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MAKING OF...(page two) |
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LOOKING A LITTLE FISHY  In addition to casting the voices of the fish, all of the filmmakers,
including the animators and character designers, spent a great deal
of time researching varieties of fish to find what types best suited
the characters in "Shark Tale." Bergeron says, "We watched a lot
of documentaries about sharks and all different species of fish,
and looked through a lot of fish catalogues. We wanted to make sure
our characters had origins in fish that actually exist. Obviously
it's a stretch--there is no city under the sea built by fish--so
we started with something real and then shaped it into something
we liked and that worked for our story."
The filmmakers put together an immense library of images of fish and sea life and also took several field trips to the Long Beach Aquarium to see many kinds of fish firsthand. Oscar ended up being a cleaner wrasse, which is a colorfully striped fish of blue, black and yellow. True to its name, a cleaner wrasse's actual job is to clean other fish and its environment, which made working at the Whale Wash the perfect job for Oscar. Appropriately, Angie is an angelfish. Character technical director co-supervisor Kevin Ochs says, "We were looking for something elegant and the big, billowing fin, which we used as Angie's hair, is characteristic to an angelfish--very flowing, very elegant." Lola, on the other hand, is predominantly a lion fish, with a little dragonfish mixed in for effect, making her as lethal as she is beautiful. "Lion fish are very beautiful," Ochs relates, "but they are also very deadly. They have very powerful venom in their spines, so they basically lure their prey close only to deal a deadly end, so that was very fitting for Lola." Sykes is a puffer fish, with spines that make him look like he's some sort of tough guy, but when he gets nervous, he puffs up and his voice gets high, which basically destroys the pretense. While traits of their respective species can be seen in the different fish characters, there are also none-too-subtle hints of the actors playing them evident in each one. Sykes' Scorsese-esque "eyebrows" are among the most obvious features that reflect the actor behind the character, but they are only a fraction of what an observant moviegoer might catch. "Half the fun of having a cast like this in the movie was capturing their faces in their characters," Jenson remarks. "Animators have a way of bringing the actors' mannerisms and personalities into a character, but it was really great that our designs helped support that, too. I think everyone was delighted when they saw their characters." Will Smith had no trouble catching the likeness. "He resembles me. They took the ears down a little bit, but I think people will still see a little bit of Will Smith in Oscar, and for me that's just the best." Lola's lips are very reminiscent of her vocal alter ego and her dorsal fin was made to form her long flowing hair. Her tail was designed to look like a long slinky dress and sparkles add to her glamour, which Angelina Jolie says suited her just fine. "I don't know how they did it, but they made her a very sexy fish and they did it beautifully. The way she looked went beyond my expectations. She's a little wicked and all sparkly in red...and I got lucky because I got to be her." There are also touches of Renée Zellweger seen in Angie. "I really credit the animators for putting Renée's expressions into her character," Jenson comments. "There's a sweetness to the way her eyes crinkle up and the way her mouth is a little asymmetrical when she talks, and they captured that brilliantly."  Bergeron notes that even the sharks were differentiated according to their characters. "Don
Lino is played by Robert De Niro, which is why he's got that mole. We printed
out every expression we could find in De Niro's filmography, from comedy to drama,
to make sure we reflected him in his shark. We tried to make every expression
Don Lino has a De Niro expression. He also has sharper lines than Jack Black's
character, Lenny. Lenny is a gentler shark, so we softened up his character.
His teeth aren't as sharp as the other sharks and he has the rounder nose and
fuller cheeks."
Jack Black says, "They captured my essence in the character," while admitting to one reservation about Lenny's appearance: "I think they went overboard with that pot belly. I gave the animation team a strict 'talking to' about trimming that down." His protestations fell on deaf ears, however, as Vicky Jenson counters, "We loved Lenny's belly. You just want to tickle it," she laughs. As usual, the actors were all filmed during their recording sessions, which provided inspiration to the animators, led by supervising animators Ken Stuart Duncan, Lionel Gallat, Fabrice Joubert, Fabio Lignini and William Salazar. Bill Damaschke confirms, "On all the animated films we make, the reference tapes of the actors are hugely helpful. But on this particular film, they took on an even greater importance, because the animators were on a quest to capture these actors and create a new kind of alter ego of each actor in his or her character. They would watch the tapes over and over and look for the smallest details and nuances in the actors' performances to extract and bring to the characters." In the case of Will Smith, Duncan says, "We also studied a lot of Will's music videos to get a sense of how he moves. It was great to watch the recording sessions of all the actors. There were nice little moments even in between takes that I tried to draw upon in the animation. It's not only what they're saying that's important, but also what their behavior is in between the dialogue." "As an animator, one of the most rewarding things about working on this movie was being able to work with talents on the level of this cast," Gallat adds. "Almost everything we do is based on the voices and what is laid out by the actors to bring the characters to life. So it was very important to us to have such great actors who really enjoyed what they were doing. It showed in their performances and it enabled the animators to have fun animating the characters."  With the rewards came challenges, and challenges spawned new breakthroughs in
computer animation. "Today's technology allows artists to realize what they dream," says Jeffrey Katzenberg. "It
is a constantly evolving process in which the power and diversity of the tools
we're able to put in the hands of our animators grows exponentially with each
one of these films. Things we did in 'Shark Tale' are already light years ahead
of what we did on 'Shrek 2,' which came out less than six months ago."
