ritics may have lifted their legs on Disney’s film ‘The Shaggy Dog’, but the family comedy raced near the front of the pack its first weekend out, fetching US$16.3 million in ticket sales. Brian Robbins directed the film, which stars Tim Allen as a dad and a workaholic deputy district attorney. Also starring in the film is a bearded collie named Cole trained by Birds & Animals’ Mark Forbes that plays a 100-year-old Tibetan sheepdog.

Allen is prosecuting an animal rights activist accused of attacking a pharmaceutical company where a research scientist (Robert Downey, Jr.) has been borrowing the Tibetan sheepdog’s genes to create a Methuselah drug. Inside the lab, a menagerie of research animals sport various dog-like characteristics – the scientist’s failed experiments. Allen becomes another.

To create the mutant lab animals, the filmmakers turned to Tippett Studio, known for its character animation. There, 46 creative artists worked on 110 shots, which including transitions shots as Allen turns into a dog, a DNA sequence, and a surfing sheepdog as well as the lab animals.

“Our goals were to take a realistic approach to animals that were genetically engineered to have dog traits,” says James Brown, lead animator. “They used the real animals when they could, and used ours when the animals needed to push the cages or bark.” The mice and rats bark, chase their tails, and act like dogs; the rabbits do the same thing. “At one point, the rabbits are in a car sticking their heads out the window with their ears flapping,” says Schelesny. “The king cobra has a shaggy sheep dog tail that it wags. It’s supposed to act cute rather than as a cobra.”

For reference, Schelesny shot videos on the set where he gained a lot of respect for the cobra. “They were deadly,” he says. “Their single minded goal was to kill all of us. The handlers said, ‘Stand back 20 feet and look for an exit. If we tell you to run, run for your life.’ They were absolutely dangerous.” Brown’s challenge was to find some kind of cuteness in these vicious vipers. “We had to find a way to juxtapose the king cobra with comedy,” says Schelesny. “What we looked at was how puppies are eager to please; how they want to participate. It was exactly what the character needed. Rather than being menacing, he was eager to please; he wanted to lick you rather than kill you.”

Even though the lab animals had canine characteristics, with the exception of the frogdog and the cobra’s tail, modelers built them in Autodesk’s Maya with the skeleton structure of the specific animals. “The only different thing we added was a dog tongue,” says Brown.

A core team of five animators worked on the project. To help understand the animals’ natural movement, the animators put the real animals against a grid and shot them orthogonally; from a 90-degree angle. “Not the snake,” says Brown. “Just the mice and the rabbits.” The grid helped the animators understand the proportions of the animals’ movements. “It’s extremely helpful to see how far they moved compared to their body,” says Brown. “When a rabbit sits, it’s still bunched up, almost spherical. When it stretches out to walk or hop, it gets almost twice as long. You can see it on the grid. These animals were more about motion than acting.”

Then, because the animals needed to act like dogs, the animators visited dogs at the local SPCA. “They let us take the dogs out of the cages, play with them, and see how they act in the cages when someone comes in,” says Brown. During the research phase, the animators, modelers, riggers and painters all worked with the CG animals on turntables, testing for one thing after another. “It was a different set of challenges because it was subtly realistic,” says Brown. “If a rabbit barks, it looks funny, but we have to make it believable. It wasn’t harder or easier; it was just different.”

“Every CG character we work with has unique challenges,” says Schelesny. “In this case Tim Allen was the star and we were creating co-stars. Everything had to serve the comedy he provided. We needed to be funny, but not as funny as the stars who acted as opposed to overacted. As an animator I can tell you that anything we think worth doing is worth overdoing, so we had to be careful.”

“We did two transition shots,” says Tom Schelesny, visual effects supervisor. “Our battle orders from the director were that he didn’t want us to do Tim Allen as a wolfman running around with hunks of fur stuck onto his face. We had to find a cinematic and creative way to demonstrate transitions without going through a wolfman look.”

The solution was to have the hairs retract into the pores. In one shot, for example, the dog has its paws on “Mom’s” shoulders and as the camera dollies behind her back, the fur grows shorter as it retracts into the pores and the paws extend into human fingers. By the time the camera has moved to the far side, the hands have become human hands.

“That was a 3D effect,” says Schelesny. “A 3D morph with animated hair.” Some of the more interesting work, however, was in creating the photorealistic, if odd, lab animals – mice (or rats), rabbits, a frog dog and a snake. The rabbits pant with their long tongues hanging out and bark; the snake has a furry tail. The frog dog has a bulldog’s head on a frog’s body.