What was it like working on CAPS on The Rescuers Down Under? What do you remember about that system in its early days?
Prince and the Pauper was Disney's final use of the traditional ink-and-paint and camera process,[1] before the CAPS digital-ink-and-paint process rendered the traditional techniques and equipment obsolete.[2]
The film was released in November 1990 before The Rescuers Down Under.
The year before Beauty’s release, the Mouse House used The Rescuers Down Under, a belated sequel to Disney’s 1977 animated feature, as a proving ground for a new digital animation process being developed by a small computer graphics company called Pixar. The Computer Animation Production System (CAPS) promised to bring radical change to the company’s familiar workflow by allowing character and background illustrations to be scanned into a digital environment, where they could be painted and layered in ways that would enhance the richness and depth of the final image.
What were your early impressions of Disney beginning to adopt computer graphics and modeling into its animation pipeline? (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, etc)
Honestly, we were worried that we were going to ruin the movie. CG has a tendency to look to clean, too perfect. We did the best we could to make it less perfect, more hand made. We positioned the columns around the perimeter of the ballroom by hand, we added a little bit of ‘dirt’’ to the curves in the camera motions.
The CG ballroom in Beauty and the Beast was a good use of CG, as there were sweeping camera movements that added impact to that moment in the story.
The Ballroom sequence works because you enter this magical room in a very pivotal moment in the story. Once the song ends, and they exit the ballroom, there is no more use of CG. The shot at the end of the film of the Ballroom is a 2D hand painted background.
Between first getting the task to work on the ballroom scene for B+B, but long before the Oscar nomination, did you have any idea that the project was going to have such an impact? Did you know that the ballroom scene in particular was going to be such an iconic moment in the film?
We had no idea the film was going to be so successful.
What was challenging or new about working with a camera in the computer? Was it more or less difficult than the traditional way of working?
The camera needed to follow Belle and the Beast into the Ballroom, follow and swirl around them as they danced, then follow them out of the ballroom.
The entire film was hand drawn, so we had to create 3D stand in guides for Belle and the Beast. We printed every frame out on paper, supplied them to the hand drawn artists, who would draw over our guides.
In the opening shot, we moved the camera too quickly into the room, luckily the characters feet are out of frame at the bottom, otherwise their feet would be sliding along the floor. At the end of the scene, the Beast was meant to open the door for Belle. We did not give enough time for them to walk over there, so instead the door ‘magically’ opens as they walk over to it. A happy accident:-)
Can you speak to the technical challenges and processes for the wildebeest stampede in The Lion King?
Each of these films in the 1990s really pushed the envelope for integrating CG into traditional animation in bigger and bigger ways; what was the moment for you where you were convinced this was going to be the direction that animated films (or Disney in particular) would be going in the future?
Was ‘Mars Attacks’ your first time as lead animator for CG character animation at ILM? How did the team bring these strange creatures to life, and what challenges came with imbuing them with a sense of performance?
Mars Attacks:
Tim Burton wanted a stop motion feel to the animation.
We watched ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ as reference.
They had to have an odd sort of behavior and way of moving, quick short movements.
Pupils in the center of the eyes, like not looking at anything in particular.
How did you first get involved with working on Star Wars: Episode I?
I wanted to be a lead on a major character. Even more than becoming an anim sup. Character performance was my dream. When yoda came about, a friend of mine Paul Giacoppo said to me, ‘you have to do this.’ So I fought for it. In the end there were 3 leads on Yoda, so that helped give everyone a chance.
[show the 3 tests]
Was there anything that the digital character animation team learned between episodes of Star Wars as they developed?
I worked on Episodes 1 and 2. I was lead on Watto and Captain Tarpals on Episode 1 and Yoda on Episode 2.
What can you tell us about the process of creating a performance for digital Yoda, working from the reference of Frank Oz’s performance with puppet Yoda?
I roughed in the overall motion and timing of the body first. I watched reference of Frank oz puppeteering Yoda. Once I got the feel of the up and down motion of the body, I worked out the foot steps to work with it. The simulations of the cape added a lot, and helped it looked more realistic and believable. As I did early tests and roughed in the walk, I’d send the rough takes to the simulation team, so they could work on the simulations for the cloth.
Stuart Freeborn famously modeled a bit of his own face into the original Yoda puppet. How much do animators (both traditional and CG) put themselves into the performances of their creations?
I can tell when I look at a shot, who animated which shot. When animators act out a shot then recreate it, then they are putting themselves in the performance. That’s why it’s good to mix and match references. If I’m animating a dragon with the voice of Sean Connery, then I want to put some of Sean Connery’s mannerisms in the facial performance.
On Dragonheart, we had a library of images that we used as reference.
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