DreamWorks
Making a film isn’t just a case of opening up a programme and creating whatever comes into your head. Making a film follows a somewhat strict procedure, first you have to storyboard the idea, then you have to iron out any flaws, work your way around any problems, create it then render it. I have taken Madagascar from DreamWorks as my first example.
(Quotes from http://www.dreamworksanimation.com)
‘The initial story concept for Madagascar started with a single question: What would happen if you took four New York City zoo animals out of the civilized world in which they’d lived their entire lives and dropped them into the middle of a savage jungle?’
‘“It’s a classic fish-out-of-water premise and so many fun ideas spring from it,” says director-writer Eric Darnell. “You just describe that basic idea and everybody gets it. That’s always what you want — an idea you can say in one sentence and people’s eyes light up. If you see people’s eyes light up, you know you’re onto something.”’
‘The framework of the story was relatively straightforward: Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Melman the Giraffe and Gloria the Hippo – a.k.a. “the Zoosters” — find themselves shipwrecked on the island of Madagascar, and now these native New Yorkers have to figure out how to survive in the wild.’
· Here we see the team have come up with a single idea and a single question, which would be the foundation of their movie idea. From this they have expanded their idea slightly by thinking of what their four animals would be and what they would be called.
‘Director and writer Tom McGrath was charged with figuring out how to get Alex, Marty, Melman, and Gloria from ship to shore. He realized it was the perfect opportunity to resurrect the penguin characters from an earlier test movie. In their original incarnation, the penguins were musically – rather than militarily – inclined. Turning the aspiring songbirds into misguided soldiers, Tom devised the hilarious sequence in which the penguins are responsible for the Zoosters becoming castaways.’
‘”Originally, the animals’ crates were washed overboard by a massive storm at sea, but I thought that was so overused,” says Tom. “I wanted to do something more interesting. We had all these animals from the zoo being shipped back to Africa, and the question came up, ‘Why are penguins going to Africa?’ They’re penguins; they want to go to Antarctica. So they break out of their crate, take over the ship, and send it into a hairpin turn that throws the crates overboard. We had a lot of fun developing the penguins into a kind of POW unit breaking out of captivity.”’
‘The penguins’ interference sends the Zoosters on a course to the island of Madagascar. According to Eric, Madagascar was chosen as the setting — and title — of the film because “we needed to find a place that was the polar opposite of Manhattan. The leads in our film are African animals, but everybody’s seen mainland Africa on the screen, and it doesn’t feel quite as exotic as what we were going for. Madagascar is completely unique, with plants and animals that are unlike anything else in the world. It is a fantastical place that gave us a lot of freedom to play.”’
· After the team had their ideas put together they decided what wasn’t ideal for the movie and they changed the idea slightly. In this case it is getting rid of the storm which was seen as used too often and replaced with something unique and funny.
· Another problem was picking the location of the film. They originally wanted to place their characters in the wild so again they worked around a problem and found Madagascar to be the tropical jungle they were looking for.
‘The overall style of the characters was inspired by a variety of classic cartoons, as well as several children’s picture books. “Our influences were some of the best of classic animation going back to the 1930s and ’40s, where a lot of the comedy was derived from the movement and the animation of the characters,” says Tom.’
‘Lead character designer Craig Kellman was responsible for creating cartoon versions of the four zoo animals. “Craig did an amazing job in coming up with the look of these characters,” says producer Mireille Soria. “He captured what we were going for, which was a more cartoony approach that carried over to all the design elements of the film.’”’
‘The design of the four main characters in Madagascar began with the basic features of a lion, zebra, hippopotamus and giraffe. “It’s great to see how the animals balance each other out,” notes Eric. “You’ve got the tall, skinny one; the big, round one; the guy with the big bouffant hairdo; and one with a crazy mohawk. It’s a perfect complement of characters.”’
‘Production designer Kendal Cronkhite adds, “They work almost like puzzle pieces that can link together. Alex is an inverted triangle; Gloria is a circle; Melman is a tall, skinny stick; and Marty is a cylinder. They are different from one another in silhouette, but are based on the same design aesthetic, which was exaggerated proportions with sharp graphic shapes and details.”’
