Seoul Seminar Wrapup - Animal Logic & Blur

Nick Hore & Damien Gray of Animal Logic.

So many times at events like SIGGRAPH or GDC, I only get to catch half of a presentation before I am pulled away for something. It's such a treat to be able to sit down and listen to our clients talk about their projects for an entire presentation.

Yesterday, thanks to Animal Logic and Blur, I was able to do just that.

Damien's presentation on Happy Feet yesterday was great. Based on the Happy Feet seminar presented at SIGGRAPH, Damien went through the process of bringing this Oscar-winning production to life. Happy Feet was shot using traditional filmmaking principles, as if it were a live action movie rather than a CG film. Director George Miller said at the onset of the project that he would have use real penguins in Antarctica if he could. Scenes were developed rather than shots, starting with the voice acting, then mocap shoots driven by the voice performance and later a technique called "lensing" allowed the teams to see what worked and didn't from the mocap shoots.

Damien stated that they were consistently adapting live filming techniques to a CG process and vice versa, which overall enhanced the creative result of the project.

One aspect that I found particularly interesting as part of the character performance pipe was the audition process for each character, where each character was auditioned similar to that for a real actor, with voice and movement. This also proved to be an audition for each animator too.

Damien's parting words from his presentation was that two main lessons were learned during the making of Happy Feet.. 1) The importance of flexibility and 2) Having several iterations minimizes overall risk.

Some fun numbers I walked away from the presentation with.. over 5600 rigs were created, 17 mocap actors were on stage at one time, up to 600 people were on staff at the project's peak, and over all 94 TERAbytes of data were stored.

Next up was Remi's presentation of Gentlemen's Duel. GD is another project that I am quite attached to, because last year during my first Asia tour & the XSI 6 Tour, we were given permission to play the short in every city, so I have seen it probably a dozen times, and I love watching a audience react to this great project. For those who don't know, Blur works on short films as a creative enhancement process for their artists. There is essentially (and again, I am paraphrasing) an open call for story pitches. The winning story pitch gets to be made into an animated short within the studio.

For XSI, GD was the first time the SW was used in Blur's pipeline for animation & rigging. Since GD had a longer project schedule, the team was able to look at what needed to be done in order to incorporate XSI into Blur's MAX-based pipeline. Never easy to incorporate anything into an established pipeline, the artists and TDs at Blur embraced XSI for its artist-friendly workflow, reliable architecture, strong referencing system, scripting with Python and the speed and flexibility in the rigging and animation toolsets.

Remi also talked about the Transformers cinematic, which was all keyframe animation, and a few other ongoing projects that are mocapped based.

All in all - our 9 hour day came to a close at 7pm, where we posed for a few photos before heading out to yet another delicious Korean feast.

Mmmm.. Green Tea Dunkin Donuts.

Not quite Red Bull, but it will do the trick.

Nabe pours a beer for Nick. It's considered impolite in Korea to pour your own alcohol. It's not rude, I discovered, to elbow your colleague and say "Please pour beer. Now."

The team at CORE with Softimage & guests.