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HP Technology Helps DreamWorks Madagascar 2 Find Its Wild Side
By Staff
Dec 3, 2008, 03:21
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The animation in DreamWorks Animation's Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa was achieved through the combination of HP technology and DreamWorks Animation's creativity. The sequel to Madagascar used HP technology to help animators solve artistic challenges in bringing the wild of Africa to the big screen. HP workstations enabled DreamWorks to bring to life every creative element, from fields of grass to vast landscapes to massive crowds of animals. Audiences experience a wide variety of deeply intricate, organic environments that exist in part thanks to the unprecedented power of HP workstations with multi-core processors.
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Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer), Gloria the
hippo (Jada Pinkett Smith), Alex the lion (Ben Stiller)
and Marty the zebra (Chris Rock) get their first
glimpse of the African savanna and its thousands
of inhabitants
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HP has helped DreamWorks Animation create groundbreaking animated feature films from Shrek to Kung Fu Panda. With 342 HP workstations and the largest and most powerful render farm ever used—also powered by HP technology—DreamWorks Animation was able to take creative elements in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa to new levels. In fact, the film required more than 27.4 million render hours—five times as many as the original Shrek.
"Our goal on every film is to push the limits of our creativity to bring the story to life for the audience," says Ed Leonard, chief technology officer, DreamWorks Animation. "HP technology not only allows us to reach those limits but to exceed them."
The technology behind the film is the latest example of the ongoing collaboration between HP and DreamWorks Animation that continuously delivers "the next big thing" in animation.
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Alpha lion, and Alex's dad, Zuba (left, Bernie Mac)
shows Alex (right, Ben Stiller) the birthmark—and
family bond—that they share, while Alex's mom
(center, Sherri Shepherd) looks on.
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"HP is committed to providing customers like DreamWorks with the power and reliability they demand," said John Thompson, vice president and general manager, Workstations Global Business Unit, HP. "HP and DreamWorks continue to work together to raise the bar and bring the best visual realities to audiences around the world."
About Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa
In the sequel to Madagascar, Alex, Marty, Melman, Gloria, King Julien, Maurice and the penguins and the chimps find themselves marooned on the distant shores of Madagascar. In the face of this obstacle, the New Yorkers have hatched a plan so crazy it just might work. With military precision, the penguins have repaired an old crashed plane—sort of. Once aloft, this unlikely crew stays airborne just long enough to make it to the wildest place of all—the vast plains of Africa, where the members of our zoo-raised crew encounter species of their own kind for the very first time. Africa seems like a great place ... but is it better than their Central Park home?
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(Left to right) Penguins Rico, Private (Christopher
Knights), Kowalski (Chris Miller) and the Skipper
(Tom McGrath)—along with the Skipper's traveling
companion—admire their handiwork.
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Anything But Plain: Creating (And Populating) Africa
What Alex, Marty, Melman and Gloria see when they reach that vista is their first truly inspiring glimpse of the beautiful and expansive African landscape. The filmmakers reasoned that in their previous film, the environment of Madagascar was pretty much a pass to create a fantasy land ... but when you start dealing with the real landscapes of one of the most beautiful and photographed countries on the Earth—well, a little realism would have to come into play. They turned to research, looking at films, photography, books and the Internet. But a wiser head prevailed.
Eric Darnell: "Jeffrey [Katzenberg] told us that we needed to go there, to see it ourselves. I mean, some of us figured, you know, trees and grass, it probably looks a lot like Simi Valley, right? But when we got there, we realized that nothing looks like it. I never imagined that I'd actually go on an African safari, but it was an amazing experience, and also a great bonding experience for the crew. All the key creative leads went together and spent several days out there, living in tents on the savanna. To be able to experience this landscape and this place together as a creative team was just absolutely invaluable. Because after we came back, and for the next two or three years, we could say, 'Remember when we were on the Masai Mara, the sun was going down and there were zebras walking across the grass?' Everybody remembers and they connect to that, and then we put the important components of that experience into our film. The trip was invaluable."
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(Left to right) Sacha Baron Cohen as King Julien and
Cedric the Entertainer as Maurice
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Tom McGrath: "When you get to Africa, you realize just how big the place is. I mean, there are grass and trees and plants that look like familiar places, but when you get there, it opens up and it feels like you can actually see the curve of the Earth. And at that point, we realized, 'Wow, we really need to get the scope to sell Africa in this movie.' And two-thirds of what you see when you're there is sky. And we just realized that it has to be a huge part of our set ... how are we going to do that?"
