Q&A • AUGUST 24 , 2001
Rat Race's Wild Titles
10 questions with Wild Brain's Julia Tortolani and Eric Schweickert

by David Nagel
Executive Producer
dnagel@digitalmedianet.com

Your task is to create an opening title sequence for the latest Jerry Zucker comedy, Rat Race. The film features, among other things, a massive ensemble cast of name-brand actors, and you need to keep the audience entertained as all of their credits parade across the screen for a whopping three minutes and 15 seconds. That's not a title sequence; it's a short film. Oh, you're also on a tight deadline with a limited budget.

So what do you do?

Well, if you work for San Francisco-based Wild Brain Inc.—the studio that actually created the opening sequence for Rat Race—you get yourself some talented animators, a bunch of Macintosh G4s and a few copies of Photoshop and After Effects and get cracking!

What Wild Brain Director Julia Tortolani came up with for the film, which opened last week, was a photo-collage piece featuring digitized versions of the film's cast and a choppy animation style to move the viewer through the credits and into the movie's opening live action scene seamlessly.

The animated title sequence in Rat Race transitions
to the live action opening scene.

Wild Brain creates content across a broad range of media, from film and television to commercials and interactive platforms. Founded in 1994, Wild Brain’s client list includes Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, DreamWorks, Warner Bros., Oxygen Media, LucasArts, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. Wild Brain's animated commercial credits include work for Hershey’s, Sega, Nabisco, Ford, KFC, AT&T, Sony, Microsoft, Nike, Levi Strauss and Coca-Cola.

The studio uses a wide range of technologies for its projects, spanning a number of platforms, from Macintosh to SGI Irix. For this project though, it was Mac all the way. The photo-collage technique was done entirely in Adobe After Effects and Photoshop.

I had a chance to interview Director Julia Tortolani and Senior Technical Director Eric Schweickert about the company's most recent work for Rat Race, the technology used and, of course, the role of the Mac in the process.

Creative Mac How did you get involved with the Rat Race project?

Julia Tortolani Most commercial work I do comes in through my rep, Patricia Claire in New York, but this job was different. This one came in through word of mouth. Jerry Zucker, the director of Rat Race, was looking for something original, a look no one had seen before. It was Steve Perani of Global Doghouse in L.A. who really steered Jerry to us. [Global Doghouse is an ad agency in Los Angeles that does TV commercials for movies.] Steve was familiar with my work through his friendship with Carl Willat, a director and colleague of mine at Wild Brain Studios. Originally the job was headed towards another company, but after Jerry Zucker saw the photo-collage work I do, he seemed determined to have me do the job. Which was incredibly flattering. We actually pitched several approaches ranging from cel to CGI. One concept had the celebrity character faces mapped into little drawn rat bodies. In the end Jerry wanted nothing but photo collage, so I made these photo-collage caricatures, and then in Adobe Photoshop we constructed them into fully functional digital puppets which hinge at their joints and are complemented by additional replacement photography for special expressions.

CM Wild Brain has worked a lot in spots, but how did you wind up doing the title sequence for this movie?

Tortolani I had done some animated title sequences for TV shows and short films, but this is my first feature film job. I hope to do more feature film titles; it's very rewarding to see your work on the big screen. Film resolution allows for a lot more detail and a lot more information to come through. The characters in this piece are small, but at film resolution you can see every blink and expression. TV resolution doesn't afford such attention to detail. Film creates a larger experience.

CM Do you use Macintosh for all of your work, or was this simply a project that you thought would work more smoothly on the Mac?

Tortolani I tend to lean towards the Mac for all my work, but I am not an exclusively Mac director. I like Macs because the interface is so well designed that I can think about the art and not about how to work the computer. They must have had artists in mind when they created the interface because it allows one to get right at the objective. I have created lots of animation without computers (stop motion, tabletop shoots, line drawings/painted cels direct to film, etc.), as well as animation created completely in a computer 3D environment. I love it all, but the Mac is where I am most at home. I am really comfortable designing on the Mac. I was fortunate enough to be right on that Macintosh wave while at Parsons School of Design. I remember when Photoshop came out and blew everyone away!

Work in progress: Character development for Rat Race's title
sequence. Click image for larger view.