· Next came the research for DreamWorks as they looked back on past cartoons for ideas and decided on their animals, which had to be very different to each other.
‘Hair and fur are often the bane of an animator’s existence, and there are more furry creatures in Madagascar than in any previous computer-animated film. The hairiest challenge was Alex’s mane, which is comprised of more than 50,000 individual strands of fur. “There are some shots where Alex goes through a fair amount of torture, so his mane has to go through that too, and then it has to spring back like nothing ever happened,” notes head of effects Scott Singer. To solve that challenge, Scott’s team developed a system that would ride on top of the existing dynamics. The system, which is controlled by the animators, allows the mane to interact with complex geometry, like when a character passes his hand through Alex’s mane.’
· Again during development the team came across another problem that needed addressing and so they worked around it. They developed a system which allowed Alex the Lion’s mane to pass through other things and bounce back into shape.
‘Marty had a particular talent for shifting from walking on all fours to standing upright and gesturing with his front legs and hooves that now functioned as his arms and hands. Character technical director (TD) supervisor Robert Vogt admits, “Creating a rig that resulted in a natural looking quadruped Marty as well as a biped Marty was pretty challenging.” The TDs also developed and advanced their facial animation system so that Marty could not only move his eyes around independently (like the other characters), but move his wonderfully designed nostrils up and down independently too.’
‘Gloria, while quite rotund, still had to appear light on her feet and flexible. “It was very tough to get that big frame to move in a nice smooth way,” says character TD supervisor Milana Huang. “We added hundreds of controls to Gloria so the animators could move her shoulders independently of her hips and manipulate every part of her body, right down to the finger tips.” Gloria’s yoga was a real challenge, recalls Milana. Her team had to be sure that Gloria’s hands could properly touch her toes and that all of her body parts looked good. “We did our best to give her the biggest range of motion that we could to give her a really nice, fun, hip feel.”’
‘Melman proved to be a literal pain in the neck for the animators, who had to figure out how to keep his head in frame with the other animals, which were considerably shorter. Recalls Robert, “We were always bending Melman’s neck into odd shapes to get his face where we wanted it. This presented a different problem because the directors then wanted the head to stay put, but once you move the body, the head starts to move. We ended up developing another set of controls, which allowed the animators to basically animate backwards from the head and keep the head in place in the scene.”’
‘Classic cartoons and children’s books provided inspiration for the look, vitality and feel of both the characters and their New York home. The art department was also influenced by contemporary painters for color reference in depicting New York City, and by classic nineteenth and twentieth century New York photography for nighttime tonal reference.’
‘Production designer Kendal Cronkhite went back through the archives of the Central Park Zoo, poring over historical photos and comparing then and now. “Our zoo is more like it was about 40 or 50 years ago,” she says. “I love what they did with New York and the Central Park Zoo,” says Ben Stiller, the voice of Alex. “I have memories of going there as a kid. They took this iconic vision of the zoo and stylized it in a way that reminded me of the cartoons I watched growing up. I love the timelessness of it.”’
‘The New York scenery is intentionally devoid of nature and bright colors and is somewhat claustrophobic. “We decided to set the New York scenes in late autumn, which gave us a very muted palette,” relates Kendal. “We basically have a brick, concrete and limestone zoo set against an autumn tree line. All the trees and hedges are very groomed, almost like topiary. The animals are confined and the skyline of New York surrounds the zoo itself, adding to that feeling of containment. You don’t see the sun, the moon or the stars in the sky. We essentially sucked any semblance of nature out of New York so we could pour it into Madagascar .”’
‘So while everything in New York was linear and almost sterile, Madagascar became a virtual explosion of vivid, saturated colors, open and freeform and bursting with life. “We wanted the colors to be lush and as varied as what you would find in nature,” says Kendal, “so even a single plant might go from pink to red to yellow to green.”’