One of the most important advancements was in the application of what is known as "squash and stretch," a visual cue most associated with the classic Chuck Jones and Tex Avery cartoons. In cartoon terms, it is when an animator deforms an object, squashing it down or stretching it out, usually to convey motion or impact. An invaluable technique in the hands of traditional animators, squash and stretch was much harder to achieve in any significant way on a computer because as an object stretched, it would simply snap apart. Since "Shark Tale" is the first CG film to be produced entirely at DreamWorks' Glendale campus, most of the animators had been traditional 2D animators who were trading in their pencils for a mouse for the first time. The comedy of "Shark Tale," coupled with the fact that the characters had the flexibility of...well...fish, demanded that the animators find a way to incorporate squash and stretch. Bergeron expounds, "It's very easy to deform a figure with a pencil stroke, but in a computer, it's hell because the figure just breaks. So in the beginning, we did a pencil test to show the technicians what we wanted and I asked them, 'Can we do that?' They said, 'Well, let's try it,' and they did better than try. It worked great." Janet Healy continues, "We built a system of controls that enabled the animators to bend and stretch the faces and bodies in any direction and as far as they wanted without losing the cohesiveness of the figure. Giving them that ability allowed for more snappy, pose-driven animation. It meant they could get the kind of physical performances you see in 'Shark Tale,' which I think added to the comedy." The use of squash and stretch can be seen throughout "Shark Tale," but it is perhaps most consistently seen in the movement of the tentacled jellyfish, Ernie and Bernie, especially when they reach out to "touch" someone. Rob Letterman states, "Ernie and Bernie are two pranksters who love to tease and torture Oscar, but it was the animators they truly tortured, because the jellyfish were the hardest to animate." Lignini agrees, "Ernie and Bernie have these tentacles--their dreadlocks--that are constantly in motion, and we had to keep them from intersecting. In CG, everything is virtual, so things don't stop when they meet; they continue on and cross into one another, so we had to work to take care of that." A different kind of challenge surfaced with regard to animating somewhat anthropomorphic fish characters who shifted in an instant from swimming like fish to sitting or standing like humans and vice versa.  Kevin Ochs attests, "One of the biggest challenges was animating characters who
are sitting or standing and acting much like humans, and then, in a split second,
swimming off like fish. It's actually more complicated than it sounds. When a
fish swims, the point of articulation is high up in his body, but in a character
who's walking, the movement is centered in his hips...or right above the legs.
We had to come up with tools for the animators so they could switch the characters
from fish to 'human' and back to fish again. It was really an uphill battle to
make that look seamless."
Fish--regardless of how anthropomorphic the animators might make them--live in water, which was a state the animators had to keep in mind. Duncan notes, "We had a tendency to hit poses and sort of 'hang' the characters, but that made them too still. They needed to float, so it was a constant challenge to make them appear to be floating in water." But not all the time, Lignini points out. "It's an underwater city, but at the same time the fish are like people living in the city. Things have to look like they have a little bit of weight; otherwise it doesn't work. The job was to find the balance between having them float in the water and still convey enough gravity to allow the fish to sit and stand as if they were living in a real city." SUB-URBAN From a distance, the city in which our fish live and work appears to be a colorful, natural coral reef, but as we swim closer we see that we are in an urban city beneath the sea, replete with buildings, billboards and traffic jams. Looking closer still, we notice that the city is "carved" out of coral, sand and other natural materials, although the fish have resourcefully also made use of objects that have been discarded into the ocean. Production designer Daniel St. Pierre offers, "We needed to design a city that didn't look like it was a sunken city, but rather a fish-made city." The filmmakers began using the term 'fishified' or 'fishification' to describe the transformation of human-like elements to those of or by fish. Art director Samuel Michlap explains, "'Fishification' or 'fishified' were phrases we coined so you would hear, 'Is this fishified enough?' or 'What's the fishification of this building?' We always started with human buildings or things we would all know. Then we'd go back to researching oceanography and look at undersea landscapes and coral reefs. We would actually pick a building that closely matched the look of a plant or reef and create a hybrid of the two of them together. The result was never so far off that you couldn't recognize the building." "We wanted to have icons that were recognizable from the everyday world, but fishify them to create a unique underwater fantasy," Janet Healy says. The primary influence in the production design of the Reef should be identifiable to most people as the city of New York, although, St. Pierre notes, "There are also pieces of Las Vegas, Atlantic City and even San Francisco mixed with elements of the Great Barrier Reef and the Caribbean. We kind of blended those worlds together to come up with the look." "We called our world the Southside Reef, which is very much like any city," Vicky Jenson states. "It has a downtown and an uptown, only, in our case, downtown is literally down on the ocean floor. That's the seamier side of the city; it's a bit like the wrong side of the tracks, where you'd find the 'prawn shops' and such. Uptown is closer to the surface where the water is crystal clear and bright and you'll find the best penthouses. That's where everybody dreams of living, especially