A new excerpt from the VFX tools issue of befores & afters magazine.
For what is perhaps The Little Mermaid’s biggest sequence, Framestore was called upon to animate hordes of sea creatures for the musical number, ‘Under the Sea’. “Rob Marshall wanted that to look like an underwater Broadway spectacular,” comments Framestore animation supervisor Kayn Garcia.
“The dancing part was really important to him, and he brought in the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater group from New York for it to do this whole choreography for the sequence.”
That meant that every beat and every move for ‘Under the Sea’ was meticulously planned, even to the point of stand-in performers being filmed on stage in sea creature outfits as a basis for what Framestore would eventually create.
However, this also provided the VFX studio with a significant challenge: how to interpret these choreographed dance moves from anthropomorphized human characters onto animalistic sea creatures, and make them believable?
An initial test came out too anthropomorphized, says Garcia. “We made them a little too cartoony, but it was not what Rob was looking for. What he really wanted was that balance between live action, character dance and the realistic animalistic behaviors. So we went back to the anatomy of each creature and looked at their individual behaviors, their mannerisms, how they moved, and how they lived and breathed underwater in the real world, and then worked at how to bring that back to the dance.”
This necessitated animation working closely with the asset team to give the creatures–like the mimic octopus or flatwork–very bespoke rigs that would enable them to act realistically but also ‘dance’.
That then led to what Garcia describes as ‘auditions’, where individual creatures were animated by themselves doing the dance. The harder task was working out how to have 600 creatures dancing and singing all at once.
“I’ve never dealt with anything this technically or creatively challenging before,” admits Garcia. “This was why we created our Choreography tool. It was basically a caching tool that gave us the ability to cache off our geometry of our rigs and give it a low poly count so that it was easy to work with in shots where there literally would be hundreds of characters.”
The tool let artists work out the staging and composition of a shot, while another artist could work in isolation on the performance. Garcia explains how it worked: “Layout artists would start by bringing in our characters as chess-like pieces. What the Choreography tool was really great at doing, then, was giving us the ability to update in parallel. We had those simple chess piece characters working out our layout of the composition with all the characters, and then in isolation, the other artists were doing our ‘auditions’. An artist inside the shot would work out our composition, our layout, and then as those animations were progressing, update our shots.”
“We had these jellyfishes that had to do arabesques, but how does a jellyfish do an arabesque?” says Garcia. “So you had to really work that out, and we spent many iterations to find that balance of creature and performer, while also hitting the musical beats that Rob was looking for, and that he so meticulously spent the time with the dancers to find.”
Read the full article in issue #14 of befores & afters magazine.
