“I think the toughest thing for a director to do is to know what he wants. It’s not how to get what you want; it’s knowing what you want. So many people make movies and they don’t know what they want.” –Stephen Spielberg
As many people know, Spielberg is probably my favorite film director. Not all of his films are favorites, but he is extremely talented at managing the three main responsibilities of the director: directing the camera, directing the actors, and directing the screenwriter (although this is an area where he is weakening). Yesterday Stu Maschwitz posted a video that goes a long way towards explaining why.
This clip was shot by the American Film Institute in 1978, and it’s a principle that I strongly believe in. Obviously, good directors don’t have to be former animators, but animation is an excellent training ground because it requires considerable planning, and so it forces animators, and directors, to decide what they want before they start production. This approach will always give better results than the make-it-up-as-you-go style of improvised filmmaking used by directors with no pre-conceived vision. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Also, here’s a clip where Spielberg explains why he always draws his own storyboards. Even with a budget large enough to support staff artists, he does the initial sketches himself. This is another important principle, since the storyboard artist is the guy who directs the camera. If the director renounces this responsibility, he is no longer the director of the camera, and he probably didn’t know what he wanted in the first place.
Last month I mentioned that seeing Up in 3D had inspired me to do a few of my own experiments. Below is one of my renders (cross your eyes to see it).
Dual-eye renders are easy to produce from just about every animation program, but it’s tricky to tweak those images in compositing apps without destroying the illusion. See the flickery 2D-created shadows? This is why stereoscopic tools like Ocula have been created for high-end compositing apps like Nuke.
But the interesting part of that clip really isn’t that it just looks 3D. The interesting part is that it looks like a painting. This is a very simple rendering technique that I’ve been developing for a while in Lightwave. It’s not particularly new in theory, but I’ve spent some time extending it and documenting it, and now managed to get something that offers both flexibility and control.
I’ve always been eager to learn about various non-photorealistic rendering solutions, and wondered if other people might be interested in mine, so I prepared some notes and examples, and sent it off to SIGGRAPH.
To make a long story short, on the 5th of August, I will be presenting my material at the Painterly Lighting session, which should be great, because it also features talks from Adolph Lusinsky, lighting director for Bolt, Ivan Neulander of Rhythm & Hues, and Jonathan Stone of Double Fine Productions. If any of my readers will be there, I’d love to catch up afterwards.
You can read more about how this technique works and see more examples in the abstract, which I’ve posted here.
I don’t write that many movie reviews, but Pixar’s latest release was such a cut above other films that I wanted to comment on many aspects of it. My brother Ben also had a few things to say.
The Story of Up
Story is king. Pixar’s writers and directors are known as being masters of the story development process, and in addition to exhibiting a technical superiority in the areas of structure and plot, they are growing increasingly adept at bringing powerful themes of character to life.
The Music of Up
A powerful storytelling tool is the musical score that accompanies every film. Some directors and composers don’t use this tool to its full extent, but Pete Docter and Michael Giacchino have done a tremendous job at uniting script and score to emphasize the emotional turning points of the film.
The Art of Up
But film is also a visual medium, and animated films offer a tremendous opportunity for artists to control every aspect of the image that the audience sees. From character design to color and composition, each shot demonstrates excellence in creative discipline.
The Technology of Up
Of course, a computer animated film also leans heavily on the rendering advances that allow for a hairy dog, a squashy scout with an overloaded pack, and a cubical man in perfectly simulated jacket and slacks to go venturing through a beautifully lit jungle. Also, this is Pixar’s first film to be released in stereoscopic 3D, which is no mean feat in itself.
Most Pixar films have had one area of groundbreaking technical achievement. Monsters Inc had a lot of new hair and fur simulations. Finding Nemo debuted a lot of new fluid dynamics. With Cars it was volumetric dust, and Wall-E made some serious advances in emulating light in physical camera lenses.
I wan’t sure what Up would bring to the table, since it used tech from all the previous films. The balloons cluster needed some seriously impressive collision detection, of course. Now the ballons themselves are basically simple spheres, so that’s easy math, but remember that each balloon is on a string. That’s where the hard math comes in.
In many ways, Up’s tech is just the latest generation of previous innovations. For example, a lot of the character and cloth work from Ratatouille has been improved for this film, as has the subsurface scattering from The Incredibles. And of course, the volumetric renderer has been beefed up for some seriously impressive clouds and atmospheres.
