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Behind the scenes: Epic

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Mark Ramshaw investigates how Blue Sky has proved that small is beautiful, with the microcosmic world of Epic

Its finely-tuned blend of action, adventure, romance and comedy may tick all the matinee movie boxes, but Epic is a world away from written-by-committee CG fare. Instead this is a true labour of love for Blue Sky studio co-founder and director Chris Wedge – and, somewhat appropriately for a movie so rooted in nature, it’s also a project that has organically grown and evolved during an unusually extended development period.

The initial inspiration came some 15 years ago, during a conversation with friend and author Will Joyce about an exhibition of Victorian fairy paintings. Joyce was moved to write the children’s book The Leaf Men and the Brave Good Bugs and, after the pair collaborated on Blue Sky’s 2005 offering Robots, Wedge began to look at how the idea of a tiny forest world could also be developed for a feature film. Epic’s story and characters gradually and naturally grew from this miniature milieu, along with the notions of interconnectedness and the natural battle between life and decay – eventually becoming a deceptively large-scale action adventure.

Even with such a long gestation, much work was required by the Blue Sky team to usher the project through the last 18 months of full production. “Every single asset we needed was brand-new, and the concept was extremely ambitious relative to everything we’d produced previously,” says CG supervisor Robert Cavaleri. “It took a lot of innovation and all the lessons learned from previous projects to be able to produce something of this scale.”

These innovations included changes to the studio’s handling of characters and its world-building tools. “We had a substantial need for more advanced cloth simulation this time,” says Cavaleri. “Each Leafman wears over 100 individual pieces of armour, which is a whole different ball game to a character wearing a T-shirt and pair of shorts. And as well as simulating all these elements, we also had to spend timing designing workflows that could handle them – with between 60 and 80 animators feeding all the work to just 20 character technical directors.”

In addition to fundamentally more complex characters, Epic’s story also demanded scenes with hundreds and even thousands of Leafmen – and their enemies the Boggans – on screen. Even opting for off-the-shelf solution Massive, a lot of work was required to integrate it into the workflow. “We needed a pipeline that would allow for huge crowds moving with a good degree of intelligence all around our key characters,” says Cavaleri. “To handle scenes like the one where a whole army of Boggans break from the surface of a tree, run down a branch and go on the attack required a lot of internal development, to support the movement of so many elements from Maya at the front end all the way out to our proprietary renderer CGI Studio.”

When it comes to the environments, Cavaleri notes that the world in Epic has a richness to it that greatly exceeds anything that the studio has accomplished before. “The issue is that when you put so many assets into a scene then you run up against the amount of data computers are capable of dealing with, both on the desktops and on the render farm. We’ve brought the latter up to around 10,000 cores in total, but even so files this large mean the amount of available RAM is an issue. So we had to find ways to render environments much more efficiently.”

Asset creation

This included numerous optimisation techniques for the propagation of trees, foliage and ground cover. “The fact that everything needed to animate – even when just moving in the wind – meant that you couldn’t simply do a repeat of the same asset, so we had to find a way to deal with all these unique elements,” says Cavaleri.

While Blue Sky has long embraced procedural techniques for asset creation, Cavaleri stresses that the Assembly department and art director were very careful about building the right look and feel for the forest world. “There are a number of procedural tools for randomising elements, but there’s also a lot of hand placement and sculpting, and working the elements relative to the camera to ensure balance in the frame and that the eye is focused on the action,” he says.

Epic essentially presents its story at two distances: one at regular human size and the other in the scaled-down, speeded up world of the Leafmen and Boggans. At the outset, there was some debate about whether to build two completely different environments or build one that would work from both viewpoints.

“In the end the solution was kind of a mix of both,” says Cavaleri. “On a technical level we tried to create original hero assets and then we would go back in and add additional model and materials detail to accommodate the closer scale. That really required an understanding when shooting of where to strategically and surgically supply that extra detail once the camera was down at ground level. And then, on an artistic level, we also pushed to have differences in colour and the way the lighting worked, to help the audience differentiate between the two and understand which they were looking at.”

Blue Sky’s raytracer CGI Studio has long been regarded as one of its secret weapons. While the R&D department didn’t make any major changes under the hood for Epic, more extensive deployment of subsurface diffusion did come into its own, allowing the artists to create forest scenes with glowing leaves and characters blessed with warm skin tones.

Cavaleri says Wedge constantly pushed them to look at real-world lighting, always creating initial scenes with simple skylight-based GI setups. “Then we’d go in and stylise as necessary, just placing one or two lights and reflectors as fill lighting – adding the ‘special sauce’ needed to achieve a nice balance.”

Believable characters

In keeping with the richer, deeper and more complex world created for Epic, its characters are also substantially more detailed than anything Blue Sky have created before – charming enough to remain appealing within the context of a family-friendly animated adventure while skirting close enough to realism to allow them to have a good emotional range and connection.

“We’ve done plenty of fluffy animals, but here we had to pull off something much more believable,” says animation lead Lluis Llobera. “The human world in particular needed to feel very much like our own, but even the Leafmen, the Boggans and the Jinn needed to be equally detailed. The aim was to have kids come out of the film wondering if there really might be a Leafman over on that tree, or flying on that hummingbird.”

