THERE WILL BE MUD
AN EXAMPLE THE LENGTHS ARTISTS GO TO GET IT RIGHT
You’d expect ground effects to be part of the Cars 3 vocabulary, but mud effects?
Well, for Jon Reisch and two colleagues, mud consumed the better part of half-a-year of their time.
“It got to the point where I’d find myself staring at my kids’ cereal bowls as they ate to see how the liquid behaved,” said effects supervisor Reisch, who worked on the first Cars movie as an intern, then as an effects artist on Ratatouille and Up.
Director Brian Fee described the mud he wanted as “chunky oatmeal sitting in soup.”
The effects department at Pixar is primarily responsible for the all the natural phenomenon that you see in a film. Everything from water to fire to sand. And yes, mud.
“Through our effects work, my team really provides that believable sense of interaction that grounds the characters in their world.
“As a story point, Brian was very clear that the audience needs to understand that if you get stuck in this puddle, if you’re not moving through it really fast, you are going to get stuck. And there’s consequences for that with Miss Fritter on the loose.”
“She’s the school bus of your nightmares,” said screenwriter Bob Peterson of Miss Fritter. “My favourite line of hers is ‘Prepare to meet the wrath of the Lower Belleville County Unified School District.’”
Which bring us back to the mud, or more to the point, the giant puddles of mud that play a big part in the Thunder Hollow demolition derby scene.
Reisch called it the most challenging segment of the film for his crew,
“Mud is one of those things that’s not really a liquid, it’s not really a solid, its kind of somewhere in-between,” he explained. “And that’s just a terribly difficult thing to simulate in animation.”
The key technical tool for the effects team is physical simulation software, programs that understand something about the physics of certain kinds of motion of different materials. But there are still many inputs the artists need to do to create the kind of effects expected of Pixar Studios.
“That sense of realism that our work brings as effects artists helps our audience identify with our characters,” Reisch explained. “That’s really what it’s all about.”
So, when he sits down for the first time to watch the complete movie, will he see the mud for the trees, as it were?
“For sure, when I was a junior artist I’d sit there waiting for my scene to come up, then watch it and think about the things I’d like to fix,” he said. “Now, being a supervisor and having worked on all three of the (Cars) movies, the things I see when I watch the movie are the people. Who I worked with on a certain scene.”