When Toy Story came out late 1995 the 3D CGI feature film industry was born. Toy Story’s enduring strength was the melding of story and technology. Both were aided by the fact the story featured manufactured and relatively simple toys, rather than expressive human faces or carefully observed human bodies.
 

 

Whereas the world of the animated feature was undergoing a revolution in 1995, so was the world of film and video - the digital video format called DV was released by Sony, JVC and Panasonic amongst others. It quickly revolutionised video and film making, giving the creative film-maker the possibility to compete in an arena that previously had been out of reach due to cost and technical benchmarks. In the same year Dogme 95, a collective of film directors founded in Copenhagen, chose to exploit the new properties of DV, leading to several popular cinema releases, showing you could now make films and tell stories in ways that were denied before
 

 

But the world of animated features remained one that only giants like Pixar, PDI and Dreamworks could grind through. The nature of computer animation with its supporting infrastructure and huge talent base meant generally it stayed an American phenomenon. It’s only been in the last few years that smaller European companies could start to seriously think of creating feature length animations.

 
 

In the UK, Vanguard Animation’s Valiant (2005) finally introduced the idea that the UK could leverage the talent and technology to create feature length CGI animation. Directed by Gary Chapman, Valiant went into production at Ealing Studios, West London where Vanguard established Europe's first purpose-built digital CG production studio. Camera layout and animation began in 2003, with all of the 3D assets completed in 2004, for a 2005 release through Disney, a decade after Toy Story.
 

 

Whilst Aardman had notched a few feature animation hits, their first 3D CGI animation Flushed Away (2006) directed by David Bowers and Sam Fell, was produced entirely at DreamWorks studio in Glendale California, and whilst it didn’t particularly invigorate the UK’s CGI animation talent base, it showed we had the quality and standards needed to make full length CGI films.

 
 

At the end of last year a new and ambitious project was completed in the UK, in central London in fact, and it represents a new gear change in the story of the UK’s nascent CGI feature industry.
 

 

The story really starts in 2006 when Framestore CFC, one of the worlds leading visual effects and animation studios, announced the formation of a feature animation department, led by the redoubtable David Lipman, ex-Dreamworks producer of Shrek 2, and co-executive producer on Shrek.
 

 

“Framestore always had aspirations to be in the feature animation business. I’d been in discussions with William Sargent, the CEO; I’d met him way back in the early days of Chicken Run and we’d stayed in touch. I left Dreamworks after finishing Shrek 2 and was looking to pursue something fresh and new. William called me and said that he’d been offered Despereaux from Universal, come and do it”.

 

The Tale of Despereaux is a best selling children’s book by Kate DiCamillo that Universal Pictures had acquired the rights to in 2004. The story is complex and dark, and features three vividly different settings- the human kingdom of Dor, Mouse World, and Rat World. The eponymous hero mouse Despereaux (with the biggest ears seen in animation this side of Dumbo) is exiled from Mouse World and travels between Rat World and the human kingdom.

 
 

“It was the book that was really appealing, the picture really wasn’t developed at that point” states Lipman. “It’s dark and it’s different. Our goal was to try to do something rich and exciting and very different, and yet still compete with mainstream Hollywood film on its terms. I knew it would be a great project to kickstart the feature department. I essentially came to Framestore with a certain methodology that I knew would need to be lean and smart to create such an animation”
 

 

But Lipman’s ‘lean and smart’ is definitely not code for corner cutting and outsourced animation - far from it. Despereaux exudes attention to detail and the quality of lighting, animation and composition are noteworthy. Could this be the start of a new animation features industry in the UK?

 

 

 

“CHARACTERS NOT CREATURES”

 

Framestore has always been known for its creatures and the levels of observation they put in to the creation of them. Look at Aslan in Prince Caspian, or the polar bears in The Golden Compass. Framestore’s animators would reference real animal movements even when working on ‘fantasy’ animals such as the ground-breaking Walking with Dinosaurs ten years ago, or the more recent Hippogriff in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. But as Lipman says, “We’re characters and not creatures anymore”, making a clear distinction between VFX and Feature Animation.
 

 

“In a feature film you need characters with emotional inner lives, displaying motive and nuance and it’s a very different business to spectacular VFX shots implanted into someone else’s movie” he continues. “On a visual effects project you might do 400, 500 maybe 900 shots maximum. You know you’ve got 6 or 9 months to do it. Compare that with our own feature. We went 3 years with 1700 shots, and with 400 crowd shots. I mean it’s big, it’s a very different animal; visually dense. The number of props, characters and bits and pieces made it a really complex show to manage, but we leveraged off the 20 years of know-how at Framestore”

 

 

Strangely, one thing that makes Despereaux’s style and look unique is the live action philosophy and background that Producer/Screenwriter Gary Ross (Big, Seabiscuit, Pleasantville) brought to bear. As Brad Blackbourn, Director of Photography and Head of Layout explains, “Gary’s not an ex-2D animation director, he’s a live action film director and so he communicates and envisions through a live action grammar. It definitely really helped getting the vision on screen when we started thinking of it as a live action film that happened in an animated world, in order to get away from a standard CG look”.
 