Producer Mark Swift relates, "The senior leadership on the show visited about five different locations in Africa. When you get to Africa—and so many people have said this—it's a magical place. You get things from it that you never imagine when you see it on television or in the movies. What we all took away with us, visually, was the enormity of the sky. The land is extremely flat, and there are these beautiful volcanoes in the distance. But the skies and the clouds—those became really important elements for us. And then just seeing the sheer amount of animals all mingling with each other also made us realize that we were going to need a huge crowd system worked out for this movie."
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(Left to right) Penguins Kowalski (Chris Miller), Rico,
the Skipper (Tom McGrath) and Private (Christopher
Knights) prepare to launch "Operation: Tourist Trap"
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So production concentrated on utilizing the DreamWorks arsenal to create scale, as producer Soria explains: "The big challenge on this movie was the crowds, everywhere we went. Because of where this story takes them, they are meeting herds of zebra, big numbers of hippos, a pride of lions. The concern was that there were a lot of animals of different sizes ... and how were we going to shoot that? So everything was bigger—the sky, the crowds. It ended up being a challenge of scale."
Kendal Cronkhite, production designer of both the original and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, was charged with the visual orchestration of all this ... scale. In the first film, her designs were more fantastical, simple yet stylized. For the follow-up, the world had to be a bit more tangible, more sophisticated, yet the designer was able to transfer the overall design elements and simplicity already visualized on the screen and 'Africanize' them, producing an Africa not seen before—rooted in realism but filtered through an animator's lens. She was able to also incorporate the scope of the environments, particularly the grass, and create an epic quality.
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(Left to right) Melman the giraffe (David Schwimmer)
gets a lesson in how to woo from King Julien
(Sacha Baron Cohen).
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A majority of Cronkhite's time was devoted to dovetailing a realistically-based Africa with stylized animals. One way for her to do this effectively was to establish a related environment for each character. She elaborates, "Where the plane crashes into the savanna, the directors wanted a real no-man's-land kind of feel. We return to this set many times, as the penguins are rebuilding the plane with all the chimps, and it turns into a big construction site—the surrounding foliage is really rough and scrubby. Around the watering hole we have distinct areas for the zoosters and their groups. We have the giraffe area, with tall and sweeping and curved acacias—they have this chartreuse colored bark that's really beautiful. The hippo area uses quiver trees—which are really unusual-looking, like big red wine goblets—and lots of ferns, palms and those kinds of more lush trees, because it's sort of a spa-like area. It's on the edge of the waterhole and it's got little pools divided by rocks.
"And then as you come over to the zebra area," continues the production designer, "it's grass, so that they can just run—basically grass, rocks and, ironically, zebra trees, which are another type of acacia. The lion area, it's a rock kopje, which is a little rock outcrop with boulders of lava rock. The area also has many species of plants, such as umbrella trees, which are a type of cactus shaped like an umbrella."
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An unfortunately attired Alex the lion (right,
Ben Stiller) calls Marty the zebra (center, Chris Rock)
away from his herd of look-alike pals
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The zoosters' plane hop to a different location also brought more concerns and challenges. The majority of the first film took place in jungles, presenting the characters in front of living walls of flora. Africa is practically an exact opposite—where down go the walls and 100-mile views to the horizon are revealed.
In addition, because of the more personal storylines, the sequel still needed to maintain the fun, broader aspects of the first, but have the ability to change gears and deliver a more subtle, sophisticated style of animation when the subject called for it. The tone was to be fun, but still with a believability of danger.
Returning head of character animation Rex Grignon explains, "We're not abandoning the style that we established in the first film. It's a really important part of this world. But what this film gives us is an opportunity to get a little more personal with our characters—when that happens, it's not really time to be doing big, crazy kinds of stuff. But we don't want the film to bog down, either. There's still a lot of great fun and silly stuff in it, but there are moments when we do get in closer—when Alex learns about his past—so there's some sincere stuff that we want to be real with. But, of course, when the penguins are hijacking an SUV, and there's a big finale—you've got to have that really fun stuff. We've never lost that. We're just striving for character continuity while allowing them to explore a bit more."
Something that would go very far in filmmakers' effort to maintain the comedy while adding a little emotionality would be the cinematography. As the window between computer animation and computer-generated imagery grows ever smaller, the crossover of talent between the worlds of live-action and animation continues. Guillermo Navarro, Academy Award-winning cinematographer for Pan's Labyrinth, signed on for the voyage to Africa with the Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa team.