Eric Schweickert Wild Brain has a number of different platforms for different departments. Our CGI animation department is, for the majority, Unix-based using SGI machines. We also have a 2D Ink and Paint department that works exclusively in Unix. The Mac for all intents and purposes is the broadest tool from concept to post. The Mac's ability to read and write files and share directories in both Unix and Windows platforms allows it to be at the center of the majority of jobs we do. In the case of Rat Race, it was perfect because of the portability of complex multi-layered images from Photoshop straight into After Effects and the ability to update those Photoshop files through the course of production without extraneous importing.

CM Tell me about the puppets. How did you create them? And why did you do them in Photoshop?

Tortolani The puppets were created for economy. You know the expression "necessity is the mother of invention?" Well that's the deal here. My previous collage work had consisted of all replacement photography, which provides a similar but different effect. Replacement photography obviously requires a whole lot of photographs. A lot of work goes into the photo shoot, and prepping of the photos, isolating the necessary hundreds of replacement parts, etc. This job had a tight budget and not a lot of time. Plus we had a lot of celebrities, yet only about four to five images of each celeb. So the puppets allowed us to create a basic body that could be used for most poses, and then we replaced the heads and hands and feet to create the wacky expressions. We also did a lot of work tweaking facial expressions at the pixel level, little tweaks to eyebrows, eyeballs and mouths.

Schweickert You have to look at the pros and cons of 3D models versus 2D puppets. The nature of photo-collage animation is that it is meant to appear as flat photographic images mimicking live action with short choppy motion. By replacing specific body parts or puppetting those parts, you achieve a surreal photo character experience. Most of the motion lies on the X and Y axis. In a 3D environment, one could only utilize the rigging of a puppet for animation and some inverse kinematic functions for keying poses, but there would be a horrendous job of transferring, conforming and mapping hundreds of body parts onto planes. The account of Z space would be lost. Our 2D puppets in Photoshop and After Effects eliminated any cross platform file transfers as well as having to single out each body part as a separate file in a character's library. With Photoshop, an entire character's library of body parts could be summed up in one Photoshop file. Furthermore, each body part could maintain its own unique qualities—for example scale, foreshortening and angle—without having relational distortions to other body parts. We were able to literally build some poses in Photoshop, import them into After Effects and key the next pose and let After Effects do the inbetweening. For the majority of the animation, we used free-floating puppets, which could be positioned into most any pose.

CM And you used After Effects 5 for all the animation?

Tortolani Yes! After Effects rocks. It's been my tool of choice for several years now. When After Effects 5.0 came out we were on the fence about whether to stick with 4.0 or 5.0 for about five minutes. The team all knew 4.0 quiet well, and sometimes the software version you know is safer than the version you don't. But once we heard 5.0 had improved layer parenting (helpful when you've got literally hundreds of layers) [and] more 3D functionality (for our multiplane moves) and could allow us to work in 16-bit space (necessary for film color matching), we were sold on 5.0.

Schweickert We Started the job in After Effects 4.1, but after testing 5.0, we realized that the new functionality of "Parenting" was going to save us tons of time. In addition, The new version of AE 5 has a better ability to create and convert Cineon files, which was our final delivery format. This was especially useful for the interior Casino shot that seamlessly transitions from the photo-collage world into the live action world of the film.

The negative of the first scene of the movie was scanned at Cinesite and delivered to as Cineon files. We were then able to import those Cineon files into After Effects 5.0 and view what are normally 10-bit logarithmic color files in a 16-bit linear color space. As long as we replicated the color space in 16-bit linear identically, it would then go back out to 10-bit logarithmic Cineon files without any color discrepancies for the film out.

AE 5.0 also had no problems handling RAM previews for our outrageous 2.35 aspect ratio for anamorphic film projection. Each frame translated to 1,828 x 778 pixels. The entire title sequence was 4,238 frames long, or roughly 3.25 minutes of animation. At one point there was a single After Effects composite that encompassed the whole title sequence with literally between 75 and 100 sub-composites. Our final sequential file delivery for film out was over 75 gigs. AE 5 was a champion. We normally never switch applications in the middle of a job, but in this case, it was still very early in the creative stages.

Work in progress: Parenting character parts in After Effects.
Click image for larger view.

Parenting in After Effects 5.0 was a blessing. It allowed us the ability to not only parent one specific feature of puppet like a character's head, but also allowed us to parent nested composites such as a pre-comped library of hands. If you align the anchor points of all the hands in the pre-comp library to the same x and y coordinates, then you can puppet the whole library and merely use opacity keys in the pre-comp to change hand poses as needed. Parenting also allowed relative scaling for some of the more forced perspective shots that give that title sequence and extra stretch of reality.

