CGSociety CGNews
More Green is on the way! 'Shrek the Third' teaser.
Tuesday, 03 April 2007, by Renee Dunlop
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Shrek The Third‘s release is right around the corner. With a crew of roughly 350, over 130,000 frames of fun are about to hit the big screen. To help whet your Ogre appetite, here are a few tidbits to chew on. Look for a full-length feature story on CGSociety with a pipeline overview and interviews with VFX Supervisor Philippe Gluckman, Effects Lead Matt Baer, and Character TD Supervisors Larry Cutler & Lucia Modesto in a few weeks.
Seven foot tall Shrek and his love, Fiona, have been married for eight months by the time Shrek The Third starts. The latest instalment includes 23 key fairytale and fantasy creatures, with additional dwarves, evil trees, witches, evil knights and pirates all making appearances throughout the film. There is a huge expansion in character animation, lighting, costumes, and FX.
And yes, a forth Shrek is on the way, plus a half hour TV Christmas special to be released this year called ‘Shrek The Halls’. Picking up roughly where ‘Shrek The Third’ left off, ‘Shrek The Halls’ takes place in some of the same environments with the same core of characters and a few new ones. Scheduled to run over the next 15 years, the visual and storyline quality will be the same as the films so it stands up to the test of time. There has been some talk of spinoffs from the Shrek characters as well.
Several advancements were made for ‘Shrek The Third’. Global Illumination was used extensively this time around, and fire was handled volumetrically. The cast of characters has expanded greatly, and ten-year-old character models were replaced with new and better ones to handle detailed rigging, clothing and hair. The hard thing about rebuilding the main characters is they have to have far more capabilities of movement and expression, yet must look just the same. It won’t do to have a recognizable character introduce a whole new set of expressions or movements, so the riggers and animators had to hold back from including anything that the audience might find distracting.
Shrek The Third Trivia
PDI imported 32 of the best animators hired from all around the world, including Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, England, Scotland, Wales, Spain, Canada, Russia, Lebanon, New Zealand, Paraguay, and the USA.
Early on, the filmmakers considered making Cinderella a complete slob, a reaction to her slave labor through adolescence, and Sleeping Beauty perpetually hyped on caffeine. However, they decided to go in a different direction, with a Cinderella succumbing to what I will call Obsessive Cleaning Disorder, and a Sleeping Beauty suffering with a case of narcolepsy. During a rebellion amongst the Princesses, they light a bra on fire, so the effects team burned a few bras for reference. All in a days work.
When villains take over Far Far Away, check out the storefronts and signs. You will see businesses called Go Go Away, Grim’s House of Ale, The Skeleton Key, Plowed Pub, Evil Way and Mean Street. And look for the jokes inserted by the Art Department at the Worcestershire Academy, from the tags on various stones to notices on the pillar in the center of the school.
They use detail and precise references to the medieval style, but with modern touches. A snack machine that dispenses a chunk of ham or a barrel of ale was modeled after one at PDI (unfortunately the menu contents are different), but with a lever similar to what you might find on a jackpot. The football players uniform are constructed from chain mail. The cheerleaders from Worcestershire Academy were originally supposed to cheer with spiked iron balls instead of pom-poms, but they turned out to be too heavy and awkward to be funny. And whose the most hysterical of all? The cheerleaders originally wore shorter dresses with chastity belts. However, to remain period appropriate and to cause less distraction, their final uniform became a much longer skirt.
Distraction shows up in many forms. Merlin the Magician’s tunic, with its folds in constant movement, is entirely simulated, so the animators had to stare at a naked Merlin while animating. To keep from embarrassing the animators as well as Merlin, they provided him with black spandex shorts to wear.
Dragon and Donkey now have their family, and Shrek and Fiona have their bundle on the way. Baby vomit used the fluid solver they wrote for Antz. But the Shrek cast was not alone. A total of 28 babies were born to artists during the making of Shrek the Third.
