Shrek meets the parents

Post, May, 2004 by Ken McGorry

REDWOOD CITY, CA -- Let's admit it, we all probably could use a fresh helping of Shrek right about now.

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Director Conrad Vernon says that great care and concentration went into devising a proper concept for a Shrek sequel, one that would combine a healthy lampooning of classic fairytales and take off on a Guess Who's Coming to Dinner theme. The sequel would also encompass more human characters and more intricate crowd scenes.

The overall look of the DreamWorks film also offers CG breakthroughs like global lighting, luminescent skin tones, real-looking crystalline eyeballs and improved cloth simulation. The CG was created both at PDI, DreamWorks' computer animation division in Northern California, and at DreamWorks' headquarters in Glendale, CA.

Vernon co-directed Shrek 2 with Andrew Adamson (an original director of the first Shrek) and Kelly Asbury. Vernon had been deep into work on DreamWorks' CG film Madagascar when studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg called him saying "we need your sensibility" on the Shrek 2 production.

Vernon had become an overnight star due to his contribution to the first Shrek. He'd successfully pitched the directors of the original film on a twisted sequence in which the evil Lord Farquaad interrogates hapless locals in his dungeon. Vernon's memorable twist was to place the brittle but stalwart Gingerbread Man in the clutches of Farquaad and his henchman--and to provide the little guy's voice.

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In the sequel, the situation is thus: Shrek needs to meet his bride Fiona's human parents. They are the king and queen of their own land ("Far, Far Away") and, never imagining that their Fiona could be anything but a beautiful, human princess, they have firm plans in place for her future and are in no mood for surprises.

Vernon and Asbury oversaw the process of character animation. And in addition to animation, Adamson dealt with the voice talent. They all oversaw the artwork, the animators, effects and lighting and made sure it all hung together well. This included a rigorous schedule of reviewing animation dailies in a PDI screening room every day at 10am and again at Spm. "The animators would introduce their shots, tell us what they did, and we would look at it," Vernon says. In fine-tuning the action in each scene, he and Asbury assumed many characters' roles. "Kelly and I had a vision for what we thought each shot should be. We would literally stand up in front of all the animators and act out what we were thinking--'This is what we need Shrek to do ...'"

PDI has a secure video teleconferencing system connecting it with the Glendale facility; computers are linked as well. "They could be watching what we were watching," Vernon says. And even in early, unrendered shots, the directors would still be able to discern the quality of a character's acting and emotions. "It is really fun going to those animation dailies," Vernon says, "it's not difficult, but it's tedious. Production is a giant furnace that you have to keep shoveling coal into. But the work that they turned out was just phenomenal, and I couldn't have been more happy."

ANIMATING A FANTASY WORLD

With all the technology available to PDI and the DreamWorks/Glendale crew, including their proprietary E_motion animation software and legions of HP Linux workstations and rendering servers, it's curious that the production team decided against using motion capture for at least some of the many characters moving about in Shrek 2. "We did try some stuff with Shrek in motion capture," Vernon says, "and we didn't feel it captured the look that we wanted." Supervising animator Raman Hui agreed that people in mocap suits came off looking more like acrobats than actors.

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Hui was supervising animator on the original Shrek too. At first, Hui says, there was a comfort level in working with Shrek 2's familiar lead characters. "But because we added so many characters in Shrek 2, Puss in Boots, Prince Charming, the King, the Queen, the Fairy Godmother--it was like starting from scratch."

Hui would start each day of production before the 10am dailies screening and his animators would come in early to check the previous night's rendering of their shots. For the digital projection, all shots were CG files, mostly in black and white, rather than traditional film dailies. "It's kind of like a Quick-Time," Hui says, "but better resolution." Once a shot was screened and finally approved, the team would cut it into the movie to see if it worked well in context. At that point another conference would ensue among the directors, producers, Hui and the directing animators to determine if any changes were called for. A shot's "hook up" or continuity with the scenes preceding and following it is essential; if an arm is posed in the wrong place in the subsequent shot it could look like a blooper.

Vernon notes that the improved CG eyeballs give the main characters the ability to seem like they're really gazing into one another's eyes. "We applied refraction to the eyes," Hui says. "It's no longer a texture on the eyeball; it's actually like a real eye with a crystal lens and a pupil inside. Especially in profile you would see a big difference."