Sony Imageworks animates The ChubbChubbs: this studio is gearing up for full-length animated features - News

Post, Dec, 2002 by Matthew Armstrong

CULVER CITY -- Rarely do five-minute animated films get produced with the full financial and creative backing of a major Hollywood studio, but such is the case with the recent short. The ChubbChubbs through Sony Pictures' visual effects division Imageworks (www.imageworks.com).

The reason behind this seemingly odd endeavor is that Imageworks, creators of character animation in live-action films like Men in Black II, Stuart Little II and the work-in-progress Spider-Man II, is preparing to add to their repertoire of skills by moving into the arena of producing all-CG animated, full-length feature films for projects that are currently in development at Sony Pictures' Animation Group. In order to acquaint itself with this type of project and establish the workflow pipeline, Imageworks set out to create an original animated short film. The result was The ChubbChubbs.

"We asked for a Gong Show here at the studio where all the artists presented ideas and one would be made into an animated short," explains Tim Sarnoff, president of Imageworks. "The focus was to create a product that required a number of characters and different backgrounds and designs. The intent was just to finish the project. If we failed in doing it, that would have taught us something and that would have been as valid for us as having it succeed."

But nothing succeeds like success, and the short film that started as an in-house experiment was seen nationally as movie exhibitors screened it in front of the theatrical releases Men in Block II and Stuart Little II. In addition, The ChubbChubbs won the Best Animated Short Award at the London Effects Animation Festival and the Best Short Award at the recent International Los Angeles Film Festival.

Imageworks artist Jeff Wolverton won the in-house Gong Show of concepts, and animation director Eric Armstrong was chosen to direct. A small group of Imageworks artists were dedicated exclusively to this project while virtually every other person at the studio worked on the short when they had a break from other duties.

The story takes place at the Ale-E-Inn, a nightclub on the planet Glorf, where a clumsy janitor seeks to save the alien clientele from an attack of the dreaded ChubbChubbs. "Fully digital animated production was something new to me and just about everyone here," notes Armstrong. "Usually our goal is to create an animated character and place them into a live-action background. We make them perform, and color and light them in a way [so it feels] like they're part of that world and fit in the environment. Whereas with a animated film, you're creating the entire world, so it's a different mindset."

Setting out to create this new animated world posed a number of challenges for the veteran visual effects studio. Though it was adept at character animation, the sheer scope of this project caused them to change the way they constructed characters. "In the past, we'd modeled individual shapes as morph targets and then did three dimensional morphs between those targets to create the performances," explains Armstrong. "This becomes extremely time consuming when you have a lot of characters because it's very difficult to share these libraries between characters; each library is unique to each character. We had to have a system so [we can repurpose] some of the work that was put into one character into multiple characters. So we used a muscle-based system and then applied that animation to multiple characters. This isn't something new, but it was new for us."

Besides conquering the new workflow obstacles inherent in creating a fully animated film, this project required everyone at Imageworks to develop a different, more artistic, approach. "The layout process was new for us," says Armstrong, "Our Match-move department takes the 3D camera and, frame by frame, rotoscopes that to what the camera is actually doing on the background plate, so as the camera moves across the practical photography we have to duplicate that with the 3D camera. But for layouts, it's not a rotoscoping process. It's far less technical and much more creative. It's really about being a cinematographer."

Imageworks created the animation in Alias/Wavefront Maya on a Windows NT platform, lighting the scenes with Maya on SGIs, compositing with a proprietary tool on SGIs and rendering the project with Pixar RenderMan. For the red tornado-like storm that precedes the arrival of the army of giant beasts, a particle-based tool in Side Effects Houdini was used. In addition to the SGIs, Imageworks has many Intel-based workstations from IBM and Boxx.

In the end, Imageworks accomplished all their goals and then some with The ChubbChubbs. The nationwide screenings and the festival awards were a welcome bonus to their hard work, but just finishing the project and proving that they were ready to delve into the brave world of animated features, made the endeavor a rousing success. "The amount of animation we accomplished was approximately the same amount of footage per week that we needed to do had this been a feature film," explains Sarnoff. Though he is excited about the prospect of doing fully animated features, Sarnoff lightheartedly remarked that it brings up a host of new challenges for the studio.