that more floors would be added automatically between ground floor and rooftop, each cleverly broken with ledges and other architectural braids. “Architecture is all about proportions” Philippe added as he rolled a screen recording from inside Maya where the operator scaled such a “coded” building into every direction.

And there were a lot of buildings to design and code. Ultimately the city was composed out of 20 thousand people, many thousand cars (following a traffic rule-set) and 70 thousand buildings, each with different LoDs and corresponding maps: If a building had a certain distance to the camera its modeled architectural details would retreat into a normal map, for example.

Also, the roads and streets were designed and coded in a similar manner, even details such as crumbled curb-edges, mailboxes, street lamps etc. had been modeled and were placed by the algorithm.

But the city’s buildings also needed to be shaded and this was where things started weighing down in memory; the whole city was around 1 terabyte of data. The solution was to bake the complex shading networks which resulted in a seven times faster rendering.

The city, however, would not only be used as a rigid stage, parts of it would also get destroyed at some point in the movie. As for the FX development there was a close cooperation with the other departments to always keep the direction transparent for each artist. The dust blown up by collapsing buildings was, for example, realized with Maya fluids that interacted with the geometry, so even DreamWorks put their pants one one leg at a time.

“A Cape Doesn’t Make a Hero”

“We also had to realize some character effects and because Megamind is all about superheroes it’s mainly about capes.” Philippe started off and displayed some cloth simulations in which the cape didn’t behave like it should, or to be more precise, like the animator wants it to behave. To cut a long story short the solution was giving the animators tools to deform and pose the cape with IK/FK handles; curl, skew and sine wave controllers and to also simulate the cape. Afterward the simulation could be seamlessly mixed together with the animation.

City Lights

In terms of lighting DreamWorks settled for a new path which seemed old hat to me to be frank: Philippe showed a shot board of some of the feature’s shots turned into black an white. It was obvious that a bit contrast was missing. Proudly Philippe beamed a slide-filling tone curve that was ever so slightly S-shaped and top-heavy. This evidently increased the contrast of the final renders and also provided a gentler roll-off towards the highlights.

But also the exposure range was presented as a bit braver than in a traditional animation as it had been decided to let things blow out into overexposure when they were not necessary to the shot (“we expose for the character”), such as bright-lit buildings in the background when a character was standing in the shadows in the foreground. Also nothing really new.

Metro City at night on the other hand asked for a little more ingenuity. I guess some of us had to build and mainly shade nightly illuminated CG-buildings. As soon as the camera starts moving (or in stereo 3D) you won’t get away with incandescent “interior views” that have been plastered over the windows. That is why behind the lit windows the buildings really had modeled rooms (= boxes) with HDI textures to suggest real buildings. Also the rooms were spanned across multiple windows “which really conveyed a real feeling.”

The street lighting was a bit trickier. The indirect illumination from the streets up the buildings was realized by an ingenious application of ambient occlusion: Take your ordinary ambient occlusion with a large radius, the subtract another ambient occlusion rendering with a smaller radius, tint it yellow and there you have your street-light illumination on the buildings, which worked really well⁶. Still, even by faking it that way, there still was enough to render, thousands of streetlamps with nine light sources each could only be rendered by calculating point clouds for the illumination.

As if that was not enough, a scene set at night also asked for pouring rain which amped up the render time per frame to a buzzing 38 hours, but that gain was feasible since the rest usually only rendered five to six hours per frame: “The complexity was not so much the geometry but the amount of map data and point clouds the renderer needed to access” Philippe summed up.

Like the old days

The college kids with the smart phone stood up as the lights brightened and I was thus granted a little more room in my row. I was rather exhausted of four days of taking notes and typing them into (somewhat) meaningful sentences that I almost forgot that there was still one presentation imminent: Animating “Tangled” by Clay Kaytis, Animation Supervisor at Disney.

“Tangled was Walt Disney Animation Studios’ 50th movie. And the really wanted to make it something special, something that could hold up to the old classics like Pinocchio or Beauty and the Beast in your DVD shelf,” talk about setting the bar high for yourself!