Oscar." Art director Seth Engstrom adds that the story lent itself to two contrasting design backdrops. "There are two main looks to the film, which were somewhat difficult to combine. There's the hip-hop neighborhood, which we needed to relate to the coral reef. The color of natural coral is amazing--it's saturated, way off the scale--so the neighborhood was vibrant and fun with lots of primary colors. The mob world, on the other hand, has a much more muted tone. It's got deep mahoganies and rich browns and shades of gray and black and white, which the sharks fit into completely." The sharks live on a sunken ocean liner, which was designed to be a cross between the Titanic and the Queen Mary, the latter of which, of course, never sank but is among the most emblematic ships ever made. The sharks have converted the First Class Lounge into an exclusive restaurant, where there is a pivotal revelation scene between Lenny and Don Lino. The Whale Wash, where Oscar and Angie work, was patterned after a typical urban car wash, with some major differences--besides the fact that the workers are fish, the cars are whales and the wax is put on by actual turtles. Instead of being a freestanding building, the Whale Wash was situated in a natural crevice in the coral reef. "To keep it from looking too humanized, we came up with the concept that there was a natural shelf where the ground rose up around it, and they put in some machines and turned it into the Whale Wash," Michlap says. Oscar's ultra-hip pad, with its clean lines, might appear to be the least fishified set, until you notice that the couch is made out of cut coral and the cushions are plants that move ever-so-subtly with the current. The centerpiece of the production design was the fishified Times Square, with its Jumbotron®, billboards and traffic jams. The filmmakers and the design team had great fun coming up with the billboards advertising everything from "Coral-Cola" to "Fish King" to "Old Wavy" and "Gup." There is also a billboard for the sharks' favorite movie, with a title that needed no fishification--"Jaws."  Jenson says, "Our Times Square is a perfect example of how we fishified something
familiar. You can imagine being in Times Square during a busy lunch hour with
cabs everywhere and noise and crowds. In our fishified Times Square, there are
fish swimming in schools, cramming up against each other at traffic lights made
from kelp. There are yellow-and-black checkered fish yelling at one another,
sounding like horns because, in this city, the fish are the vehicles."
Spawning schools of fish is similar to generating crowds of people. The animators began with four basic fish designs from which could be produced innumerable variations of fish of different colors, shapes and sizes. Different assortments of fish could then be placed in and around the cityscape as needed for any sequence. The racetrack scene, for example, involved more than 5,000 fish extras demonstrating more than 600 animation cycles, ranging from cheering and jumping up and down, to eating and talking, and much more. In a similar way, once the design of the city was completed, all of the different elements of the sets were created in the computer, using what the computer graphics team called "Toolbox City." Lead CG supervisor Kevin P. Rafferty explains, "We had modules of different building shells and types of windows, stoops, doorways and billboards that we could mix and match to build the neighborhood. Using pieces from the Toolbox City, we could cobble together a brownstone village, like the one Oscar lives in, or we could use more modern, cleaner modules for uptown." Visual effects supervisor Doug Cooper notes that it was not as simple as it sounds, due to the organic nature of the environment. "You couldn't have a building where all the windows look the same, for example, because they've all been carved out of coral. The coral would continue to grow and morph over time, making it difficult to accomplish in a computer. A computer is really good at replicating things--taking a copy of a window and putting it throughout a scene, but these all had to be a little bit different from one another. We really had to beef up the system to handle that much data and the complexity of all that scenery." Cooper gives special thanks to HP, stating, "Without HP's super-fast computers, we would never have been able to complete the incredibly complex rendering calculations required to achieve the film's visual detail." More than 300 HP workstations were used by the digital artists for "Shark Tale." State-of-the-art dual processors and the fastest available memory allowed the animators, designers, effects team and other departments to see more visual detail interactively on their desktops. This allowed the artists to scale the complexity of the environments in which "Shark Tale" exists to create a richer, more believable undersea world. In addition, the HP renderfarm allowed the filmmakers to see what had been produced with amazing alacrity. Janet Healy attests, "It was terrific to be able to imagine a movie with so much complexity and still be able to get through all our processing and look at the images every morning. It was astonishing." The design team worked closely with the directors and the layout team, headed by Gil Zimmerman, to determine the best camera angles with which to capture the action. Layout is akin to cinematography in a live-action movie, and Daniel St. Pierre says that they discussed the camerawork on "Shark Tale" in live-action terms. "We would say things like, 'This has got to be a steadicam from this point to this point,' or 'We need a crane shot here and then we'll push in on the dolly.'" The camera blocking was first laid out using physical models and then in the computer with animatics--computer models of scene elements, including characters, that allowed the filmmakers to build a scene in the computer in 3D. One of the innovations that Zimmerman and his team came up with was the "Sharkcam," which essentially placed a virtual camera on the head of a shark to give the audience a shark's-eye view as he swims through the city.
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