As far as expressions are concerned, we did do some research into some inverse kinematic expressions for ease of posing the puppets, by which one can move the furthest extended tangent object, and the rest of the parented objects would follow. We found that the expressions we tried were not dynamic enough and had limited rotational movement. It required further scripting and research, of which we had no time to develop. In addition, we had experienced animators who had already done this style of animation in After Effects 4.0, so it pragmatic to work without using expressions on account of the limited schedule.

CM Had you done anything similar to this kind of animation prior to this Rat Race project?

Tortolani Yes. I have done a few other projects that were similar. One was Reality Chick for Oxygen Networks. It was an animated TV show about a pregnant superhero. She and her cast of characters were also created using digital puppetry. I was fortunate enough to have the same team of After Effects Animators on this job (the incredible Jason Yen, Jance Allen and Tau Geber). Because they had worked on Reality Chick, we were way ahead of the game. The animation these guys can do in After Effects was what made this project so good. They really brought it to the next level.

CM What kinds of animation have you been involved with in the past?

Tortolani I started out doing cel, but in the last five to six years I have started to specialize in this photo-collage medium. It's still labor-intensive like cel, but it's got its own set of issues. It requires actual photography, which usually means actors, wardrobe, lighting, film, processing [and] scanning before any character design or animation even happens.

CM Is commercial work just dead in New York right now? Do you think it will pick up again soon?

Tortolani No, commercial work isn't dead. It's a concern to everyone when things slow down. A lot of people get frightened, and some companies go under. But stresses such as dips in the economy also strengthen the industry. You know, survival of the fittest? I think we were living a little too high on the hog there with all the inflated media commerce. Now its time to regroup and see how we can be more efficient and cost effective.

Work in progress: The Cineon view. Click image for larger picture.

The difficult thing about animation is that the profit margins are smaller than with live action commercial work. Clients want more control over animation work because they know you can tweak every frame, and generally we do. Still it becomes absurd when you are watching a spot and an agency art director pauses on a frame and scrutinizes the composition of a single frame. Live action rarely falls under the same scrutiny. Still we roll with it and make the best of it. It's generally a labor of love around Wild Brain. The studio attracts artists who are about the quality of the work. If they were all about the cash, they wouldn't be in this business.

CM What about studio work? Everybody seemed to rush to get projects done before the strike deadline, so there's been a bit of a lull. Do you see that picking up again?

Tortolani Yes. I do see it picking up again ... slowly. But I so think the SAG strike did some serious damage. Lots of motion picture work left the U.S. and went to Canada and other countries. I was pissed about the strike, it didn't help anyone I know. A lot of people in the business got hurt. Rushing work in under the deadline probably affected the quality of the work to some degree. This summer has been pretty hurting for a good movie. Rat Race was a refreshingly good movie. I hope people talk it up; it's a good movie that you can bring the whole family to and still laugh hard.

CM What are your plans for OS X migration?

Tortolani We're waiting for the software to catch up. I am looking forward to the Linux-based 3D packages porting over to the Mac. That will be nice.

Schweickert Right now we have an R&D G4 running OS X where we're experimenting with carbonized apps, albeit few. Until our set of Adobe tools passes the OS X test without failure, we'll be sticking to OS 9.0 and 9.1.

Schweickert has worked at Wild Brain for five years. In addition to his work in animation, he has an extensive background in prepress design. His projects include The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle; commercial spots for Sony, Nike and Coca-Cola; and a CG short film called Hubert's Brain, for which Schweickert did the title design.

Tortolani joined Wild Brain in 1999. Since then, she has directed commercials for Midas, Mattel, Nabisco’s Ritz Crackers, Loup Connect and Parfums de Couer, as well as station IDs for Noggin’ Network. Her recent projects at the studio include "Guilty As Sin," an original Web series for wildbrain.com, and "Reality Chick," a television/Internet series for Oxygen Media Networks. She came to Wild Brain from @Radical Media in New York, where her work included projects for Nike NYC Basketball, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Ford and Hardee's. Her animation work also includes a 55-minute animated program installed with a synchronized light show and surround sound mix at Universal Studio's Marvel Mania Theme Restaurant in Hollywood.

For more information on Wild Brain, visit http://www.wildbraininc.com.

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