quite long. [It was hard] to get that up to such an intensity without being too jarring.” Simple dialogue moments are not easy to achieve. “There is a scene when Robyn is talking to herself and pretending to be her dad talking back to her,” states Moore. “She is walking up and down picking things up, putting them down and moving them around. All that was tricky work. Some of the action stuff is over fast; you might make a little mistake with continuity but don’t notice it because there is so much to see, but not when it’s a small scene with a couple of characters.”
Much to the amusement of his childhood friend Stewart, Moore has fully embraced the animals that may actually get reintroduced to Ireland after being extinct for 250 years. “My beard is getting more wolfy!” laughs Moore. “The wolf is called Mac Tire in Irish which means ‘son of the land’. It isn’t like a big bad wolf idea. It’s more like a protector or respectful attitude to the other apex predators.
It’s fascinating that Ireland has forgotten that. We didn’t see the land as something to be used for our own benefit but as something we shared.” A proud moment was animating to ‘Running with the Wolves’ by Norwegian singer and songwriter Aurora Aksnes. “Tomm and I wanted to make sure it was a real visual masterpiece, because it’s supposed to convey the pure joy that Robyn has when experiencing the world as a wolf,” explains Stewart. “In there we had some demanding shots of ‘wolfvision’ along with epic shots of a pack of wolves running. It was very technical in animation, layout and compositing. Then it all has to work to a song. From the feedback that we have gotten most people love that sequence.”
EFFECTS & COMPOSITING
Essential for effects was being able to match the illustrations created by co-art director Maria Pareja. “Everything was done with Tvpaint and some fixes
with Moho,” states FX supervisor Andreu Campos. “We would try to split the illustration into different elements and these layers would be given to the compositing department to match to the final look. All of our work was hand-drawn animation, done frame by frame.” Shadows were problematic. “A lot of times the shadows don’t match with the point of light because it is something expressionistic. At the end of the movie when all of the magic is flowing around the characters, that’s a good example of teamwork because we had to match our work with the animators and what would later be done by compositing. We worked with compositing so that they could reuse the effects in different ways.”
All of the compositing was done within Nuke. “There are a lot of different styles in the movie,” remarks head of compositing Serge Ume. “The main problem for us was to find a way to make different stuff but at the same time have a graphic style that matched together. It was not easy to do. The shadows in the town are straight and in the forest they’re more like watercolour. We tried to keep everything in volume but at the same time really flat. A lot of tools were developed to add texture to the characters, blush of the cheeks or make different treatments for the lines of the town and forest. A big part of the movie is during the night so there is a lot of progression of lighting. In the middle of the movie there are four or five different sequences and the sun is going down. It was not easy to manage but was important for the story. We worked closely with Maria based on the concept she did, and all of the colour scripts that we had were really helpful in comp.”
“WE HAD 10,000 FOLDERS FULL OF REFERENCES WE WERE USING TO BUILD AN ENVIRONMENT THAT FEELS REAL” Maria Pareja, co-art director, Wolfwalkers
Below (top): As her friendship with Mebh develops, Robyn begins to integrate with the forest animation style
Bottom left: Previs of the magic effect
Bottom right: The wolves showcase a playful side inside the den with Mebh and Moll
A BELIEVABLE WORLD
Research was an important element in making the environments believable. “We went on a few trips with the background team to do research of the Irish forest that we have around Kilkenny and in the city itself, to check the streets and see how everything was in terms of colour, shape and how to push all of those,” explains co-art director
Maria Pareja. “At some point we had a mess of 10,000 folders full of references and pictures we were using to build that kind of environment that feels real. You’d be able to say, ‘I could imagine someone grabbing the basket or lighting that fire’.”
The settings had an impact on the character design and vice versa. “We had to work with the characters at the same time because the backgrounds had to match them,” states Pareja. “I was afraid in the beginning that they would look like sticker characters, but at the end we managed to simplify the backgrounds, and compositing did an amazing work adding textures to the characters so that both of them matched together perfectly.”
“For Tomm and Ross,” Pareja continues, “I was like a tool to communicate to the other departments. I was doing a lot of reference for effects when the backgrounds finished so Andreu Campos could replicate them. I remember the first time I saw the first comped scene it was in the house of Bill and Robyn. I was like, ‘Oh, my god!’. It was cool: with the animation, effects, and colour it instantly felt like they’re alive and living there.”