Although he notes that the aim was to create stylised characters rather than attempt any kind of photorealism, Llobera says they were still very much aware of the uncanny valley: “We had to be mindful that the characters’ bodies moved in the right way, so that the skin stretches correctly when their jaw opens, for example. The animators spent a lot of time analysing wrinkling on the face, and things like hip twists and arm/shoulder movements. They would often disappear to a special room where they could act things out and create reference.”

“I think everyone was scared about the challenge of taking on human characters and emotions, but it was surprising how well the animators all took to it,” adds fellow animation lead Jeff Gabor. “In fact, we ended up with the inverse problem. Now that they’re jumping back onto Rio 2, they’re finding it hard to get away from this more realistic animation style.”

Gabor says that of one the more difficult aspects of pre-production involved working out how to differentiate the various groups in the story: “The most difficult one was dealing with how to separate the Leafmen from the human characters, not least because the idea is that the Leafman character Nod doesn’t realise that MK [the film’s heroine] is human until late on in the film.”

Emphasising differences between the Leafmen and the Boggans proved rather easier. While amphibians and lizards were used as inspiration for imbuing the latter with an itchy, bug-like quality, the stoic Leafmen more obviously referenced the characters featured in the work of N C Wyeth, the 20th century American artist whose work directly inspired Wedge in the early stages of development. “The Leafmen have very good posture and move in a very defined way,” explains Gabor. “You can really see it when they use their bow and arrow, in the way they pull the string across their chest with a very sharp and precise motion.”

“Because the Boggans are less realistic they were definitely a little easier to deal with,” says Llobera. “We could use extreme poses without it feeling too unnatural. We would even scale the skull to allow for facial expression, making it slightly bigger when shocked or scaling it down when angry. And with lead bad guy Mandrake, we would even scale up his teeth and shrink his pupils to make the eyes more intense. It’s still the same squash and stretch controls that we utilised on Rio, but here the aim was to use them much more conservatively.”

Doing the maths

To further highlight the difference between the full-sized humans and the smaller characters, the movie plays on the notion that the inhabitants of the forest move much more quickly than the big, bumbling humans who live nearby. For this, the Blue Sky artists developed a whole rulebook of small-scale character physics that – akin to those governing the combat in wire-fu martial arts movies – govern the limits of their exaggerated abilities.

“The rules covered everything from the way they can jump far and high, to the nature of combat,” says Gabor. “When a Leafman stops a Boggan with his fist there’s a kind of bounce while the fist remains immobile, for example. There was even more we looked at in pre-production but which we didn’t get to fully explore in the movie – such as the way surface tension on water makes it possible for these small characters to walk right over it – that would be great to dive into should there be a sequel.”

While the movie’s cast of thousands is crucial to the telling of the action-packed tale, Epic is also rich with well-defined lead characters. Mandrake, the villain of the piece, is an obvious standout – with a surprisingly dark look and demeanour for a kids’ movie. “A lot of his design came together right off the bat, and from there it was quite easy to push for a crazy acting style,” admits Llobera, whose role – as on Rio – chiefly involved dealing with the bad guys. “For inspiration, I looked at Hannibal Lecter, a lot of Gary Oldman performances, and even Christopher Walken. We did find that some of his more over-the-top moments became too scary for younger children, so had to dial it back a little. I took that as a compliment!”

Personal performances

With Bomba, the father of MK, the challenge lay in making him believable enough to sit correctly in the film’s human world and carry some weighty scenes, while still sporting a pleasingly bendable, cartoonish air. “Chris Wedge would often act out his scenes, so we immediately knew how to approach the performance,” says Gabor. “He especially wanted us to take inspiration from both Doc Brown and George McFly in Back To The Future, as well as Rick Moranis. To be honest, Chris himself was the big inspiration, although I’m not sure he’s even aware of that. He really does look and act like Bomba.”

But it was the character of MK – the heroine of the piece and the window into the forest world – who proved the most difficult to get right. Gabor says that her face was continually reworked during preproduction in search of the elusive right formula. “Audiences want a 3D character they can relate to, who doesn’t look generic, but doesn’t look so real as to be creepy,” he explains. “Movies like Tangled have definitely raised the bar in terms of female characters with strong personality and facial depth.”

He also believes that female CG characters are inherently more difficult to get right. “You can get away with more extreme expressions on a male character without it looking off-putting. But to have a digital female that looks appealing while still displaying a wide range of emotions is very specific – and to get over 100 animators on all the same page with that is no easy task.”

For Gabor, it’s the depth rather than the breadth of Epic that made it such a satisfying project. “There are scenes in the film, especially those with interaction between MK and her father, that were very emotional and required some subtle acting. That’s obviously something we very rarely get a chance to tackle in the world of CG animation, so I feel really gratified that this movie came along. For me, it satisfied a need to go beyond cartoon characters for a change and do something a little closer to acting. I definitely hope we get a chance to see these characters again.”

 

Discover the best 3D movies of 2013 at Creative Bloq.


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