Last month, I received a tour of DreamWorks Animation in Glendale, Cafornia as part of a blogger press event for The Croods, the new movie from DreamWorks due out on March 22. In part one of my report, I covered the very beginning of the story process, in which the directors hand the script to the story artists. From there, the artists put together scenes with early models of the characters to storyboard the movie, scene by scene.
Today, I'm going to take a look at how the Crood family and the world around them evolved. As fascinated as I was by the beginning of the process, the presentations about why the characters move the way they do, why the world around them looks as it does, and how the world came to be populated by all manner of creatures added a whole new layer of understanding. And not just because Jeffrey Katzenberg, the CEO of DreamWorks Animation, showed up to answer some questions at one of them.
I want to emphasize, however, while I'm talking about the "beginning" and the later steps in the process, it's more accurate to say they tend to happen simultaneously, as different parts of the movie are in different stages at any given time. Many parts are in motion at any given time. That's the reason it takes five years to make an animated film. The DreamWorks Animation staff said on any given day, they only finish a few seconds of the movie.
The presentations, on the creatures, worlds and characters, were given by co-directors Chris Sanders and Kirk DeMicco, VFX (visual effects) supervisor Markus Manninen, and Head of Character Animation James Baxter.
The Story World
Sanders and DeMicco showed slides of the various "assets" for the movie, essentially every plant, stone, tree, structure, etc., that must go in the story. There was no way they could show us all the assets, as there were over 2,000. I'm not sure where I thought all the background came from before but I certainly was ignorant of exactly how much of it there was.
As the assets were created, as the characters' look and movements were tested, and as the creatures that inhabit the film took shape, the directors had to merge them all together while finding the right tone.
"We definitely wanted it to feel grounded so the stakes of the story and the family dynamics felt real. Everything we have in the film has some sort of spin on it, the Croods spin. It took a while to find the right balance. Because if you pushed it too much, it actually looks like science fiction, and if you push it the other way, it looks like Dr. Seuss," DeMicco said.
"We had to figure out how to create this time between time that the story took place in," Manninen said, talking of what the movie would be like visually. "It was important for the story that this felt like earth because we wanted this to be a family, a regular family that were trying to survive and go through regular life in their context of actually survival and eating. The design came out of trying to find a way to make an interesting earth that was also engaging but also acted as a story point, which is we don't have a villain in our movie – really the world is, to some degree, the villain, but it's also, their place they live, it's home."
The world of the movie is essentially divided into three parts: the original cave world that the Croods must leave because it's literally collapsing around them, the eye-popping colorful world they must traverse to get to safety, and the world coming into being that they're trying to reach. As Manninen said, the Croods are struggling with each other and with the interloper Guy, but they're also struggling against the world.
"The first sequence where we go into the new world–we call it the Chasm. The Croods come down, they drop into this new world, and we started exploring what that would look like."
What they drop into in the final version of the movie is a burst of strange colors and creatures.
"Now, the original images that we had for this world were slightly more muted," Manninen said. "But, by the time we had gotten to this point in our story process, we decided we really want to feel color come into this world so that, when the movie starts, we get to know the world that the family is in and the limitations in some ways visually of that and then this beautiful blossoming color world comes to life in front of them and shocks us as an audience because we're going through the journey with them."
While explaining the color, Manninen also talked how the lighting in the movie. The inspiration for how it's lit was someone from his native country and something I didn't expect to hear when learning about an animated movie: Ingmar Bergman.
"I grew up in Sweden, and we have a very different quality of life than here in California. I don't know if you know why we ended up in California as a movie business, but it was because in the old days, cameras didn't have enough light, light sensitivity, so you need a lot of light to be able to capture images on a camera. Nowadays, you don't have that. A lot of people actually go up north to shoot films nowadays because you have this really soft beautiful lighting."
And that's what they wanted for this film, Manninen said. He pointed out that animated films have as much artistry as any other film.
"There’s a perception that the computers make the movie. It really is the artists making the movie, and the computer is the tool, it's the pen that we use. All these pieces come together, and artists from every department sort of help drive it towards the final goal."
As they concentrated on 3D for the movie, the staff added what they called either "bugs in the air" or "crap in the air." The bugs are the various creatures that seem to surround the audience as they float around in the movie. The crap in the air is the sense that the dust and other elements on the screen are covering the viewer.
I tend to get nasty migraines while watching 3D movies. Not only was I migraine-free after my showing of The Croods but the 3D immersed me in the world as no movie has since Avatar.
DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg said the quality of 3D in DreamWorks Animated movies is something the company works on constantly.
"If you look at it on the technology standpoint, those engineers who are perfecting the tools, the toolbox, it incrementally gets better each time," Katzenberg said. "If you look at it on a creative basis, the experiences, the filmmakers, Yong Duk Jhun, who was the cinematographer on this movie, did Kung Fu Panda 2, which also had some pretty amazing breakthroughs in terms of the use of 3D.
"The fact that we're able to just keep building on top of it, I think we could certainly argue that there's no place in the world today where there's as much expertise and creative and experience knowing how to apply 3D in a way that really makes it an immersive experience. The goal always has been, if we can transport you into that world and really make you feel as though you're in the center of it, that's the best use of it."
The Characters and Their Inspiration
As the world the characters will inhabit is undergoing tweaks and adjustments, so are the characters. Each of the member of the Crood family had to be individually developed, especially the way they speak, move, and relate to each other.
We were shown a screencap of "the rigging," which are the lines in a custom-made computer program that control each part of a character's movements. It was like looking at a flow chart with fifty zillion lines. I'm not sure how the animators keep them straight but one tool they use is the ability to click on the program to view the rigging for only a particular portion of the body.
Baxter said the animators look for inspiration in the real world to develop movement.
"We wanted to try and get some sort of animal influences on a lot of these characters. So, Grug especially is sort of like this big silverback gorilla. A lot of the Croods hold themselves in this sort of hunched over way, and he doesn't have to reach down very far before he touches the ground. We decided to mix it up. Sometimes, we'll put his fist down. Sometimes, we'll put his knuckles down like a gorilla. Sometimes, we'll put a flat hand down."
Eep, on the other hand, is not so much a gorilla as like, say, Catwoman.
"So, Eep, she's got the tiger skin on, she's much more like a cat, you know, sort of more like a tiger. The way that she moves around is much more athletic, much more dynamic, more like a jungle cat than a monkey." Baxter said his staff in particular loved Emma Stone's facial expressions and worked many of them into Eep.
One of the things I liked most about Eep was that she was drawn with a powerful body, in proportion to the strength she must have to survive in her world. And her strength is in contrast to Guy, the more evolved human in the bunch and her sort of love interest.
"It was very important that Eep would be much more physically dominant than Guy," Baxter said. "She can just throw him around like a rag doll. We wanted to explore that movement and see how it would actually feel, before we finalize how they look together and if we want to go back to modeling to make sure that their proportions are correct. You need to put them next to each other."
Baxter said that baby Sandy especially was a "blast" and that she was modeled after a little Jack Russell terrier in behavior and movement. (I would bet that younger kids come away from the movie saying "Release the baby!") Son Thunk is based on a little baby chimp with incredibly floppy arms that starred in a YouTube video. Gran's concept is a "crusty old lady in a hollowed out lizard skin." Baxter said they wanted to infuse her with a "crocodile vibe."
To get the way the characters related to each other, the animators acted out the parts as needed. They showed a short video of themselves acting out a scene from the movie in which the other family members react to Guy, who's been brought to them by Eep. (Aside: This looks like a really fun part of the job.)
"One of the things we wanted to get with the Croods is that, as a whole, they were a little bit different," Baxter said. "They had much less or no personal space boundaries, you know, they would just go right up into your face, and they would grab each other a lot and touch each other and bite each other and all sorts of unsuitable things."
"We have a very low amount of characters, but they're almost in every single shot. So it takes a lot of choreography to get each scene right," DeMicco added.
Those Amazing Creatures
As I said in part 1, my absolute favorite creature from the movie is the macarnivore, a big-headed sabre-toothed tiger-like creature with the colorings of a bird. But he's by no means the only incredible animal in the movie. There's Belt, who started off as a slow-moving sloth and whose part evolved into comic relief, a sort of Greek chorus. There's also Douglas, a sort of dog that Thunk finds, and so many others.
The creatures were basically mash-ups of two types of animals and some of them verged a bit into Dr. Seuss territory but they were all fantastical and interesting. It's easier to show you some of them than tell you about them:
Douglas, Thunk's sort of dog:
And Chunky, my favorite:
The final piece to all this, is seeing the film. DreamWorks Animation invites everyone who's worked on the film to a special screening of the film so they can finally see the product of all their work. That's very late in the process, as several of the staff we talked to during the event said they hadn't seen it yet, putting those of us who attended the event a step ahead.
Did all their work pay off? I'll talk about the 9 reasons you should see The Croods tomorrow.
