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“A Bug’s Life” will be released on a dual layer disc that contains the widescreen version of the film as well as the new fullscreen presentation. Selectable through the main menu, both versions are accessible without having to flip the disc over. Both transfers will be the first ever digital-to-digital transfers to hit home video. This means the movie never went to film but instead an immediate digital copy was used to create the DVD masters. “There’s something otherworldly about that,” Craig raves. “There’s no grain! Usually when you watch a movie, within the first 10 seconds or so there’s always a white spot, dust or any other film artifact somewhere. Now, when you watch the direct-digital transfer without all that, it’s like you cleaned your glasses, like having the fog blown out! You will love it.” Although DVD offers the technology that would allow filmmakers to make their work more interactive, Bill and Craig are hesitant about that. “I think we’re mostly focussed on making films that are linear and require the storytelling skills that Pixar is so known for. Interactivity is a totally different beast. We had an interactive division, but these people are now contributing to our movies.” Craig sums it up, and Bill adds, “If we ever had the opportunity to, maybe we would use the multiple angle capabilities to allow viewers to switch between the film and a storyboard version, but that’s it. The films are composed to have an editorial flow and the animation is done to a particular point of view.” “A Bug’s Life” was created using a 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio, which resulted in individual frames that were rendered out at 2048x862 pixels. This is a surprisingly low resolution, considering the image will be projected on an over 30 feet large screen. “Two things help.” Craig explains. “Once we did some measurements on the resolution of 35 mm film prints and more interestingly, the actual resolution you get when you project this 35 mm print to a screen. If you high end use lab equipment you can get about 2000 lines out of this print, but even in a good movie theater only 850-900 lines are visible. On ‘Young Sherlock Holmes’ we computed the glass-window knight at 1024x600 pixels or so, and they even had to diffuse it in Optical to make it soft and match the film.” |
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“You have to know how RenderMan works to understand why we get away with such a low resolution. It anti-aliases the image using multiple samples per pixel. Other renderers render in hi-resolution and then apply anti-aliasing as a post procedure. When we have a 2048 pixel frame, it compares to what other people have in 8192 pixels, but it doesn’t take nearly as much processing time and space.”
“We did film test at different resolutions, including these higher than 2048 pixel frames and everyone said, why should we bother? You couldn’t see the difference. Even a 1024 dpl projector looks as good as it does. If you go to a normal theaters you do really well if you see 1000 lines, which is kind of disappointing, actually.” |
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Bill Kinder |
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Instead of having two fully detailed hero-models only as in “Toy Story”, “A Bug’s Life” asked for many more of these complex models. “Almost all of our characters in this film were like Buzz and Woody”, technical director Eben Ostby observes. “On this film, except from a few minor characters, all the models had the same rich set of facial controls”. Using Pixar’s proprietary Marionette software to animate these complex models would prove highly efficient for the animators, but put quite a bit of stress on the hardware and brought the team’s progress to a crawl at one point. “We were pushing the envelope and hit an unexpected hurdle with our software”, Pixar’s Graham Walters admits. Fortunately it turned out to be the only crisis on the production and with additional brainpower, a rescue team consisting mainly of personal from the |
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Craig Good |
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RenderMan department, were able to optimize the code to the point that the Marionette system became up to eighty times faster than it was before. |
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Even with the help of the most sophisticated software however, computer animation is a field that asks for a number of unique skills and different methodologies, you would think. “Actually the basic principles are the same.” Craig Good remarks. “We have animators who never worked with computers before and did cel type, stop motion or even clay animation. The basic principles like squashing, stretching, etc. still apply, and we try make our computer systems usable and accessible for them.”
Instead of them drawing frames, the computer gives them a marionette they can pose and work with. “At the artistic level, it doesn’t really make a lot of difference, other than that everything is done in the computer. We don’t use rigs or puppets, it’s all done by manipulating data with software.” Good continues excitedly. “We also don’t use motion capturing. While it is useful for capturing human beings, you can’t get the exaggerated movements we need in our film out of them. Just think of it, how do you motion capture Mr. Potatohead?” In doing their work this way, Pixar has some substantial advantages over traditional cel animation. “Repeatability is the key”, Craig Good sums it up. “It is a completely motion controlled world. In the re-framing project for those 55% we had re-compute, we would just go back and shoot with a different camera after all the acting is done. We would go in and recompose the images after the acting is finished, which gives us an incredible flexibility”.
“Another huge aspect is the ability to collaborate with different people as a team through networks”, Bill Kinder adds. “We have the ability to have many people working on the same thing at the same time. This is technically impossible in traditional animation. We share things a lot. We usually have two or three animators working on the characters in a given shot. You can easily have completely different acting styles within a shot by simply assigning different animators to the different characters and you combine talent on a critical shot.” It is obvious, the artist is still key to create animated films like “A Bug’s Life”, despite the omnipresence of computers, which almost makes you fear that the films will lose the magical, personal touch of human animators.
“No matter what we do and how much we automate, we always put it in the hands of the animator. The technologies are |
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there to give them more control. The computer is the world’s best in-between artist. It’s the same thing. If we give the animator control over dynamics, it’s just a way to letting that animator have more creative control. The computer isn’t doing the actual work. It’s just a very expensive pencil. The power is still in our hands, we now use the keyboard the way we used to work with pencils and brushes.” |
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Apart from the animation part, a lot of work also has to go into the production and set design, and in computer generated films, these take a new meanings all of a sudden. “The way we approach it is a mix between live action films and the animated world.” Craig Good comments. “Everything needs to be approached like a live action shoot. We have to make props and build sets. Even more so, because everything that appears in the frame needs to be built. But we also approach it as an animation film where everything’s highly stylized. We’re interested in a coherent world for our story, not reality. Making it interesting is the key and we do have an art director and production designer who work as if they were on a live action set.”
Bill Kinder notes, “It takes on a new proportion, though. Everything needs to be more detailed. We have people drawing lines on leaves, and believe me leaves are not trivial. The work we do is not necessarily more difficult, but we have a lot more design work to do than in other films.” Since the computer also helps to manage large numbers of objects in a single frame, it almost seems as if crowd scenes are becoming a new trend for all computer graphic associated productions.
“We put in crowd shots were the story demanded it. They’re really hard to do and I feel our crowd team did a fantastic job.” Bill Kinder explains. “For better or worse, we decided to make a story in an ant colony, and you need crowd scenes to bring that to live. We still used them sparingly, although enough to get the idea across. We always tried to find ways to get more mileage out of the animators work in the crowds. Is there another trend? Any trip to the multiplex tells you, yes, currently we see spectacle over story.”
Craig Good adds, “At Pixar, the story is King however. Every decision we make about camera placement, acting, sound, etc. is driven by the story. We will certainly have films with no crowd scenes at all in the future.” With some of the most powerful tools at their hands, everything seems possible. Things that were practically not achievable in computer graphics have become common things today, like rain simulators, particle systems, hair and much more. It makes you wonder if there are any barriers left for computer graphics to break. “We’ll find out when the story department comes out with something we can’t do.” Craig laughs good naturedly. “They always come up with something. We need a baggy suit for the man in the park. We need splashing rain, flowing hair, all that. It’s a hard to predict. Hair is getting to the point where it looks pretty good. Things were hard yesterday are not quite as hard today. But I’m not sure what we’ll discover. When our people’s faces go white, you know what the next challenge is.” |
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