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(Left to right) Marty the zebra (Chris Rock), Alex the
lion (Ben Stiller), Melman the giraffe (David
Schwimmer) and Gloria the hippo (Jada Pinkett
Smith) receive the disappointing news that the
repairs to their plane won't happen overnight
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McGrath reasons, "In our first film, we had to lock off shots and it ended up looking somewhat like a series of post cards. We knew we wanted to do a moving camera through a lot of these spaces. A live-action cinematographer would be able to help us develop a more cinematic language for this movie. Mireille Soria brought in Guillermo, and he's fantastic, and he opened our eyes to a lot of things."
Darnell continues, "Everything that you could do with a real camera in the real world, you can do with our virtual cameras: zoom in, zoom out, incorporate different lenses, move the cameras in any way you want. And we can do that even more, because we don't have to pay for a helicopter or an expensive dolly, if that's what we need. And since cinematography was so critical, especially for this movie—with all the scope and the size of the environments, as well as the action—we needed someone with a live action frame of mind."
Intro to Cinematography
Navarro began with an "Intro to Cinematography" class for the filmmakers and crew. It commenced with the photographer holding a rolling camera and demonstrating how he finds shots in live-action filmmaking. Then, he began passing the camera around, first to the directors, then others, asking his "students" to find their own shots. The resulting footage was full of moments of discovery—their experience in a loose, free and easy environment became valuable when they moved into the computer, where conditions are more time-consuming and labor intensive.
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King Julien (center, Sacha Baron Cohen)—
accompanied by his right-hand lemur,
Maurice (right, Cedric the Entertainer)—
addresses the citizens of the watering hole.
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When the team shifted to flat, 2D storyboards, into which they wanted to introduce a moving camera, Navarro advised them to gather people in a room, set them up with the script, and explore the scene through the camera. Again, worthwhile results, as they discovered how the scenes were (or were not) playing—the participants were also themselves the animators, who now had greater knowledge of the emotional arcs for the characters in those scenes. One such sequence put through this exercise was the argument among the four friends, which escalates as the monkeys' deconstruction of the plane becomes more zealous.
McGrath laughs, "We probably have the high school play version of this entire movie on videotape. Those exercises of actual filming and solving problems on the fly actually impacted how we eventually made our film."
The "animators as actors" idea was taken even further, when they were immersed in several days of workshops in order to challenge themselves as artists. Characters were dissected through discussion and questioning—resembling the preparation an actor might go through in exploring the backstory on a character he was to portray. Then, prior to executing a shot, the animator might act out the scene multiple times with variations, each time playing the character in the shot. This allowed a more in-depth look into the characters themselves, to get at more of the emotions the filmmakers were so keen to discover, giving the animators keys to more subtle expression of both surface reactions and subtext.
Supervising animator Cassidy Curtis even expressed, "I worked on almost all of the characters, and some of the new ones are really fun to explore. Tom and Eric are so receptive to the ideas that we bring to them, and the communications process has been a two-way street and very collaborative. To watch the animators get up in front of the directors with a new idea for something, and to see them try it out and have the directors say, 'Yeah, that's pretty funny, let's try it'—and then to see the expression on the animators' faces when they come out of dailies, having seen their idea realized—it's just great and a really satisfying way to work."
HP Technology
To fully coordinate the efforts of hundreds of film artisans, DreamWorks again employed the HP-designed technology that links their two California campuses—one in Glendale (southern) and PDI in Redwood City (northern)—the Virtual Studio Collaboration system (VSC). Such a hook-up puts DreamWorkers in the same room, essentially, with 30-foot-square video walls. This technology proved especially useful to producer Mireille Soria, whose husband and family keep her rooted in Southern California. Having jumped at the chance to return as producer on the sequel, her traveling was significantly curtailed up to Redwood City (where the majority of the crew was working), thanks to the video conferencing that kept all departments on the same page and up-to-speed.
Making the Movie Even More Effect-ive
Returning visual effects supervisor Philippe Gluckman thought that the effects in the first film had been difficult to achieve ... until he realized the challenges that lay ahead for him in Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa.
Gluckman explains, "To create all the jungle in the first one, with the density of plants—at the time, it was a big achievement, particularly since it was jungle plus crowds and things like fur. But in some ways the jungle before—even though there were a lot of plants—it would mask the view after a certain point and, therefore, you didn't have to produce as many plants just because they would be obscured. But the landscapes in this film, because it's so much more open that you see basically all the way to the horizon, the element that probably becomes the most complex is actually the grass. You see grass all the way to the horizon. You also see crowds going all the way into the distance. And the grass is very difficult, because basically, the computer has to generate every single blade of grass ... and that becomes just a lot of data to handle."
