Hasta La Motion!

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We made a customizable video game about you (yes, actually you), featuring talking animals, unbalanced strip mall-to-human ratios, tattooing enemies in the face, wooden virtual-reality headsets, and the very real perils of interdimensional cyborg race cars! We hope you enjoy and then share on your social media networks because this game was really, really super hard to make.

Joe Johnston’s The Rocketeer was released 25 years ago today – on 21 June, 1991. Tom St Amand was ILM’s stop motion animator on the film and responsible for bringing to life an armatured version of the flying character which would then be composited into live action aerial plates. vfxblog asked St Amand to go back a quarter of a century and discuss how motion control, stop motion and optical effects made those dynamic shots possible.

Planning the shots

Peter Daulton was the cameraman responsible for filming the Rocketeer shots and programming the motion control camera moves. He and I determined that we could fabricate and animate an 18″ tall character, which would provide us a more detailed puppet than, say, a 12″ version. I arranged for reference photos of the actor to be taken, showing front and side views. I then enlarged these photos to the correct scale, and made detailed line drawings from them. Over these I drew the dimensions for the articulated armature that would go inside the figure.

Sculpting the puppets

I also made copies of the drawings and the photos, to give to Richard Miller, who did the sculpture, and to Jean Bolte, who made the clothing. Richard and Jean were excellent artists with many years of experience between them, and the final figure came out virtually indistinguishable to the actor in costume. Richard put some of the folds and wrinkles of the costume into the actual sculpture, and sculpted and fabricated the helmet separately.

Armatures

We built 2 puppets, with the idea that a second setup could be put into work while the first one was filming. The armatures were basic human armatures consisting of ball joints, hinges, and swivels, and I designed and built them to have as few restrictions as possible. They also had multiple points in the hip and chest for various mount rods.

Shooting tests

Peter and I would look at the storyboard for each shot and discuss what actions the Rocketeer would have to do, along with how he would be mounted onto a blue screen pylon. Working with his crew, Peter would then program the movement of the Rocketeer through space by moving the camera down a motion control track, also adding tilt, pan, and roll where necessary. For shots where the Rocketeer had to start far away and zoom way up close to camera, Peter had to use every inch of motion control track available to him.

Animation begins

Quickly developed black and white iterations of each shot would then be shown to visual effects supervisor Ken Ralston and to director Joe Johnston. When we got a buy off on the blocking of the camera and overall motion, I would then go in and animate, single frame, the body moves of the puppet. We intentionally tried to make the early shots of him look slightly out of control, like a man who was just learning to fly. Any animation I did with the body had to be timed with what Peter had done with the camera. The puppet was generally mounted onto a ball joint, which could be animated to make him turn and roll. In later shots we calmed him down, to indicate that he was getting more assured about flying the rocket pack.

Shot designs

Joe and Ken were very much open to any suggestions Peter and I would make, and treated us like collaborators. Ken was a terrific animator himself and could act out stuff for us if we needed it, and Joe would sometimes lay a piece of acetate over the moviola image and draw for us exactly the pose he wanted. Their ability to do this saved us a considerable amount of time, because we got feedback instantly. Case in point: for one shot where they planned for the Rocketeer to fly up beside a plane and salute the passengers, I suggested that he accidentally hit the ‘off’ switch with his thumb, and plummet towards the ground. On the down shot of him falling away, we came up with the idea of him falling into a cloud and then restarting the jet pack while inside the cloud, so you would see the muffled ‘flash.’ Peter was an expert at animating camera moves that were naturalistic and not ‘smart,’ as you sometimes find in some CG work. Any ideas we could come up with that did not detract from the basic idea of the shot were welcome. Joe would not hesitate to add a shot if he thought it would make the cut better.

Flying

A typical shot might take between two to six hours to animate. For reference we looked at blue screen film of Billy Campbell ‘flying’ in the suit to get a feel for how he moved and tried to correct himself in the air. We tried to make whatever we did true to his body performance. Because the camera was moving during the exposure of each frame, we were able to incorporate natural blurs into each of the shots. For the scenes where he’s flying through a clothesline and picks up a sheet, we attached monofilament lines to the miniature sheet corners and manipulated them by hand while filming at approximately one frame per second.

