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.