However, as far as pioneering goes, this is Pixar’s first stereoscopic film. There’s a lot of extra work to do for films that will be shown in 3D, but the extra dimension adds some new storytelling tools. The directors have complete control over how wide the depth of a shot really is, as well as whether objects push out of the plane of the screen or recede behind it, and how far.
For Up, this control is used subtly and well. For example, the altitude of the floating house is very apparent. The scene with Russell on the porch high above the ground had a much better sense of jeopardy and vertigo to it than when I’d seen it in the 2D trailer. Large objects like Muntz’s zeppelin seem more imposing because they can be huge on the screen and obviously far away at the same time, giving the audience a real understanding of their true scale.
More importantly, though, the film develops a cinematic language for 3D early on, and the audience picks up on this. The emotional moments are fairly shallow in their stereography; taking place in small spaces. This forces viewers to focus on the dialog there, and it makes the visual depth of the sweeping vistas in other scenes more breathtaking by comparison.
Unfortunately, the technology behind 3D films isn’t perfect. The circular polarization of the new Real D glasses easily beats the linear polarization and anaglyphic lenses of yesterday, and the 144hz refresh rate of the projectors beats trying to keep two reels synced, but there are still limitations.
For starters, the image was very dim through the glasses. 3D projectors need to throw more light at the screen since the polarized lenses block so much of it. During several scenes I had to take the glasses off just to get a better idea of what colors and tones the lighting technicians were using. And of course, fast horizontal motion will cause some ghosting in the image. Besides, to some extent, modern cinematic editing techniques need to be tweaked just to be watchable in 3D.
For example, high-energy films will often cut quickly back and forth between medium, wide, and extreme close-ups of action. Editing in 3D, the director now has a choice; he can jump the action closer to the audience when the camera cuts closer, which makes sense in physical space but forces the audience to constantly “refocus” as their focal point leaps back and forth in 3D space – or he can keep the action the same relative distance from the screen regardless of what the camera does, which looks strange but is less jarring to the viewer.
So, 3D films need to take these issues into consideration, and Up does a great job of that. Every shot is long enough for audiences to take in all the spatial data, and the cross-cutting nearly always happens along similar planes so the images don’t appear to leap forwards and backwards from the screen. Even the exciting chase scenes feature long, swooping camera moves that show off the 3D effect without fast cuts or the main action jerking around in frame.
In the past, the 3D element of 3D films was always a gimmick. It was really too crude to enhance the story , but now it’s coming into its own. Directors are learning how to use it, rather than work around it. Studios love it because it’s a powerful anti-piracy measure; as long as you can’t watch 3D movies at home you must go to the theater. Even audiences seem to like 3D movies, but that may not last, since they are really no longer a novelty.
As of this writing, I think all upcoming CG animated movies are being released in 3D. All the trailers before Up were shown in 3D, and they were almost all awful. Ice Age 3 fared the best because its teaser was basically a continuous short, but the others all pushed 3D further than they should have; extremely short shots, attempts to push the depth farther than it could be maintained, and too much fast motion. Also, since most trailers recut movie scenes, there was no spatial coherence between shots, which made the recutting more obvious.
The 3D effect was far more satisfying when used by the Pixar team in small ways. For example, there’s a scene where Carl and Russell chat by a campfire. The camera is static, and the shots are long, but just seeing the stars in the deep background and the house slowly rotating in the wind gave the scene tremendous visual appeal. Also, the “chunkified” stopmotion-style props and sets were well suited to stereoscopic display; many establishing shots felt just like my old Disney View-Master discs.
In fact, it was so visually interesting that over the last few days I’ve done some of my own 3D tests in Lightwave. Keep an eye out for those next month. In the meantime, remember that in the same way that Pixar’s films are usually the best examples of the art serving the story, they also demonstrate how technology can serve the story as well. By doing so, the art and technology are far more interesting than they would be on their own.
All images copyright Disney/Pixar. This is the third in a series of articles which include the Story of Up and the Art of Up.
One of the challenges that CGI artists and technical directors face is how much detail to add to their characters. Especially for the types of stories that animated films generally tell, too much realism could be a distraction (or even disturbing). But at the same time, not enough detail makes for a blander image and might not be as engaging to audiences.
