• Blogs
• Forums
• Tradeshows
• Partners
• White Papers
• Podcast Show Notes
• Events

 

A Digital Zoo

Aug 25, 2010 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

Tippett Studio uses its animal magnetism for The Twilight Saga: Eclipse and Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.

You can see it in the jiggling skin on a hairless cat, or the bristling fur of a menacing wolf. It's state-of-the-art animal animation, as practiced by Tippett Studio in Berkeley, Calif. Founded 25 years ago by two-time Oscar winner Phil Tippett, the studio has become a go-to place for moviemakers needing realistic digital animals, and its credits include Charlotte's Web, Enchanted, The Shaggy Dog, The Golden Compass, the Twilight films New Moon and Eclipse, and Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore. "It is a zoo," laughs Tippett, who was the senior VFX supervisor on the Twilight films. "We're in the furry animal gulag."

His studio's expertise actually became widely noticed as a result of the 2002 Clio Award-winning Blockbuster commercials starring talking guinea pigs and rabbits. "That's when we finally got the look of fur to a place where it worked," Tippett recalls. But it's movie clients that keep upping the ante. "In New Moon, there were six wolves, and Eclipse had eight. The next movie has more." (Tippett Studio is already working on the next Twilight film, Breaking Dawn.)

Since fur sucks light like a black hole, the studio has developed proprietary tools for handling millions of hairs on each animal. Tippett's fur tool Furrocious has evolved into Furator, which enabled the studio to keep up with new challenges. Tom Gibbons, the animation supervisor on both Twilight films, says, "Each wolf in the first movie had 3 million hairs on it, and in the second movie it had 18 million. We built technology to support that much hair growth per frame, per wolf, and not slow things down."

One secret to Tippett's success in the animal kingdom is the care taken while shooting the plate photography into which the animals are placed. The on-set visual effects team on the Twilight movies gathered high-dynamic-range images (HDRIs) that later enabled the studio to render wolf scenes using gobal illumination. As Gibbons reports, "With HDRI information, we could drop a wolf into a scene and it would look 70 percent there."

That's when the tweaking begins, Gibbons adds. "Actors get little bounce lights and kicks in order to make them look dramatic," he says. "We have to do the same thing for the wolves or they won't fit with the actors. We have to hand-place those things artistically."

An essential step in creating believable digital animals is making sure that eyeline information is gathered during shooting so that interaction between actors and animals appears plausible. As Tippett remarks, "You have to bust the eyeline issue immediately. We use every trick in the book. Sometimes it's just a marker on a C-stand." Tippett's matchmove team is also scrupulous about gathering camera information and laser scanning film sets, and the point cloud data they capture is crucial for reconstructing scenes efficiently in post.

A key production technique Tippett touts is previz, which his team creates using Autodesk Maya. "We use previz to speed things along. If a camera was 18in. off the ground with a 35mm lens and an 18-degree tilt, we'd work out our choreography to match. So when we'd get the plates, we'd just pop in our previz and have something the editor could use immediately."

Previz has helped avoid problems, too. When Tippett was shooting the Twilight saga on location, Gibbons' team back at the studio used Google satellite imagery to recreate camera setups. This approach would alert them if an impossible shot was being contemplated. "We proved that they couldn't do a shot where the camera had to move from 14mph to 22mph," Gibbons says. "I started testing [virtual] 8mph moves and trying a zoom out at a certain speed and seeing if that approximated the shot they wanted. I was able to give Phil camera information so we could propose an alternative."

Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
© 2012 NewBay Media, LLC.