‘The primary inspiration for Madagascar’s look came from the paintings of renowned French artist Henri Rousseau. “We wanted to create a fantasy jungle,” recalls director-writer Eric Darnell. “Rousseau never actually went to the jungle, but still created wonderful, exotic paintings of these fantastic, mysterious jungles. His almost childlike, naïve vision of what a tropical jungle would be became our inspiration for Madagascar.”’
‘“We really looked at what makes Rousseau’s style what it is,” says art director Shannon Jeffries. “He was working in a 2D medium, so his work is very flat and painterly. Everything was basically backlit, so there were certain things that we could take and certain things that we couldn’t in a 3D film. The way he applies shapes, color, the general feel of his paintings was something that we could do. However the lighting wouldn’t work, so we needed to find a way that we could apply 3D lighting sensibility to his design. There are stylistic fundamentals that we hung onto, like a lot of the shape language that he uses. But as story and characters developed, it made more sense to us that the film take on a more homogenous look. And so the style of our characters began to influence the style of our jungle.”’
‘Madagascar is more cartoony than anything DreamWorks Animation has done before. “Our characters are very stylized, so we could have a lot of fun with how they looked and how they moved,” says director-writer Eric Darnell. “They are very 2D inspired, but created in the 3D world of the computer.”’
‘The cartoon comedy style of Madagascar called for the computer animators at PDI/DreamWorks to be able to apply a visual cue called “squash and stretch” to the characters. A hallmark of classic cartoons, squash and stretch is the process an animator uses to deform an object and then snap it back into shape to convey motion or impact. Traditional animators have always been able to squash and stretch characters or objects at will because it was all done on paper, but in the computer, a 3D object could only be stretched so far before it reached its breaking point.’
‘“The people at PDI/DreamWorks created a system that took it to the next level, where the animators could push and pull and stretch objects way out without breaking them,” recalls director-writer Tom McGrath. Co-producer Teresa Cheng adds, “Our animators are used to animating in a more realistic way, using tools like our facial animation system that involves building every muscle on the face so we can recreate expressions that are totally grounded in the real world. When we started working on Madagascar , we decided to take a different path based on the classic cartoon style, with extreme poses and exaggerated proportions that, even when the character is standing still, look comical.”’
‘The character TDs, led by character TD supervisors Milana Huang and Robert Vogt, were responsible for creating the controls, or rigging, for all the characters in the computer. To expand the parameters and amplify the effect, the team developed squash and stretch for different zones of each character, including the face, head and different parts of the body. “We also wanted the animators to know when they were taking it too far so they wouldn’t break the characters,” says Robert.’‘Fans of classic cartoons know that humor can be derived from eyes popping and jaws dropping without a word spoken. Incorporating broad squash and stretch into the facial expressions allowed for the kind of comedy that heretofore had been solely the domain of traditional animators. As head of character animation Rex Grignon explains, “We blew the old limits out the door. It was an animator’s dream.”’ ‘There are 295 crowd shots – from pigeons to people. That’s almost 20% of the entire film! Also, the actions required of the crowds are more demanding than ever before.’‘The basic technique for creating crowds has remained essentially the same, with many variations of body types, heads, clothing and hair being mixed and matched with different behavior cycles to render a virtually limitless number of people. However, once the Zoosters arrived in Madagascar, the crowds consisted mainly of lemurs and, to a lesser extent, the predatory fossas. Both species have fur coats, which multiplied the complexity of the crowd scenes exponentially. The “Meet the Fossa” sequence features the biggest crowd of furry animals in a CG film so far — 1,100 lemurs.’‘“Having crowds of animals that all have fur is very hard to render and compute, but on top of that, the lemurs are all crazy,” laughs visual effects supervisor Philippe Gluckman. “They have this totally over-the-top behavior, so we needed to create scenes of mayhem, which is extremely difficult to do. The lemur crowds had to perform actions unlike anything we’d ever done before with particularly complex transitions, so we needed a lot of new behavior cycles. We had to design several new proprietary techniques to achieve the animation of the crowds and get all the fur rendered.”’‘All of the lemurs, except for King Julien, are examples of the same character rig. The generic lemur character employs techniques that allow it to change facial features and body proportions.’