 

You’ll see this in Despereaux’s virtual camera work with its use of depth of field, peering around foreground objects, and camera moves that seem to mimic traditional jib, dolly and crane shots. The virtual camera is frequently energetically thrust into the centre of the action, rather than observing from the edges. You also get a strong sense of the lens as an artistic tool- there are suggestions of ‘blooming’ (overexposure of lights) and a soft diffusion reminiscent of certain professional film camera filters.

“Gary and I both hoped these film allusions would help get away from the CG feel that animated films can fall into” says Blackbourn. In line with this cinematic philosophy, Blackbourn made the brave decision after coming on board to change the aspect ratio of the film from the common movie format of 1.85:1 to the wider Cinemascope format of 2.35:1.

 

“It was one of the first things I did, to get the little model of Despereaux and Princess Pea together in Pea’s room which was the only semi-accurate set at the time because they were still doing lookdev tests then”  (“Look Development”; the process that defines all the technical aspects needed to create the appearance of a 3-D element.)

 

On a hunch, Brad made up a 2.35:1 camera system in Maya, based on how a Panavision Super35 film camera might work, and re-shot all of the set-ups with that.

 

“I showed the compositions to Evgeni Tomov (Production Designer) and Olivier Adam (Art Designer) and we all thought it had a really dramatic quality to it. Just the simple, horizontal space of the 2.35:1 gives you a lot more ways to divide up that frame especially with characters. I’ve always liked the fact that in two-shots you have a horizontal separation between characters and you can use that especially in a film like this where you have characters reaching out to each other from different worlds”.

There was some concern that a small mouse in this big human world would be lost, and there was also an issue of the lack of verticality, since the human characters are very tall and slim.

“Pea’s face initially took some getting used to - seeing her in 2.35:1 ratio close-ups after seeing her composed in 1.85:1 ratio storyboards, but the thing we learnt was that the cropping of her face to fit made for a more intense live-action film feel; it felt really immediate. It didn’t feel like she was a sort of traditional, illustrated character per se, it felt a lot more like what we were used to seeing in a film, whether it’s Meryl Streep or Angelina Jolie, suddenly with that intense cropping she was popping straight right out at you. Emotionally that’s really good”.

 

 

 

FROM VERMIN TO VERMEER

 

An inspiration that features heavily in the movie is that of Flemish painting, supplying the subtle and muted look of the architecture and the lighting scheme.

 

“Flemish artists like Pieter Brueghel the Elder were strong references, with paintings like Netherlandish Proverbs (1559), where there’s a peasant wedding or something like that, and Tower of Babel (1563)” explains Blackbourn, reeling off the paintings like an art historian. “If you look at those you can basically see the colour palette of Mouse World. Actually there’s quite a lot about the human world buildings and human activity in Dor that’s based around that too”.

 

“Princess Pea’s bedroom was based on the lighting in Vermeer’s work and the series he did in his studio, such as The Milkmaid (c.1658), The Girl with the Wineglass (c.1659), or A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (1662-5). All those paintings he did with north light coming in through the window, a diffuse sort of wintry light bouncing off the wall. Virtually all of the light in the Princess’s room is supplied by the outside source – bouncing around and causing the windows to sort of burn out”.

 

Likewise, you can contrast this pure light with Rat World, where the ominous shapes of Hieronymous Bosch start appearing.

“You can see Bosch’s Hell panel from The Garden of Earthly Delights triptych (1504) in Rat World- people falling into darkness, it’s all very grim, but there’s a lot of blacks and the colours are hot and saturated coming through in a very punchy, high contrast way”.

 

“These traditional art sources really gave us the lighting, the composition, the colour palettes and the textures. It’s kind of remarkable for me that all that art theory that you’re taught, that you never think you’ll use, has come together in this film”, Blackbourn admits. “I think a lot of the artists that were coming in on the production, especially in the final layout process where it can get quite technical, found it a real pleasant surprise”.

 

 

 

CAPTURING MICE: LAYOUT AND PRE-VIZ

 

Lipman’s previously mentioned ‘lean and smart’ methodology was needed because the budget was smaller than most CGI movies, at an estimated sixty million dollars. Due to the complexity of the original story with its three main environments (and a separate exciting storybook sequence seemingly made out of paper), it also had more shots than the average animated movie to deal with.

 

A heavy regime of Pre-viz (Pre-visualisation) and well crafted layouts helped here. Layout is about finding the best way to capture a scene through the virtual camera.

“Layout and Pre-viz are the only times you’ll get spontaneity once you’re in production. Previously at the storyboard phase there’s heaps of spontaneity but that’s drawn in 2D, exploring different story and character options, it’s not cinematography” says Blackbourn.
 

