Entergalactic
The team from DNEG Animation tell all about their stunning special for Netflix
Getting high on the imagination of American rapper Scott ‘Kid Cudi’ Mescudi and executive producer Kenya Barris are filmmaker Fletcher Moules and DNEG Animation. Entergalactic revolves around up-and-coming artist and recreational drug user Jabari moving into his dream apartment and falling in love with photographer Meadow. The animated romantic musical comedy was produced by DNEG, Khalabo Ink Society and MAD SOLAR, distributed by Netflix, and features the vocal talents of Mescudi, Tyrone Griffin Jr., Jessica Williams, Laura Harrier, Timothée Chalamet, Macaulay Culkin, Vanessa Hudgens and Christopher Abbott.
Unlike Jabari, who hangs out with his friends and pursues love on the streets of New York City, the coronavirus pandemic meant that the team at DNEG had to have a virtual rather than in-person interaction with each other. “The positives were that it was a little easier to get hold of people because everyone was at home,” notes visual effects supervisor Archie Donato. “On the other hand, the human factor was completely gone. It took a while to build a relationship over Zoom.”
Nevertheless, maintaining a consistency to the animation was not a major undertaking despite everyone working remotely. “To my surprise it turned out well because you can get talent from anywhere,” states Kapil Sharma, the animation director. “Strangely this project felt more like a family. The thing I did miss was going to someone else’s desk to have a quick chat to maintain certain things. Zoom was still good too.”
Animatics were provided by Netflix for every chapter. “The animatics had the storyboards inside them and Archie, Kapil and I would sit together and break it down storyboard by storyboard,” explains digital producer Chrissy Metge. “We would break it down into assets, environments, effects, character effects, anything we could literally think of and then we would go through it with Netflix. We were asking things specifically about T-shirts, what the characters were wearing, where they wanted the hair to go,
and what was important to them in that sequence.
“We got artwork in the beginning, which recruited us all. Michal Sawtyruk, our art director, his paintings were a huge influence, so we looked at all of his stuff across Instagram and beyond and fell in love with his style for the show. They were organised in the beginning and clear about what they wanted.”
What proved creatively and technically challenging was the music not being made available to animators for security reasons. “We had a beat track that the crew got to use,” remarks Metge. “That was a challenge in itself. Fletcher Moules did a fantastic job of acting that out for us across Zoom, he was making sure that we were hitting a specific beat for something we couldn’t hear!”
The secrecy was frustrating at times. “There were sequences that we didn’t know where the beat hit,” explains Sharma. “Fletch was giving us actual frame numbers. The hardest thing is when you want to match the rhythm. We sent it back to Fletch, he checked his edit and comes back, ‘We are two frames off.’ While we were doing this, I didn’t know exactly how it would come across because there was a lot of back and forth and guess work on our side. It was frustrating at times but paid off.”
As for the animation style, comparisons have been made with an Oscar-winning feature film. “I know that we are being compared a lot to Spider-man: Into the Spider-verse but that
movie wasn’t a reference at all,” says Sharma. “I Lost My Body was something that we all watched. Especially with the painterly look, we wanted to make sure we were able to achieve a clear range of emotions on the face.
“We were animating in 3D and then converting everything on 2s or 4s. It involved mathematics. We did a bunch of tests to make sure it didn’t strobe in the camera. Then Archie took those tests and we saw it with the actual colour and lighting. We said, ‘This fits perfectly.’ The movie required intimate acting and is still living in a different world. We were catering to this painterly look. Those two elements drove the animation style we wanted.”
Effects were given a 2D aesthetic, such as when Meadow is burning sage and waving it around her apartment. “I literally sat down with my head in my hands because we basically had to break our pipeline to make this work due to the animation style,” confesses Donato. “One of the other things they were into was to have 2D effects interact with 3D characters, which is so fun and amazing but also an incredibly challenging thing to do.”
A video game adaptation on Netflix was a point of reference. “Arcane was still doing a lot of their 2D work in Blender, which made it a little easier because even though it was hand-drawn, it was already digitised. Whereas we had 2D animators working on a flat piece of paper drawing their animation, and our job was to integrate that with a 3D character.
A lot of the time it was incredibly challenging because of spatial differences with the 3D cameras. It wasn’t just about stylisation, but also how you take the 2D and light it in a way that it matches with the 3D lighting. Something that helped us immensely was that we asked for line art early, so even when the animators were doing rough drawings, we would get the first line tests in there before they were cleaned up and colour filled. We didn’t care what it looked like. We just needed to build the pipeline to make it work.”
There were two initial motion tests conducted to establish the performance of the characters. “Right away we went into walk cycles and did more with Jabari,” remarks Sharma. “Once we had that we put it into actual steps and walked through it. Doing that right away made us realise that anything going beyond what we had done was going to come up very animated. We wanted to steer away from that. With the BMX we were pushing the limits but we didn’t want to do that with the actual performance. The test of Jabari walking on the curb showed that despite the motion being on steps, it could convey a lot of things about his character.
“WE BASICALLY HAD TO BREAK OUR PIPELINE TO MAKE THIS WORK DUE TO THE ANIMATION STYLE” Archie Donato, visual effects supervisor, DNEG Animation
“The second test was of three people sitting together. We spent a lot of time finding good poses. Only when the character is eating did we add to what they’re doing. There is a purpose to why a character is moving. We wanted people to forget they were watching animated characters. The only way we could do that is with the general performance. My animators enjoyed that a great deal because they got a chance to not dumb down their acting for the audience. They could make genuine, mature acting choices. In real life we don’t go super big.”
The animated personas resembled their voice-actor counterparts. “We wanted to make sure the characters came close to the real actors,” states Sharma. “A lot of that translation we worked on quite a bit because we wanted to have the face convey the exact same feeling. You want it to resemble but have its own look. I enjoyed working closely with Archie’s team because I learned a lot. We had to be quite in sync with how it would look in the final image. If it works in animation but not in final image it’s broken. If it works in final image but doesn’t work in animation, it’s broken. That collaboration was good.”
Entergalactic was an enjoyable experience for Sharma, with particular scenes making personal highlights. “Meadow’s speech at the end and then the Nightmare, which takes you on a different journey. The Nightmare was actually the one where we ended up redesigning some shots to make it flow well. I personally enjoy all of the Jabari shots when he is smoking. I ended up animating quite a few! I am surprised how much I enjoyed the movie when it came out, which usually doesn’t happen to me.”