‘With more than two-thirds of Madagascar set in a jungle, the flora proved even more challenging than the fauna (in the “jungle reveal” sequence, there are as many as 14,000 plants and 4 million leaves swaying simultaneously in the wind.) In addition to being dense and overgrown, the tropical vegetation had to appear as alive as any character, but in a much more subtle way.‘
‘Head of effects Scott Singer declares, “The single biggest effect in Madagascar is the jungle. There was no way around it; there are tons of trees and plants and we had to make them move as naturalistically as possible, without being distracting. It was too much to figure out how every single plant might move individually based on the wind speed, etc. We needed a more direct way of manipulating the geometry.” The effects team not only had to determine how to keep all the foliage in constant motion, those movements also had to be in direct correlation to what generated them — ranging from the ambient motion of trees stirred by a breeze to the more dynamic action of plants being nearly flattened by an animal “stampede.”’
‘The team came up with various ways to keep the jungle moving, including a procedure that Philippe teasingly calls “the force.” “We created a kind of force field around the characters that moved everything in their wake without affecting the animation of the characters and without having to do too much hand tweaking.” For more complex shots, the animators and effects artists used a combination of techniques, including hand animating certain plants.’
‘An island, Madagascar is surrounded by ever-shifting sand and water, two elements that present significant challenges to animators. With about one-third of the movie happening on the ocean or at the beach, the difficulty, according to Philippe, was to totally control the water. “It wouldn’t be satisfactory to have something that does a realistic simulation of an ocean because then we would have little control of it,” he notes. “Instead, we designed systems that allowed us to hand animate the waves and totally control the timing and the height.” In addition, the pattern of the foam and the visual look of the waves are very stylized. “We wanted to be very precise on what that looked like,” recalls Philippe, “being careful to match what the art work dictated.”’
‘“We were faced with an interesting challenge of making it look like water but in an environment where characters can leap 15 feet up in the air and can surf on dolphins,” adds Scott. “There’s so much squash and stretch that if the physical dynamics of the world don’t somehow interact with that, the characters look foreign, like cartoon characters slapped into live action backgrounds. That looks really jarring and pulls you out of the story.’
‘The ocean is built up from smaller components and at every level the artists were able to control shaping and timing. At the smallest level, 2D waves were hand-animated, then manually placed along profile curves, which created the 3D wave shapes. Each was assigned its size, speed, crash time etc. In addition, the foam patterns and splashes were carefully designed to satisfy the graphic visual style while still moving in a naturalistic way.’
‘“For stuff like the sand, where the goal was to be cartoony, we ended up having to hand animate it,” reveals Philippe. The sand had properties that required its own rendering system, which enabled the animators to create footprints in the sand corresponding to the character making them or to kick the sand up as the animals ran along the beach.’
‘Scott notes that the animators had to learn to manipulate gravity in keeping with the cartoon action. “With this movie, you can have a character who jumps up in the air and hovers for a while before he falls down. If you have sand trailing after him, the sand can’t just go up and come down with the force of gravity. It has to hang there with him, but then again, if it hangs too long, it’s just going to look frozen. So animators who had been used to treating gravity as a constant now had to work with gravity as a variable, depending on the scene. For example, gravity gets weaker when the main character in the shot is hovering, and it gets really strong when he starts coming down again.”’
‘Between flora and fauna, and sand and water, the amount of imagery that had to be rendered was beyond anything the animation team had ever imagined. “We figured out that it was so much more data than we’d ever even tried to manage on any film before,” says Scott. “There are some brilliant minds here who came up with interesting ways of rendering that much data.”’
‘In the end, the challenges overcome by the filmmakers have yielded an extraordinary, seamless and entertaining movie. Best of all, the technical and artistic innovations of Madagascar are already translating into benefits for DreamWorks Animation’s new crop of animated hits. In the ever-evolving world of CG animation, the artists and engineers making these new films are tackling even more dazzling visual designs that are sure to delight audiences for years to come.’