 

You could say the layout process equates to when the film director gets on set and rehearses with cheap stand-ins for the expensive actors. They get to block out moves and explore nuances in performance, trying out options.

This is where film-making techniques are explored before engaging thousands of hours of artists’ and animators’ time, forcing more decisions earlier into the process so that colour representation, basic textural information as well as lens and angle information are gleaned to make quite an accurate replication of what will eventually be a complicated high resolution set.
 

 

“If necessary we can fiddle with fake lights, rather than spending hours with renders. In the Rat World layout the artists put in fake caustics to remind us that this flat surface that looks like concrete is really water and it’s going to be covered in reflections that will affect everything in this environment”.
 

 

“You should be able to show the layout/pre-viz to an eight year-old off the street and they wouldn’t have any questions about what it portrays”.
 

 

It is very rare to see the cinematography planned so meticulously for a whole film beforehand, and this was Framestore’s secret weapon. It paid huge dividends. Anyone in the team could read the script, see all the thumbnail images and understand each shot in terms of lighting, texture, camera and composition.

 

 

 

OF MICE, PIPES AND MEN

 

Creative layouts of inventive camera moves, emotive animated poses and Flemish north lighting don’t amount to much unless there is an efficient infrastructure to back it up and enable the production to move on swiftly.
 

 

David Lipman and his team had to build their pipeline differently compared to Framestore’s usual VFX work, even though it was still built around the familiar Maya and Renderman. They also needed a powerful data management system that could track what turned out to be around 40,000 assets. At its peak 278 people were working on Despereaux, with digital files amounting to 200 terabytes of data, a world away from Toy Story’s one terabyte in 1995. Framestore also utilised the power of 55,000 processors, a dizzying increase on the 87 dual-processor and 30 quad-processor 100-MHz SPARCstation 20s available to Pixar in 1995.

 

“It took a while for the pipeline to settle down and people to effectively use it to communicate to each other, but once it was bedded in, we did around 80% of the movie in 20% of the time”, says Tripp Hudson, Production Manager on Despereaux.

 
 

Surprisingly considering Framestore’s track record, the Feature Animation team decided to build their own fur system specifically for the style they wanted, rather than using the in-house system. There were 413,138 hairs on Despereaux’s head. In another comparison that shows how far the technology has moved since 1995, Andy in Toy Story had a full head of hair composed of only 12,000 hairs.
 

 

In total 126,248 final frames were produced, and at the peak 335 shots were spat out the pipeline in one week, a magnificent technical achievement; 11,050 shots were completed in the last six weeks.
 

 

“Finding the tone and style was a fun challenge. There were 50 animators and they needed consistency, since everyone was touching the same assets. Each animator was assigned a sequence so they were responsible for all the characters in that sequence. Again this is a different approach to VFX work” explains Hudson.

Houdini was also utilised, especially for its fluid simulator, as well as Massive for the crowd sequences in Rat World.

“We always knew we were in for the long haul, and this provided many more acting opportunities for the animators. The Lighting TDs also got excited since they could make a bigger contribution to the film. Some people like the methodical factory approach of an animated feature. Research and Develiopment is vital, and much of what we developed for Despereaux can be used again later”.

 

 

With Despereaux, Framestore have blazed a trail that others may follow. It is ironic that some will suspect that it is an attempt to follow in the footsteps of other Rodent epics, indeed it was co-directed by Sam Fell who also directed and wrote Aardman’s Flushed Away. But in a world of multiple Shrek movies, is another rat movie so bad? “Interestingly, Ratatouille hadn’t even come out when we were in pre-production. No-one had seen it” says David Lipman. “It wasn’t on the radar when Universal green-lit the movie”

Whilst some critics have pointed to problems with narrative and character development, the famous critic Roger Ebert hits the nail on the head when he says “It is a joy to look at frame by frame, and it would be worth getting the Blu-ray DVD to do that”. The vision that incorporated flemish painting, live action film techniques and the talent of one of Europe’s top VFX houses is apparent from start to finish. It’s a fine calling card to the rest of the world that the UK is ready for animated feature film business.

“Part of the attraction of coming to Framestore was that we could develop our own projects, and we’ll be making a few announcements in the next few weeks or months” says David Lipman cryptically. “It doesn’t preclude us from taking other sort of work for hire like Despereaux either”.
 

 

To Brad Blackbourn the main achievement of Despereaux is that it has widened the possibilities of the animated feature. “European audiences are hungry for new CGI visions, I would say desperately. As far as the commercial business goes, the domestic US audience is what bankrolls the industry, but I think there is definitely a noticeable percentage of people who are very interested in seeing new types of CG films. I think it’s about just gently exposing them, like Lasseter has done with Miyazaki. With Despereaux hopefully we’ve pushed the genre forward, too”.

Article By Saint John Walker, Skillset Animation, Games and Facilities Manager