Every talking dog has his digital day - Animation

Post, Nov, 2003

VANCOUVER -- Working with dogs creates some obvious problems from a production standpoint, according to top compositing pros at Rainmaker, here.

The new feature comedy Good Boy is a good example--it's about young Owen Baker, whose summer job as a dog walker affords him the opportunity to adopt his own dog. To Owen's surprise, the dog he chooses--portentously named Hubble--is an interplanetary scout from the dog star Sirius. It is one thing to get a dog to sit, stay or roll over; it is entirely different to get them to speak in full sentences, or navigate advanced spacecraft, and that is where Rainmaker came to the rescue.

Rainmaker (www.rainmaker.com) had a number of unique issues to deal with, most revolving around the fact that the dogs needed to speak. Since there was no way to achieve this effect practically, they called on a healthy mix of 3D and 2D to get the look just right. With the aid of a lossless HDRI file format, originally proprietary to ILM called OpenEXR, Rainmaker was able to bring in CG speaking muzzles rendered out of NewTek LightWave into Eyeon Digital Fusion to get the CG integration into live action to look just right.

Digital supervisor Jason Dowdeswell explains that the "OpenEXR render format gave us a new level of flexibility to dramatically manipulate color information of rendered images within our composites. OpenEXR and Fusion provided us with a way of retaining all of the out-of-range color values for tweaking later, preventing us from having to re-render time consuming fur passes in CG to adjust for densities." Dowdeswell makes it clear that every second counts when dealing with such a film's 467 effects shots. "Having all of the information available to us with one render pass saved valuable seconds, helping us meet our already strenuous deadlines."

At its peak, the Digital Fusion compositing pipeline consisted of 15 compositors working swing shifts on six workstations. Every week they needed to produce an average of 20-plus shots to meet the production quotas. So at any given time, they had 50 shots on the go in various stages of development. The compositing team also had access to a Digital Fusion renderfarm; at the height running 26 processors being shared at any given time between the six DF workstations. The most expensive Fusion renders were 22 minutes a frame, but on average, came in at roughly four to six minutes a frame. The average flow had about 16 loaders pulling 2K Cineon files, though the high-end flows pushed 40 loaders. "Basically, the renderfarm and our advanced network allowed for monster throughput, making the Cineon renders manageable," says Dowdeswell.

The compositing duties were split between Digital Fusion and Discreet's Inferno, and approximately 350 of the 467 shots passed through Fusion for treatment of varying sorts. The volume DF is capable of handling was the primary reason Digital Fusion was brought on just before Good Boy went into post," says Dowdeswell. That and the need for a warping function that happened to be a new feature in the release of Digital Fusion 4 late last year. "DF's grid warping function was very necessary to the process of integrating the talking CG muzzles with the live action dogs," he says.