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Henry Anderson, CG Animation
Supervisor, 'Stuart Little' By Bob OHaver Dec 22 1999 08:10:10:000AM After studying biology at UC San Diego, Henry Anderson moved on to California Institute of the Arts' animation program, then plied his trade at Pacific Data Images, Rhythm & Hues, Pixar, Digital Domain and Blue Sky before beginning his tenure at Sony Pictures Imageworks. His most recent title as CG animation supervisor for Columbia Pictures' "Stuart Little" was the result of 10 years' experience directing digital character animation that has included Coca Cola's perennial polar bear campaign and the primetime Emmy-winning martians of CBS/Hanna-Barbara's "The Last Halloween." Anderson's goal on "Stuart Little" was to translate the wishes of director Rob Minkoff ("The Lion King") into a series of unified performances coaxed from a team of 30 animators, giving life to Stuart (voiced by Michael J. Fox) and his rodent co-stars (Bruno Kirby and Jennifer Tilly). Anderson also supervised the animation of a supporting cast of talking felines, supplied by Rhythm & Hues (supervised by Bill Westenhofer) and Centropolis Effects (lead animator Benedikt Niemann). The demands on those studios for the photo-realistic integration of believable animal performance became an almost herculean endeavor. Working with senior VFX supervisor John Dykstra and Imageworks supervisor Jerome Chen -- who clothed and furred the mice, then implemented the final digital composites -- Anderson and company raised the bar on 3D character animation and captured the heart and soul of E.B. White's timeless tale. There was a shot in "Stuart Little" of Stuart sitting on Geena Davis' knee that blew me away. The hair work was incredibly realistic. You really did a great job. Thank you very much. The early screenings have been a huge thrill for us because we've been working on the film so long and it's great to finally be able to share it with the public. During the last few months of our work on "Stuart," the realism of the hair, the clothing, the effects and the animators understanding of the character really came a long way and was great to be a part of. When I started on "Stuart Little" myself, in June of 1998, Imageworks were already working on some of the final lead character designs. I worked with director Rob Minkoff to finalize those character designs. My role as animation supervisor was to be the actor playing the character, or in some cases multiple characters, as in the case of the Stout family, who were the other mouse characters featured in "Stuart Little." We had an almost overwhelming number of shots of Stuart. Were you involved while Minkoff was directing Fox and the performers who supplied the voices of Stuart and the other animated characters? Yes. As you know, in animation, we always record the voices before we start any of the animation. Rob and I would talk about the performances to help him develop an idea of what he wanted from the scene, then Rob would direct Michael J. Fox during the voice recording sessions to communicate what he wanted In the scene you pointed out, for example, where he was sitting on Mrs. Little's knee, asking the Stouts why they put him up for adoption, that was a particularly long shot, with a big run up to the actual dialogue. Michael recorded a sigh and a very thoughtful reading of the line -- "Why don't you want me?" -- but there were a couple of seconds before the line was delivered where Stuart was sitting there, struggling with what he was going to say. We conveyed those emotions by having Stuart purse his mouth, then rub his hand on his leg, until he said his line, then pulled back very sensitively as if he was waiting for what the Stouts were going to say. You'll also notice that his legs were crosed, a closed posture, before he asks the question, then he uncrosses his legs to an open posture as he opens up to ask the Stouts his question. Those were the type of elements the animators added to every scene, adding their own understanding of the character to the vocal performance. It all worked together to create a performance in the same way an actor would. It was great to work with a live-action director like Rob who is well-versed in the tradition of animation and has the skills to fully understand the role of an animation director. Rob and I would talk about Stuart in the same way we would talk about a real actor, discussing Stuart's motivation for his performance and what Rob wanted, emtionally, from the shot. After that, it was up to the animation team and I to achieve those goals. Did you assign one animator to work on each shot, or did you combine multiple animators? It was a combination. The ideal way of working -- which is how we were able to work on most of this show -- is to cast an animator to a particular shot that best fits their abilities and personalities. Some
For example, the shot with Stuart on Geena's knee was animated by Pepe Valencia, who is very good at subtle and emotional, communicative animation, the type of shot where a small gesture will speak volumes. Pepe also animated a shot where Stuart was in the basement, sitting for the first time in his little model car and his human foster brother George (Jonathan Lipnicki) asks him what's wrong. Stuart starts to speak about how it's the first time since he arrived in the Little household that he has felt like he fit in. I thought that it would be great to have him rubbing his finger along the top of the door of the car while he was speaking, diffusing his nervous energy. It needed to be a very subtle, thoughtful moment, so an animator like Pepe was ideal casting for that shot. As we got into the real crunch to deliver the vast quantity of shots near the end of our schedule, we sometimes didn't have the luxury of assigning all of the shots to the ideal animators, but for most of the film that was the way I tried to work. Over the course of the movie, about 30 people were responsible for animating Stuart, which was a large number of animators to assign to a single character. That's difficult since no two animators see the world, or a character, the same way -- let alone 30! If you go through the film and really scrutinize the animation, you can find some scenes that are probably not as typically "Stuart" as they should be, but overall, I tried to keep the animation style as consistent as possible. Stuart's walk and hand gestures were particularly distinctive. For technical reasons having to do with Stuart's clothing, when animating Stuart's clothing, we decided to avoid showing Stuart with his hands in his pockets, so his hands were usually right out in front. This turned out o be very expressive. We adopted certain hand-movement patterns that became Stuart trademarks -- the way he would fidget with his hands, twiddle his fingers or drum his fingers on the surface of a table were all typical Stuart characteristics. Were you able to reuse Stuart's walk cycles, or was each scene animated individually? Each shot was approached individually, since Stuart's acting depends on his frame of mind at that particular moment of the film. It's certainly true that one of the advantages of GC animation is the ability to replicate large amounts of animation data, the way they did with the wildebeest stampede in "The Lion King" a few years ago. For a character like Stuart, who is the center of attention through the whole movie, every one of his walks was a little different. Just because Stuart was 'sad' did not mean he was just sad. He might be sad and heartbroken, or sad and confused. These are the type of subtle differences we tried
