ANATOMY OF A SCENE: PETER RABBIT

ANIMAL LOGIC LAYOUT SUPERVISOR NED WALKER RUNS DOWN HOW THE LAYOUT DEPARTMENT WORKED ON A PARTICULAR SCENE IN

1. STORYBOARDS

The first pass storyboards for this Peter Rabbit scene were drawn in pre-production by the story team. These drawings are the essence of the shot and were used as a guideline for the action and timing on set. You can see that the framing changes a lot from these boards to the final film, but the story beats are there.

2. ANIMATICS

After the plates were shot, the story department completed draw-overs of the sequence on the footage as a guide. As you can see, the scale of the rabbits and their depth in 3D are hard to get spot-on in a 2D drawing, so now layout needs to build everything and begin our process of creating an awesome composition.

3. LAYOUT, PART 1

The elements come together in Maya. The bike prop and set were lined up to the plate for us by the tracking team. They have also supplied the 3D camera to match the real on-set one. The Mcgregor rig has been animated in the roto department to match the plate action. Now we have everything we need spatially to add our CG bunnies and create the shot.

4. LAYOUT, PART 2

We adjusted the framing from the animatic we received quite dramatically. We zoomed in to make Mcgregor larger in frame and panned to make him more central. We added our CG bunnies and completed a rough blocking pass (adding Benji left of frame to create a nice balance of foreground characters). Peter has been parented to the Mcgregor rig so come render time he will look nicely aligned to the plate Mcgregor.

5. FINAL

There have been some small positional changes to the characters in animation but in essence they have followed layout's composition very closely in this final rendered frame. Camera, character blocking and composition are key parts of layout's work and flow from our department right through to the final rendered shots. Our layout is the framework for the other departments to build the film on.