“But everything starts somewhere and often it is not pretty!” Clay smiled and showed the first test of a CG model, animated with blendshapes in Maya. And they really were producing disgusting holes and errors in the geometry; additionally the deformation looked eerie, like a corpse (and I am not talking about the flat shading). “The needs of the performer should drive the design” Clay remarked and went on to a photo of a beautifully sculpted maquette of Rapunzel that got scanned and cleaned. But unfortunately also this model did not work properly with the facial animation system back then.

In about a week an artist took the task of creating a new facial rig to heart and presented Clay with the result on an already modeled character: Instead of blendshapes he had settled for a rig of intricately weighted joints, eight lip controls, six for each eye, four or five for each brow and so on. Even in that early stage it was clear this was the way to go, because animating a character’s face was more intuitive than before. The rig was extensively tested with extremes and there things started to feel a tad too fleshy since the rig did not treat the bone structure differently. To tackle this issue, six extreme poses were defined, drawn and modeled and used as targets, once a certain constellation of joints was closing in on an extreme pose. This method assured a somewhat believable bone structure and additionally art-directed extreme poses. “You want your rig to be like a sports car,” Clay explained, “intuitive, elegant and very responsive.”

For body testing the team really had to gear up as Clay one day slipped that he wanted Tangled to feature the best character animation they had ever done. So they started learning animation from scratch: They animated Rapunzel turning, walking, jumping, looking and so on. Once the animator gave the character a motivation to turn or to act in a certain way, Rapunzel suddenly began to feel like a real quirky teenager, “You need to find a way to have the characters act from inside out.”

The character of Flynn should be sporty and slick although not too grossly “slick”, but the fears were allayed as soon as the character was modeled. Since Flynn and the Horse also needed to be in the sneak peek of the movie, the development on Rapunzel stopped, though.

Tangled did not have dedicated character supervisors. In the beginning all the animators played around with the characters and soon certain animators made certain characters the best.

Glen Keane, legendary Disney animator who had the luck of being trained by the “Nine Old Men,” came initially as a co-director to the production but for health reasons had to leave for six months. When he returned he stepped down from directing to just animating, “a dream come true for us other animators so he would sit with us all day and we could learn from him,” Clay remembered revelling. When he came back after his leave, the artists showed him what they got and Glen started drawing over the viewport rendering. And in 2D he drew the changes needed to be made on the model “which freaked out the animation department.”

In the end there were eight months time to animate the movie when all main characters were rigged, approved and ready for production. “The rig was so robust that there was nothing you couldn’t do with a character.” It was also scripted so it could be set up easily for another character.

Dailies with Glen

During dailies the artists showed Glen what they animated and he would give feedback and draw key poses on a Cintiq over their animation in the screening room. On a new shot, Glen would start drawing his suggestions and ideas of posture and poses and the longer an animator would work on the shot, the smaller and smaller the ideas would get. “Every day was like a masterclass in animation. You go in clueless and walk out with all the right answers to make your shot better.”

When the animation on a shot was final, a breathing pass would be animated to match the breathing of the voice actors which was vital in the singing sequences. Another very subtle detail that got added towards the end was the direction and shape of the eyelashes at each key pose, a detail Glen expertly used in all of Rapunzel’s drawings.

“And he’s always getting better. After 35 years he’s still improving!” Clay finished and rolled a reel of showcasing the animators with a sample of their contribution to Tangled — a well rounded conclusion to this year’s fmx. In the Großer Saal across the street followed the screening of the whole feature but with a heavy heart I had to pass.

“See ya in 2012!”

After four days of too little sleep, caffeine-abuse and battles for up-front seats, my body was aching for rest. Not more coffee, just rest. So I ransomed my car from the ridiculously expensive parking garage and rolled back to my hotel. I was asleep before I remember hitting the mattress.

…but it’s not over yet! Soon I will finish writing the other days’ reports, then add lots of pretty pictures and proof-read the whole grammar-abomination thoroughly.

This site is still currently under construction and more will follow soon.
Watch out for falling pixels!

It’s terrible to say but I was somewhat glad this was the last day of fmx. There had been so much input, creatively, inspirationally and technically that my brains were...

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