We came up with several styles of walk. You see the basic Stuart walk in the scene where he first arrives at the Little house carrying his suitcase. You see a fearful walk when Snowbell the cat is backing Stuart across the bed and you see Stuart's courageous, hopeful walk where he is walking in to try to make friends with the cat. He also has a sad walk for the scene where he is skulking out of the house with all his belongings. That walk is not just sad, it is tinged with confusion. Each of these scenes had a different emotion and the style of Stuart's walk had to convey to the audience everything that Stuart was thinking and feeling. Did most of your animators come from a traditional hand-drawn animation background, or were they mostly CG-trained? Most of the animators on Stuart were not new to computer animation, though this was not always the case. Generally, animators who had some animation experience, or had done some kind of acting, tended to be more immediately successful in their understanding of performance than the animators who did not have that experience. It was much easier to teach a software tool like Maya to a person experienced in claymation, stop-motion or hand-drawn animation than it was to teach a technical person to think like an animator. Pepe Valencia, the animator we discussed before, had not done any character animation like this before "Stuart Little." But Pepe had been an actor and understood what it took to communicate an idea through performance. He animated a terrific audition test of Stuart that showed us all that he had the Did you experience any particular difficulties in the interaction between your CG Stuart and physical effects, for instance, with his car? Most of the time, we followed a rule of thumb, which I think is pretty widely used when one is trying to integrate a dogital character with a real environment. If the character's acting affects the movement of a prop, it's generally better to create that prop in CG. In the scene at the boat pond, where Stuart picks up and carries a remote-control box, we chose to create a CG remote control rather than puppeteer a real prop attached to a rod on-set. If we had tried to match our CG Stuart to the movements of a real prop, we never could have achieved all the subtleties of Stuart's performance. By having Stuart manipulate a 3D prop, we were able to animate him doing exactly what we wanted him to do, stumbling around, while we animated the remote control to follow Stuart's lead. Stuart's car was photographed as a practical set piece, then Rachel Nicoll and her match-move team tracked our CG Stuart into the car. Almost all the shots of Stuart in his car were handled this way and were pretty straightforward to achieve, particularly for the wide shots. Once we tracked Stuart to the car, the shot was almost done. We would then add subtleties of animation to enhance the realism. There was an animatronic puppet version of Stuart in his car, where he was far away, but there were few of these shots in the movie. Maybe just five shots. Stuart was always acting, either waving his arm or looking nervously behind him, left and right, even when he was zipping away from the camera at high speed. The animation of those shots added even more believability to the scene. We would animate the way his spine would bend, the way his arms flexed. We also had a number of close-up shots of Stuart in the car to help heighten the tension when the cats are chasing him, and shots where the car makes a jump and lands on the ground, and Stuart tries to restart the car. There was a lot of interactive animation in that sequence and it worked pretty well. Did you use the same technique for the boat-race sequence? Yes. For most shots in the boat sequence, Stuart was a CG character on board a practical boat. Again, our match-move team did a terrific job of putting Stuart in the shot, then our animators went to work on that. We found this was much more convincing than having a puppet on the boat. One of our animators, Dielo Tramontozzi, who became known as our Stuart stuntman, animated most of the shots where Stuart was climbing in the rigging. Did you study real mice to find out how they climbed? We had a few live mice and rats around Imageworks that we used to study mouse faces, the way their noses twitched and their ears moved. Other than his face and his tail, Stuart was more like a little person than he was like a mouse. That's why Bill Irwin was so useful, as were a lot of old Buster Keaton films. Personally, I never felt that Stuart was a mouse. He was an enthusiastic, energetic curious little kid who happened to have the characteristics of a mouse. How much freedom did Minkoff allow you while animating Stuart? It was a nice partnership. I enjoyed working with Rob because he was very open to discussion and he understands that an anbimator is an actor. We sometimes had different ideas about how a scene should play and I would have to really work to sell him on my interpretation. Sometimes I'd win and sometimes I wouldn't, but that happens on the set of a live action movie as well. My own background is in hand-drawn animation, so I'm used to first seeing animation in pose test first -- where a character is moved from key pose to key pose with few or no in-betweens to smooth out the movement. We did that a lot with Stuart, using Maya's step curves to quickly show Rob our ideas, to see if he was happy with the basic blocking of a How was your interaction with the other supervisors, Dykstra and Chen? It was a good working relationship, even though we had very different roles. None of us had worked together before, but John Dykstra, Jerome and I developed a nice rapport early on. We operated on different branches of the production that joined to create each final Stuart shot. I worked witht he animators to get a version of the animation that Rob Minkoff could approve, then it would go off to John and Jerome to add Stuart's look and feel and integrate him into the live action photography. We were fairly separate most of the time, but there was a dialogue back and forth. I would sometimes give them ideas about aspects of Stuart's fur that affected his expressions and they would reciprocate if there were any technical issues in the animation process that affected things like Stuart's clothing. I have to say John and Jerome and their team did such a great job of making the clothing work that, for the most part, the animators were able to really concentrate on the performance without ever having to worry about the technical limitations. We had a high volume of shots, and sometimes had to go back and make a minor adjustment but overall, it remained a creative process as opposed to a technical one.
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