SPECIAL FX
Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation brings back all the fave characters and puts them on an ocean cruise.
Naturally, things don’t go swimmingly.
The movie marks another major feature to be completed out of the busy Vancouver-based Sony Pictures Imageworks.
“I worked on the first one seven years ago and I’m really excited to have this one come out,” says visual effects (VFX) supervisor Michael Ford.
Director Genndy Tartakovsky is the creator of such Cartoon Network animated series as Samurai Jack and Star Wars: Clone Wars, and he also voices Blobby, the green blob monster previously voiced by Jonny Solomon in Hotel Transylvania 2. Ford says he can always be depended on to come up with challenging and rewarding ideas.
For instance, putting the characters on a cruise ship means there’s water. Animators don’t like water.
“You have to put the water through a water simulation software — which actually does mathematical calculations to get you a reaction appropriate to that of real water,” Ford says. “When you have something smashing down in the water, the software will calculate how much that weighs and what its impact would look like. And then you’ll do it over and over and over again until it meets the director’s unique style and vision and look for the whole film. That’s a lot of work, no pun intended, to float the boat.”