How dneg does… animation
In the third part of 3D World’s special series on DNEG, the visual effects studio reveals its approach to animation
The third instalment in our series explores VFX studio DNEG’S approach to animation and how they have overcome some significant challenges
So far in 3D World’s look behind the scenes at DNEG, we’ve explored the visual effects studio’s work in visual development and creature creation. Now we turn to animation; DNEG employs a global group of animators to bring to life animated creatures, characters, vehicles and many other elements for the studio’s feature films and television shows.
And DNEG’S 20-year visual effects history certainly has some animation highlights. Significant work on John Carter, released in 2012, involved huge numbers of characters and set the scene for the VFX studio’s animation expertise. In more recent times, the central performances in Venom, Pacific Rim: Uprising and Deadpool 2 evidence more of the major contributions DNEG has made in the field. And episodic work for shows such as Fungus The Bogeyman and Black Mirror’s ‘Metalhead’ reveal how DNEG has brought its feature-level quality animation to television. To find out more, 3D World dives into the features Alpha and Venom to learn more about how animation at DNEG is handled.
Alpha: A slightly unusual Animation challenge
Alpha is set 21,000 years ago in Upper Paleolithic Europe. That unusual timeline for a film, which tells the story of a hunter who befriends a wolf during the last ice age, essentially meant that many of the movie’s animals would be brought to life with visual effects. Sometimes this involved augmenting real animals on location, while other times it required animating completely CG ones. One of DNEG’S main tasks on
Alpha was to craft a herd of steppe bison as they are hunted by a tribe. The men force the bison to stampede off a cliff. This meant that not only did DNEG’S animals have to replicate the look of bison in normal walking and running cycles, but they also had to consider how an entire herd of these large animals would all fall from a great height.
“When creating any animal digitally, animating to reference is of paramount importance,” states DNEG animation director Aaron Gilman, a veteran of films such as
Avatar, Iron Man 3 and Pacific Rim: Uprising. “For all bison locomotion, it was fairly straightforward to gather a large library of references from online sources as well as film and documentaries. However, sometimes a shot calls for a behaviour that is not easy to find in nature. On Alpha we needed to animate a series of shots where the entire bison herd goes cascading over a cliff edge.”
The animation began by looking into how large animals lose their footing when galloping, as well as how they smash into each other. “We got a great deal of inspiration from the film Dances
With Wolves,” says Gilman. “The buffalo hunt sequence in that film featured many shots showing these enormous animals losing their footing and violently hitting the ground at top speeds. Along with other references of animals falling, we were able to fill in the blanks on the physics of the impacts between the bison and come up with some cool blocking choreography.”
Designing camera moves in Animation
The overall bison hunt sequence in Alpha also saw DNEG need to supplement real background plates with all-cg scenes, when it was realised that several new shots were needed to help full out the film’s edit and tell the story required. Gilman says this can be common: “At some point, every animator will be called upon to design a camera move for a shot, and it is essential that animators know how real-world cameras work and that they animate them to move accordingly.”
DNEG’S animators brainstormed several new shot ideas within the initial edit, and then created a number of brandnew sequence cuts that allowed the director to choose from a variety of different camera movements, angles and lenses. Each had to replicate the style of what had already been filmed.
“Because a CG camera can be moved in physically impossible ways,” says Gilman, “there is always a risk when an animator creates a camera move that it won’t conform to how an on-set camera works. Sometimes a film may require an impossible camera move, but in the case of Alpha, as it was a very realistic prehistoric film, the cameras needed to be grounded in reality. We needed to sell the feeling of a real dolly or crane move in order for the director to buy off on these additions to the cinematography.
“We had a very experienced animation team to help create these shot concepts, and along with our animation and VFX supervision, we were able to create dynamic, realistic camera moves that mimicked a real-world feeling.”
Venom: Where Do you start?
For DNEG, the comic book film Venom posed a number of challenges. Not only was there a main symbiote/humanoid CG character to animate (and, indeed, several iterations of these), there were also amoeba-like symbiote forms. DNEG animation director Troy Saliba, whose other credits include Alice Through the Looking
“WE NEEDED to sell THE FEELING of A real Dolly or CRANE move” aaron Gilman, DNEG animation director, talks CG camera work in alpha
Glass, Monster House, G-force and The Smurfs, got started early in doing several facial animation tests for the humanoid character.