Hand animating 2D effects

The ILM 2-D animators, supervised by Tom Bertino, hand animated the rocket fire for the jet pack, and even put in extra flash bursts for when he flew close to camera. The blue screen shots were all skillfully composited on an optical printer by John Ellis and his crew. The model shop, led by Steve Gawley and Mike Fulmer, crafted a number of exquisite miniatures, including an amazing, quite large, zeppelin model that ended up literally going down in flames. Having a relatively small crew meant that we could screen dailies as a group, and people were free to comment on areas outside of their immediate expertise.

Rocketeer’s legacy

Working on The Rocketeer was a very rewarding experience for me, in terms of collaborating with people whom I had known and worked with for many years. It was truly a one in a million crew, and I believe the results hold up well even now. Within a year of working on The Rocketeer I also worked on The Nightmare Before Christmas and the original Jurassic Park. From that vantage point I could already see that computer graphics were going to play an increasing role in visual effects work and animation, but I also realized that, as with any tool, the result would only be as good or as bad as the hand that was guiding it. For some people to give the credit for good work to a computer is like giving the pencil the credit for a fine drawing.

Tom St Amand also worked at Walt Disney Film Productions, Tippett Studio and Imageworks, and is now a senior character animator at Digital Domain. Thank you to Tiffany Tetrault at DD for helping to make this interview possible.

Sony Pictures Animation (SPA) has been a major player when it comes to bringing out movies with comic and animated elements attached to it by some means or the other. Although recently Sony revealed more about their small screen endeavours too. Here are some of them.

Firstly, the company has secured their directorial talent in the name of Genndy Tartakovsky for the third edition of Hotel Transylvania film. Tartakovsky has been the director of the former versions of the same film but decided to depart from the franchisee given some apparent creative differences. But it seems like the Samurai Jack maker is back on-board.

Secondly, with the advent of the Ghostbusters movie, Variety reports that the company is also planning to release an animated series named Ghostbusters: Ecto Force, which will feature a ‘new generation’ of ghost busters and will be set in a far off year 2050. Ivan Reitman, the director of the original Ghostbusters will apparently be ‘shepherding’ the project and it will be hitting screens in 2018. The company will also bring out Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Hotel Transylvania, to the small screen sometime in 2017.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs will follow the adventures of Flint and Sam from the original 2009 movie and Teletoon Canada will be producing it in collaboration with SPA. The Hotel Transylvania series will follow the adventures of Dracula’s daughter Mavis and her friends and will air on the Disney Channel.

Thirdly, Bob Persichetti, who is famed for his contributions to animated movies like Puss in the Boots and The Little Prince as the head of story, will be directing the upcoming Spider-Man animated film which boasts a script written by The Lego Movie‘s Phil Lord and Chris Miller and is slated to release sometime in 2018.

Fourthly, SPA confirmed that their upcoming emoji movie would be called Emoji movie: Express Yourself. A whole new line of emojis are being developed to avoid legal issues as they would loosely look like the emojis we see in our smartphones right now.

With all these projects on the line, the near future seems to be exciting for SPA.

The post Here’s Sony Pictures Animation’s plans for its small and big screen endeavours appeared first on AnimationXpress.

After a lot of controversy, the film ‘Udta Punjab’ from Abhishek Chaubey (Ishqiya) hit the screens on 17 June, 2016. Udta Punjab is a gritty, crime thriller exploring the drug abuse in Punjab from a number of perspectives: a rock star, a migrant labourer, a doctor and a cop. Udta Punjab has been produced under the banner of Phantom Films and Balaji Motion Pictures, which was also the distribution company. Providing services to this critically acclaimed film that stars Shahid Kapoor, Alia Bhatt, Kareena Kapoor Khan and Diljit Dosanjh, Prime Focus delivered visual effects (VFX), Digital Intermediate (DI) services and camera rental.

More than 345 VFX shots have been delivered by Prime Focus which includes crowd multiplication and LED screen compositing for the ‘Chitta Ve’ song sequence, set extension and enhancement, picture-in-picture (PIPs) and clean-up work. One of the most challenging VFX sequences was a drug injection sequence which required the creation of a surreal dreamlike environment.

