The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Making ‘the Internet’
Northeast Ohio native helps bring to life complicated ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ sequel
Ernie Petti is an adult who gets to play with some pretty incredible toys, albeit toys he didn’t dream of playing with as a kid.
Petti, a Northeast Ohio native and a graduate of St. Ignatius High School (1993) in Cleveland and John Carroll University (1997) in University Heights, works for Walt Disney Animation Studios, the last several years as a technical supervisor on films that include the recent “Ralph Breaks the Internet.”
In a phone interview during a stop in the Cleveland area to promote the film — a sequel to 2012’s “WreckIt Ralph” that hit theaters right before Thanksgiving — and make presentations about his work to students at the Art Institute of Cleveland and JCU, Petti talked about a path that involved majoring in physics and computer science at John Carroll.
While he enjoyed the physics, he says, he ultimately saw some kind of future in computer sciences, pursuing a master’s degree in the field at the University of Iowa and working in aerospace at Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“That was interesting — good experience — but I really wanted to do something more visual, something where you could touch it or see it on the screen,” Petti says.
It was a case of rightplace-right-time, he says, when Disney made a recruitment stop at the Iowa college, and Petti joined the company in 2000.
He first worked on 2002’s
“Treasure Planet,” as a tactic supervisor.
“So it was a highlight in that regard,” he says. “‘Bolt’ (2008) was one that I was really involved in.
“‘Zootopia’ (2016) was the first one where I was in my current role as technical supervisor,” he continues.
“Plus, I’m really proud of that movie.”
Petti describes his job as helping to make these incredibly complex films as efficiently as possible.
“(The) technical supervisor comes on pretty early in the show,” he says.”I started about two and a half years ago (on ‘Ralph Breaks the Internet’) — right when the first version of the story was starting to come together.”
That, he says, is when a couple of related questions can be asked: “What don’t we know how to do yet? What are the technical challenges that we haven’t (faced) in previous movies that are going to be really hard?”
Then, he and others work with both the technology group on one end and the artistic team on the other to figure out how to turn visions into realities. He never wants to be the bad guy at this stage.
“You definitely don’t want the first reaction to be, ‘No, we can’t do that,’ even though internally it might be,” he says. “It’s more of trying to get to the core of what they’re going for. Sometimes people will say they need ‘this,’ but really the underlying story point, the underlying problem they’re trying to solve, is slightly different, and there might be a different way of doing that that will get them what they want but in a little more-feasible way.”
In “Ralph Breaks the Internet,” digital pals Ralph (voiced by John C. Reilly) and Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) travel through the Web on an adventure, and the film is packed with clever visualizations representing various online concepts and Internet-based companies with which many of us are very familiar.
“The biggest challenge with (the visualizations) was just figuring out what they should be,” Petti says. “We all use the Internet, so we all have an experience with it, but it’s really abstract in that you’re looking at Web pages. What does that mean in terms of a 3D environment that characters are interacting with and using?”
Thanks in large part to all those visualizations, “Ralph Breaks the Internet” is an incredibly visually dense film.
“That was the movie’s big technical challenge,” Petti says. “It didn’t have a neverbeen-done-before thing like fur for 60 different species in ‘Zootopia’ or a huge ocean that you’re spending time on in (2016’s) ‘Moana.’ We’ve done buildings, we’ve done crowds — we’ve done all of that. We’ve never done it to this scale — we’ve never done thousands and thousands (of buildings) stretching to the horizons with millions of (people) and hundreds of thousands of signs on every building.”
Another challenge: an elaborate car-race scene involving Vanellope and a new character, Shank (Gal Gadot). Petti says he loves the way it came together, but it took a lot of work, starting with the research.
“We actually had the animation team and the layout team go to a track and learn how to drive on a track and drift and do spin-outs and all of that stuff,” he says. “At the same time, we talked to a person who (shoots) live-action car chases and learned about how it’s filmed, too.
“So, based on that, we added cameras to the cars in the 3D environment ... to film them from the angles and the ways that are a common language for car chases so it would feel familiar.”
They shot, he says, about 100 minutes of footage for that sequence, which is far from standard operating procedure.
“That was a challenge — just in terms of how to cut and edit that,” he says. “Usually, we storyboard all our sequences and then try to render as little as possible because that’s a cost — we try to do as much as we need and no more.
“But for the car chase, we had to think differently and do it more like a live-action movie, where you have a lot of coverage from a lot of different angles and hand that over to editorial and they cut it into something in the editing room.”
Another key sequence has Ralph and Vanellope visiting a virtual Disney world, populated by characters from various Disney properties, including heroes from Marvel Studios, Stormtroopers and others from Lucasfilm’s “Star Wars” movies and, last but not least, various Disney princesses.
“It was absolutely as much fun as you can imagine,” Petti says, adding that it was a ton of work because even though these were familiar characters the filmmaking team had to build models of them that would work in the movie. “We got all the original voices of the princesses back, so they came in to the studio to talk about their experiences. It was definitely a really fun part of it.
“Ralph Breaks the Internet” is a movie anyone can enjoy, Petti says.
“The world that it’s in has such a variety,” he says. “Everyone’s using the Internet, so there’s sort of that awareness and the fun of seeing it visualized, but then there’s the poking fun at all these other (Disney) properties. This is the only movie where you’re going to see all of those princesses and Marvel and ‘Star Wars’ (characters) in one place. Plus, it’s just a good, I think, friendship movie.”
“It was absolutely as much fun as you can imagine.” — Ernie Petti, technical supervisor on “Ralph Breaks the Internet,” on getting to incorporate various Disney properties such as “Star Wars,” Marvel and Disney princesses