As a result of the African trip, Gluckman also realized that not only would the expansive sky prove problematic, so, too, would the clouds that sometimes dot and, at other times, overwhelm the space. He particularly found the way the clouds were lit to be fascinating—"there's an element of unpredictability to it all."
To help replicate this unpredictable Mother Nature and her mercurial way of playing with light and clouds, proprietary software was created that could produce the clouds themselves as 3D elements, which then allowed the computers to light them—as difficult and as memory-consuming a task as it was.
He continues, "We pushed the limits of technology, trying to get the light to shine through the cloud to get a unique translucent behavior. This brought us some really amazing images that either were used directly, where the clouds are actually 3D elements, or were used as the basis for the painters to start with. And it gave us looks that were really fascinating."
Darnell comments, "Think of it as being inside of a globe with painted clouds that surround you. But we decided to make these three-dimensional clouds, which are much more computationally expensive and technically challenging. But to really give us the sense of scale and size, and to see these rolling shapes playing against each other in perspective—well, that is something that's very difficult to do with a painting or a backdrop. And these three-dimensional clouds gave us the opportunity to really bring the sky to life, while giving it the same kind of scope and scale and perspective that we were getting on our landscapes in Africa."
But to incorporate those clouds into the frames, and have them actually support the composition of the frame, the job fell to the matte painters. McGrath says, "We have this crew of incredibly talented matte painters who come in and create these skies for us, which can move and reflect light as well. And since two-thirds of our screen in much of the movie is domed with this sky, we really relied heavily on the matte painters to support the sets we built and the compositions of the frame."
Into those frames, other challenges would wander—like thousands of animals— and others would simply be there—like moving water or, perhaps even more problematically, a billion blades of grass. This three-foot grass does more than just cover the savanna, it also has to 'act'—compact under hooves and footfalls, part when animals are passing. Again, technology to the rescue, with another system to grow and individually control these blades of grass. This sort of advancement made the original film seem light years ago, as the characters of Madagascar couldn't pick up an object or touch their hair in the beginning of the first film. DreamWorks computer artisans kept pushing the possibilities and advancing—the characters had moving hair and when they fell on the ground, the hair could compress.
Head of effects Scott Peterson offers, "We do a lot with the grass. Where it's trickiest is actually where the grass meets up with the characters. We had to put animation into the grass, so that if a character is stepping on it, the grass is reacting properly, and we found out that making the grass collide properly actually doesn't look very good. So we have to embellish it with lots of almost very directed wind—this gives it a secondary motion."
Such careful effects treatment of things like grass, foliage animation and dust is called an invisible effect—invisible in the sense that it should organically fit into the scene without pulling attention. Countless hours are spent attempting to make such animation real and integral to the scene.
Something else that has to be carefully engineered is crowd control, which would become especially important to all of the herds of animals at play on the African savanna. Darnell says, "As soon as you put a hundred different characters into a shot, you have to find a way to make it feel organic. If you have a little cycle of a character waving, 'Yay!,' it's easy. But if that shot lasts too long, you start to see it repeat. And if you haven't done enough variations of that, pretty soon this guy's doing this, and then three guys over, he's doing the same thing. Your eye can easily pick up these patterns. And so it's a real challenge, both creatively and technically, to animate these big populations in a way that feels natural and organic. But even more difficult for us sometimes is getting our characters to pop off of these big masses of animals. You know, zebras are designed with black and white stripes for a very specific reason—that's so when they're running in a herd, you can't pick out one from the other. So being able to pick Marty out— sometimes we'd put him in a little more light, or darken the other zebras with dust or dirt, or drop them out of focus a little bit. We ended up creating the same challenges for ourselves that Mother Nature intentionally creates—we drop our lions into the very authentic African savanna, and suddenly, where'd they go? You can't find him, because he does what he's supposed to do, which is blend in with this grass so the prey can't see him. So we had to do things to bring up the color of our lions and knock back the color of the grasses so that we could defy Mother Nature and actually see our characters onscreen."
Such involved work to capture all the detail and movement gave Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa an unintended record over the preceding film. It took 12 million render hours to complete Madagascar, while the follow-up would require close to 30 million to complete.
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