![]() ![]() He mimes to the actors’ voice tracks and films himself on his iPhone. “Wes tends to act out everything himself as well. Park’s approach is similar to Anderson’s in directing “Isle of Dogs,” says Oliver. “I’d get on the studio floor in front of a video camera and mime a scene, using an actor’s voice track as a guide.” When it came to the process of communicating with Aardman’s 35 animators, however, Park’s process was decidedly low-tech. “By the time we got everything in it, rendering it all took an hour a frame,” Jones says. The creative decisions made by Park guided the 3D-CG stadium that Jones’ would construct using Maya software. “I put on the headset and it was amazing walking around as if I was in the stadium.” “We experimented with VR as a way of seeing how much of the set we needed to build,” Park says. Since he had previously worked on Aardman’s “Pirates!” and “Shaun the Sheep,” Jones says, “I was conscious to stay in the style of the ‘Aardman world.’ ”ĭifferent permutations and combinations of scanned puppets by Axis eventually yielded a cast of thousands.ĭespite a reputation for making handcrafted movies, Aardman actually adopted virtual reality technology to plan the stadium action via simple CG models. “Aardman’s puppets were scanned as a starting point for the crowds,” Jones says. But they also created 300 to 400 shots of the stadium and its crowds. ![]() Given the athletic puppet feats in “Early Man,” the Axis team had copious amounts of cleanup to do. But Jones notes, “Years ago, they had to be really careful because they couldn’t afford to paint out too many rigs.” That number will be stuck in my head for years.”ĭigital techniques are employed regularly in post-production to erase the rigs and wires that animators use to manipulate puppets. We kept real models, and used real fabric and hair - even if it twitches a bit, that’s part of the charm.”īut Aardman also engaged the digital experts at Axis VFX to generate atmospheric effects and a triple-tier sports stadium filled with cheering fans.Īs vfx supervisor Howard Jones recalls, “We worked on 1,357 shots. “This was an epic world of prehistoric landscapes with lots of fire and explosions,” says Park, a four-time Oscar winner for shorts starring the Wallace & Gromit characters as well as the animated feature “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.” “We embraced a hybrid of digital technology mixed with stop-motion. To capture Park’s Chaplinesque tale of Stone Age cavemen competing against Bronze Age footballers, Aardman had to expand its toolbox. Positioning a puppet, shooting a frame and slightly re-positioning it to shoot the next frame was the method used by stop-motion pioneers Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen to animate “King Kong” and “Jason and the Argonauts.” “Early Man” director Park even says he called the dinosaurs in “Early Man” Ray and Harry in honor of that tradition. That’s ironic, given that stop-motion techniques are as old as filmmaking itself.
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