“In the scene in which Alia can be seen freefalling against a pitch-black backdrop, the idea was to portray the calming and sedating effect of drugs on a junkie,” commented VFX supervisor Vishal Kapoor. “Even after grading we weren’t quite satisfied with the static look of the frame, so in order to impart more dreaminess to sequence we added subtle transverse wave motions to help bring the sequence to life.”  

The grade of the film varied for each of the main characters – from colourful and vibrant for Tommy (a high-on-drugs, Punjabi rockstar), to earthy and raw for Pinky (a Bihari migrant who works in the fields). A rather cold treatment was given to the scenes featuring Preet and Sartaj – the characters battling the drug menace in the state of Punjab.

“In addition to the overall dark treatment of the movie a grungy texture was added to the drug sequences to bring about the squalid, drug-fuelled underbelly of the region,” said Prime Focus colourist Aashirwad Hadkar.

The post About 345 VFX shots along with DI delivered by Prime Focus for the critically acclaimed film ‘Udta Punjab’ appeared first on AnimationXpress.

Ogilvy & Mather London has won the Pharma Grand Prix at Cannes International Festival of Creativity, for the Philips Breathless Choir campaign. Launching on World COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) Day in November 18 2015, the Philips Breathless Choir film brought together eighteen strangers in New York, all of whom are living with chronic respiratory conditions, including COPD, cystic fibrosis and asthma. Coming from all walks of life and all over the world, the group was brought together for a week by Philips to undertake what they had previously thought impossible: learning to sing. They are led by celebrity choirmaster Gareth Malone, who is famed for his ability to turn unlikely people into singers. The film is supported by four additional online films that focus on a different aspect of the singers’ journey. Philips’ belief that health is not an absence of illness, but enjoying fullness in life is revealed as the stories develop. Viewers learn that many of the group have difficulty speaking let alone singing, which emphasises their achievements even more. Their use of Philips’ latest portable oxygen concentrator (POC), SimplyGo Mini, which empowers patients who struggle with respiratory conditions to continue living full, active lives.

Meet the members of the Breathless Choir and discover how much they had to overcome. Evie, Claire, Lawrence, Stephanie, describe how conditions like COPD, Cystic Fibrosis, reduced lung capacity and asthma affect their daily lives.

The transformation

See the Breathless Choir’s inspiring performance of “Every Breath You Take” at the world famous Apollo Theater in Harlem, New York City.

Prof. S. Parthasarathy and Gareth Malone discuss the health benefits of singing and the Philips SimplyGo Mini, a portable oxygen concentrator that gives people with respiratory problems more freedom than ever thought possible.

Comments from the Cannes Lions Jury

The jury looked at work that “used a full pallet of marketing communications to create the kind of engagement that maybe some other brands use more fluidly,” said Alexandra von Plato, president for Publicis Healthcare Communications in North America and jury president for the pharma category. “It demonstrates to all healthcare marketers that you can do this kind of narrative storytelling. You can expand the arc, create emotional content and have a very relevant and powerful connection to real substantial healthcare issues, disease conditions and products. We felt ‘Breathless Choir’ from Philips, an up-and-coming healthcare company, which is now entering healthcare hot and heavily in the devices space, is showing the rest of healthcare what’s possible through a fresh lens.”

Philips Breathless Choir Credits

The Philips Breathless Choir campaign was developed at Ogilvy & Mather London by executive creative director Gerry Human, creative team Laura Rogers and Trevallyn Hall, agency producer Ruth Darsow, managing director Craig Burleigh, business director Kate Waugh, planning partner Gareth Ellis, and account executive Christy Madden working with Philips global head of brand communications Eva Barrett.

Filming was shot by director John X Carey via Tool of North America, Santa Monica, with producer Nadine Brown, director of photography Ed David, freelance editor Philip Owens.

Post production was done at Universal Production Partners Prague by TK operator Andrej Stibingr and Flame operator Jaime Aguirre.

Sound was produced at Soundsquare, Prague, by engineer Pavel Rejholec. Music post production was by Peter Mitchell.