Pixar’s Renderman is the software that’s responsible for most of the photoreal images in modern film effects, so there’s certainly no technical limit to the complexity that Pixar could be adding to their films, but their art direction has always tried to find a balance. With Up, they’ve gone for an approach which they call ‘simplexity,’ adding detailed textures to simple objects.
More importantly, the simple shapes they’ve used help to tell the story better. Carl Fredrickson is a square. Every aspect of his anatomy, from his jaw to his glasses to his fingers, is cubic. Carl’s chair is a cube and his pictures are in square frames. His wife Ellie is different, slim and curvy and has a round head. Her furniture is curvy and her pictures are in oval frames.
When Russell comes on the scene, his roundness also complements Carl’s squareness visually, and their different body shapes help to communicate their character differences to viewers. When they meet up with Dug and Kevin, the shapes of the tall thin bird and the short fat dog make for an aesthetically pleasing lineup with clearly recognizable silhouettes.
This kind of design is very important to creating strong and memorable characters, but more than that, the rounded design similarities between the oppositely-built Ellie and Russell remind us of Carl’s emotional needs. At Pixar, story is king, and much of the four or five-year production process focuses on reworking the script and story reels. However, they also spend much of that time working on the art design of the project.
Since every single element of an animated film is created by hand, the director and art department have far more control over every frame than they would with any live-action film. To make the most of this opportunity, Pixar artists like Lou Romano will create thousands of sketches and paintings to develop the look of the film before any animation begins. You can see a tiny fraction of this amazing work on his blog.
Characters, sets, environments, props are designed and redesigned around and in the context of the story. Shot composition and camera moves are built and tested as the script and storyboards come together. Color keys and production stills flesh these designs out further for the texture painters and lighting technicians. Every shot is a work of art, because each shot has dozens of sketches and studies and lesser works of art behind it.
And the film is more than just the sum of its shots. The color design plots out the look of the movie over time. As Carl’s warmly nostalgic past fades into modern day, his life becomes desaturated. Not as an special effect in post, but naturally, as the paint on his house fades and the colorful surroundings are replaced by grey construction lots. Then, a brightly dressed scout, brilliant skies, and lush jungles explode onto the screen once the adventures start.
This is more nuanced than a simple Wizard of Oz shift towards color; dark caves, mist-shrouded plateaus, and stormclouds keep both the hue and saturation of scenes changing to match the storyline and compliment the emotional arcs of the story. This is all worked out in pre-production to maximize the power of the story’s message.
To learn more about this process and see more of the brilliant production art that was created, you can buy the Disney/Pixar book The Art of Up now. It’s a beautiful hardcover with 160 pages of tremendous work, everything from napkin sketches by Pete Docter to amazing character designs and digital paintings by Daniel López Muñoz.
All images copyright Disney/Pixar. This is the third in a series of articles which include the Story of Up and the Technology of Up.
Pixar is a film company that is redefining family movies, but they are also forcing the rest of us to redefine how we classify movies in general. Up is a perfect example of this. At first glance, it has all the tired clichés of almost every other animated movie: the grumpy old man, the spunky kid, the gravel-voiced Britishy villain, and the dopey comedy relief animal sidekicks. Fortunately, Up is really nothing like any other movie.
Yes, there are many similarities. There have been movies that revolve around the despair and emptiness that a husband feels after his wife has died, and there have been movies where talking dogs perpetrate goofy high-jinks in pursuit of treats – but this is surely the first time that a film truly supports and truly needs both plotlines.
In fact, it’s a great testimony to the storytelling talent behind Pixar’s team that Up takes place in a world where childlessness, eminent domain, and death are painfully real, and yet thrilling zeppelin chases through the trackless jungle are also real. It’s an impressive feat, but not only does the great fun and great depth perfectly mesh, each aspect of the film is strengthened by the others, however incongruous they might seem at first.
Note: This story analysis contains many spoilers.
The film opens with Carl Fredrickson’s whole life, shown flashing by from early childhood to old age. He is a man defined by his love for his wife, and by their combined thirst for adventure – adventure in the classic swashbuckling style – but the joys and tragedies of everyday life postpone all of their grand plans until Carl is a tired old widower. He never gave his wife what he thought she wanted, his house is surrounded by skyscrapers, and civil busybodies are trying to ship him off to a retirement home.