“What I knew we had to solve early,” says Saliba, “was how do you take this face that’s hardly a face, with two giant eye sockets and an open maw, that’s really all it is. He hardly has a thin strip of flesh underneath his lower eyelids and between his upper lip. So, it made it very difficult. You don’t have any brow, you don’t have any cheeks, no nasolabial crease, nothing. So all the subtle acting had to come from this graphic black-and-white, killer whale, jack-o’-lantern head.”
One other major challenge Saliba had to deal with was how the character should move. The filmmakers were intent on it not looking like a performer in a suit, while also retaining key human characteristics. “That meant,” he says, “we had to give him some weight, some power, but a certain level of agility that you wouldn’t expect from a creature that size.”
Part of those movements were transformations, where Venom could grow appendages or even go from Tom Hardy-human form to completely humanoid. This happened in several ‘wrap-around’ sequences that combined grosslevel animation with significant effects simulations.
“The animation part of the transformation process is almost really goofy,” acknowledges Saliba. “It’s almost like a hoodie. We just literally only have his mouth and have him come up over Tom’s head, it’s almost like he’s being eaten by Venom, and then we just kind of blended it into our normal performance. All of the other magic and texture, that’s all effects. That’s all layers and layers of effects and hard work.”
If one Venom character was not hard enough, DNEG also had to deliver other humanoids, including the evil Riot, and the female incarnation, She-venom. “Each had their different language,” notes Saliba. “Even though Venom was kind of a big brute, he had an elegance to how he moved – it was very fluid, like his shapes tended to be very liquid, but also the way he moved was very agile and fluid. Riot, on the other hand, is much
more rage-infused and much more brutal in what he did. The shapes he manifested were very genuinely crystalline and that informed everything that he did.”
Adds Saliba: “She-venom had to walk that strange line between sort of sexy and scary. That moment should make you feel very uneasy, so she had her own body language. But it was fun because she comes in all sultry and then tears someone’s head off.”
rigging realities
At one point, Venom and Riot become embroiled in a massive fight and join together. DNEG’S standard animation rigs had to be adapted to enable the combination of the characters. The ‘Mergevenom’ character involved crossover again between animation and effects, but it also involved a new approach to animation rigging.
“For that we used what we called our ‘Gumby’ rigs,” outlines Saliba. “These were basically our standard rigs for the characters, but with the ability to take the limbs and stretch them around and bend them into shapes, and twist them into pretzels.
“We had the ability to take certain parts of the character, say if they were going to do something crazy, and then you just saw like the face and an arm briefly. The rest was all abstract – we could snap back to default geometry of how the character looked, just for those areas, and then we could keep the rest all bent and abstract.”
Similarly, the amoeba-like symbiote also required a twist on the usual animation rig. The symbiote is a blob of spindly tendrils that can take almost any shape and then strike its prey. “Many of the rigs have bespoke solutions, per problem,” says Saliba.
“So, for instance, there were two completely different setups for the symbiotes to frame what they were doing. One was set up to follow one path and the other was multi-directional and completely independent. They were both good for certain scenarios we had within three different tentacles, depending on what we were going to be doing with the tentacles. So technically it was kind of an on-demand situation, we’d just go to the rig when we had this problem and we had to solve it.
“We’d animate the shape of the core, and then we’d animate all the tendrils and you’d get the idea of the performance, for sure, but you really didn’t know how that character was going to look exactly, until you saw the effects afterwards.”
Saliba’s animation team numbers reached the mid-40s in London, with further contributions from DNEG’S offices from around the world. For the animation director, it was an intense process of maintaining the look of an iconic comic book character, while making the different symbiotes and humanoids work on screen. He says he particularly enjoyed ‘finding’ the character early in production.
“I didn’t have any animators on the scene at that moment, so I got behind the box, which for me was a rare treat because I don’t get to do that very often, and just did face tests for Venom, animating his weird tentacle-y shapes for the symbiotes for the effects team to run all their magic on.”