hen Director George Miller first began to
think about the story for ‘Happy Feet,’ he
was about to start production on a fourth ‘Mad Max - Road Warrior’ film. The 2003 Iraq war had begun and finances were falling short, so the post-apocalyptic episode had to wait. Miller had been working closely with an editor in Sydney whose father was Frank Hurley.
Hurley had been in the expedition that first made their way down to the South Pole with Douglas Mawson, then with Ernest Shackleton. This was the start of another beautiful friendship. “I saw a documentary about eight years ago,” Miller explains, “'Life in the Freezer', done by the BBC and I was completely blown away by the Emperor Penguins, the way they live and survive by a community, the way they sing to each other to imprint and find a mate and that was the beginning of 'Happy Feet'."
Behind every good film is the team that creates it. Animal Logic took up its present position at the Sydney Showgrounds some years ago, in a superb location with other companies in an air of frantic fairground film-making. Rehearsals in car parks, pilates classes on the lawns, every window of the walk from the gatehouse filled with production meetings in coffee shops or young artists pumping away at their PCs. It’s a week since the cast and crew screening of ‘Happy Feet’ and while the pace has quickened on a future CG project, the Animal Logic crew appears to be kicking back just a tad. Smiles on the faces of the crew are infectious.
The crew at Animal Logic were just coming off the highs of ‘The Matrix 2’ movie and Aidan Sarsfield was cleaning out his desk and drive from that production, when the ‘Happy Feet’ project landed. Aidan was invited by Producer Zareh Nalbandian to join the team. “I was handed the chalice of the 'Character Supervisor' role,” says Aidan. He managed character technical directors, riggers, modelers, and texture artists; a team that has grown from six to 40 in three years. This team of specialists has been involved with building complex rigging systems providing flexibility for the evolution of character design and performance development; modeling tools able to be shared by artists across the production; as well as a CG muscle system allowing the penguins to move in a way that works for the aesthetic of the film and delivers a highly believable and engaging performance at a level beyond any animated feature to date. “Had I known how complex it was when I started, I would have been shaking in my boots,” he admits, "Ignorance was bliss, as they say, but we pushed forward into it and it proved to be much bigger than I’d ever considered.”
Very early on in the project, Animal Logic made a decision to go with Softimage|XSI, predominantly because of the mo-cap component of the show. “Because of its high level editing tools, and because of its dense data capabilities when it came to Motion Capture, it was a great choice,” explains Sarsfield. “We started building the backbone of the character and the animation pipeline. We built all of our characters with XSI, we built the rigs, the custom muscle system, the custom fat system, and a huge amount of pipeline support tools to get our animators working efficiently.
As soon as the modeling was done, it was all XSI to build the characters, the animation, hair simulation and as soon as it popped out of animation, we had to bake the mesh. At that point the characters went off to Maya and your standard Renderman lighting pipeline.” The Animal Logic crew used XSI exclusively as the background application and then wrote a huge amount of proprietary tools to enable the crew to navigate around the asset structure.
One of the hardest things in a production like this is getting a team of 30 people working on any given scene simultaneously. What the Logic crew ended up having to do was build a system that could read a breakdown, look for approved assets, and give the animators a one-button system that would load in the assets they selected. “There was a large amount of development,” adds Sarsfield. “We had to speed up the ability for the crew to deliver assets, so we spent a great deal of time optimising so they could start work very quickly and when they finish, they can deliver their work very quickly.”