With nothing left to lose, he launches his house on a last bid to fulfill his promise to his wife Ellie; to go on their big adventure to South America. With her pictures on the wall and her adventure journal in hand, he discovers a small snag. Russell, the eight-year-old urban boy scout, has accidentally stowed away on the porch.
When the house lands in South America, Carl is torn between his desire to reach his adventurous final destination and his mundane duty to keep an eye on Russell. Irritated by every wonderful distraction along the way, his spirits are lifted only when he meets his childhood hero, the elderly but still bold and intrepid dirigible pilot Charles Muntz.
However, decades of hunting an elusive quarry with only his canine guards for company have changed Muntz from a charmingly eccentric explorer into a glory-obsessed madman. This betrayal is yet another broken dream for Carl, and he and Russell have to flee for their lives.
However, these heightened stakes force Carl to take his responsibilities more seriously, and from this perspective he begins to realize what Ellie knew all along. As he pages through her adventure journal, he sees photographs of their lives. She wasn’t waiting for a trip to a far-off location to provide adventure – her life with Carl was an adventure. This is the film’s message; adventure doesn’t require some epic trek or exotic holy grail goal because life’s true adventures exist in everyday events and experiences and relationships.
This suddenly understood truth makes Carl a new man. Now he can be the father-figure that Russell needs, stand up to Muntz, and make dogs obey his commands! Ironically, it’s the realization that adventures don’t need to be action-packed quests that actually catapults Carl into the giant swashbuckling finale, but nevertheless, the lesson is still clear.
Another strong theme of the film is one of fatherhood. Ellie’s inability to have children is the first setback of the film, and this is presented as being almost as tragic as her death. Likewise, it turns out that the apparently wilderness-loving scout Russell is only desperate to win his final badge because the awarding ceremony is one of the few times he can see his divorced father.
In a very poignant moment, he reveals how he treasures the quiet and “boring” moments with his Dad afterwards far more than the exciting process of actually winning the badges. This is an extremely thought-provoking statement for Carl, and it helps him to understand the nobility of the commonplace and that he and Russell both need each other.
And so, what looks like a crazy cartoon movie about the wilderness of South America is one of the strongest depictions of family and purpose ever put on film. In fact, a five-minute montage at the top of the film has more to say about love and marriage, joy and loss, and dreams and sacrifice than any film of the last decade, and that’s without any dialog.
The Toy Story films, Monsters Inc, and Finding Nemo have all had strong themes related to the brevity of childhood and often a fear of growing old. Even Cars revolved around a nostalgic take on the forgotten past. As powerful as those themes are, Up seems to be past that. After all, Carl is already an old man. This does not matter; he’s going to continue having adventures with Russell, and any change is part of the adventure. Carl’s past sorrows are still there, but there’s no wistful apprehension about the future. In this way, Up is a very hopeful film.
Two years ago I wrote a review of Ratatouille which mentioned how I thought that Pixar’s own story might have influenced their take on Gusteau’s almost-successor. Up is their second post-Disney project, and I think it may reflect a more settled, hopeful position, and certainly a more mature storytelling style. Pete Docter and Bob Peterson have excelled themselves technically, and artistically, and in doing so, made one of the most pro-family, pro-children, pro-happiness films ever.
They’ve done what most movies don’t dare attempt. Most comedy genre films, almost by definition, can’t depict real tragedy; setbacks have to be minor, temporary, or presented as uncomfortable jokes in and of themselves. Modern tragedies tend to communicate sadness with inevitable despair and utter hopelessness, and any jokes must be grim and dark to preserve the mood. Through superior writing, Up manages to show us both without weakening the message.
Plus, because the film takes place in an emotionally-realistic setting, rather than rose-colored screwball world of constant comedy, the jokes are actually funnier. And in this world where funny things happen naturally, sad events are genuinely sad, and far more tragic than they would be in a genre where total gloom is the universal constant. Maintaining this delicate of balance of emotional truth is tough, especially in a film with goofy birds and balloon-carried houses, but Up never wavers.
All images copyright Disney/Pixar. This is the third in a series of articles which include the Art of Up and the Technology of Up.
