“We spent six months working with the Aardman animators, trying out different approaches,” says Costello. Rather than building a facial system based on muscles, the team decided to emulate Aardman’s method: They built replacement mouth shapes. We knew if we could get Toad to work, we could get any character to work.” “He’s very expressive and has a massive amount of surface. “We used Toad because he had to roll his lips all around his head and he speaks asymmetrically,” Spencer-Galsworthy says. Supervising animator Jason Spencer-Galsworthy, who was a model maker at Aardman for Wallace & Gromit in A Close Shave and a key animator for Chicken Run before joining PDI/DreamWorks to work on Shrek and Madagascar, helped develop the mouth system for the Flushed Away characters. A shaper causedthe low-resolution subskin, which was attached to the skeleton, tomove the high-resolution geometry. Atcenter is the simplifi ed model that animators used. Shown at left is Roddy’s skeleton with mouth and hand controls. “But in CG, the mathematical lattice keeps breaking if you push in too many directions all at once.” “The plasticine is infinitely malleable,” says Fell. And then, once the animators apply the shapes to the models, they can push the “clay” around. For their stop-frame animations, Aardman modelers typically create a set of approximately 16 plasticine mouth shapes for each character. “We also had a plug-in that allowed them to do deformations on a low-resolution surface that we’d bind onto the final geometry.” Thus, animators could work more quickly by weighting a few points on lightweight models and then transferring the performance to the higher resolution geometry.Ĭreating the characters’ mouths was equally challenging. “They essentially sculpted the clay,” says Costello. Then, with additional controllers, they could flatten the front of a brow or plump it up to make it fatter. Animators could pull the eyebrows into a rough silhouette using three sets of joints-left, right, and middle. To rig the Flushed Away characters’ eyebrows in Autodesk’s Maya so that the DreamWorks animators could replicate what Aardman animators do in plasticine, Costello’s team took a layered approach. “The directors wanted to be able to press down and leave an indentation in the eye socket. “We have characters with the likes of which we’ve never rigged before,” says Wendy Rogers, visual effects supervisor for Flushed Away. “They’re pushing and pulling and making dents above his eyeballs, moving ever so slightly between the keyframes, and it’s magic. “In A Close Shave, Gromit spends 30 seconds just acting with his eyebrows,” Costello says. Gromit provides the best example-he doesn’t have a mouth the animators convey his facial expressions by moving his eyebrows. Sam Fell, Aardman’s director of commercials, and David Bowers, a story artist on Shark Tale and senior storyboard artist on Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, co-directed Flushed Away. Produced by Aardman’s Peter Lord and David Sproxton, and DreamWorks’ Cecil Kramer, Flushed Away blends Aardman’s stop-motion style and DreamWorks CG techniques it’s Aardman’s first completely CG feature. The film represents the third collaboration between Aardman and DreamWorks, which began with Chicken Run. He tries to persuade Rita (Kate Winslet), a savvy rat with a boat, to take him back to his home, but he’s thwarted by the villainous Toad (Ian McKellen) and Toad’s cousin, Le Frog (Jean Reno). It’s as quirky and detailed an environment as Aardman fans have come to expect, but bigger, filled with water, and populated with thousands of characters-mostly rats, snails, toads, frogs, and bugs. He lands in Ratropolis, a version of London, built in the underground sewers from rubbish. These characters might look as if modelers created them from plasticine in the same workshops where Wallace and Gromit took shape, but they are every bit as computer-generated as Shrek, Fiona, and Donkey.įlushed Away follows Roddy (Hugh Jackman), a sophisticated, pampered mouse living in an upper-class Kensington flat until he’s flushed down a toilet. Take, for example, Roddy, Rita, Toad, and Le Frog, the stars of Flushed Away, the latest feature film from Aardman Animation and DreamWorks Animation. Sometimes the simplest things are the most difficult.
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