Storks 2016 Animated Movie Rundown AWN Exclusie

Warner Bros and Sony Pictures Imageworks’ new animated feature film collaboration, Storks, is the latest expertly crafted, gorgeous looking and frenetically-paced CG animated movie to hit the local movieplex. Opened in U.S. theatres, Storks takes place in a world where
our fearless feathered transporters no longer deliver babies, but packages for internet giant Cornerstore.com. When the Baby Factory accidentally produces a cute and unauthorized
baby girl, top delivery stork Junior, voiced by Andy Samberg, races to deliver the troublesome

kid before his boss finds out. Cue the “fowl”
hijinks. Sorry.
Imageworks animation supervisor Joshua
Beveridge and I recently spoke about his work on
the film, a production that at its height employed
126 character animators alone. He shared his
insights on the four main challenges the studio
faced from day one: designing featherless bird
wings, developing a workable wolf pack rig,
designing cute but not cloyingly sweet babies
and a lead character Tulip, who was anything but
a predictable “animated film” princess.
Dan Sarto: Describe your role on the film. What
were your main duties?
Joshua Beveridge: I was animation supervisor on
this show. From company to company that titles
changes. It's kind of a weird one. Some studios
just call it an animation director. Disney calls it
head of animation. Basically, I headed up
character motion - quality controlled
performances of characters. I made sure they
would stay in scene, staged, true to the
characters, hitting the story points that needed
to hit. I was involved early in the project from
day one. Actually, from the beginning of the
relationship between Sony and Warner Bros.
I made sure the characters were built in a way
they could do all of the things they needed to
do. We had many unique challenges on this show
that needed specific engineering. Basically, if it's
the character moving, that fell under my
umbrella.
I also was pretty much the liaison between
Warner and Sony, making sure that everyone was
happy...here are the storyboards, there are the
reels…how are we going to get that onto screen,
translate a 2D image into 3D in a way that feels
true to the source material?
DS : Did you get to work on any animation
yourself?
JB: I did animate a bit myself as well. That
doesn't fall specifically under my job description.
I just feel personally, it’s the only way to keep
your teeth sharp. It's too easy to get out of
touch - it's not like riding a bicycle. It keeps you
honest. I love animating so I did go ahead and
work late and put in a couple of shots. But it is
nowhere near my full-time job on the show.
DS : At the height of production, how big was your
crew?
JB: I believe this was the largest animation crew
we've ever had here at Sony. I think that at one
point in time we had 126 animators on at once.
That's just animators…character animators.
That's not including effects artists, hair artists,
lighters, TD's and riggers. That's just a single
department of animators - 126. Entirely in
Vancouver.
DS : What were the biggest concerns or challenges
you knew you’d face going into the production?
JB: There were four things that jumped out at
me right out of the gate. The first was our bird
design, our language of storks, specifically their
wings. The face is always a challenge no matter
what the universe design rules are. But this one
unique thing to our storks specifically was how
we were treating the wings.
Much like how you would draw them in a 2D
Looney Tunes short, the wings just changed to
hands whenever you would feel like it. They went
from being a full bladed wing that you believe is
flying these characters around, to, it's got a
thumb, an index finger, and a pinkie and the
arms are just arms that these guys can drink
coffee and wear ties with. These are just dudes
– we didn't want it to feel like they’re holding
things and pointing at things with their feather
tips. It's just a hand. We had to find a really fast,
applicable way for that to feel invisible. One of
the design choices was their wings weren't made
of hundreds of feathers. They don't really have
feathers.
You don’t question that it looks like a wing
because of its shape and because of the look in
the film and the material it's made of. It's
obviously a wing. If you handle that wrong in
animation, it could easily go down a path of
looking like this weird, broken bat wing. We
ended up finding this principal we called the "not
every brick" principal. Like if a kid draws a
house, and they want to state that the house is
made of bricks, they just draw two or three
bricks and you know that whole thing is made of
bricks.
That was the same philosophy we applied to our
wing shapes. If it has the broad shape of a wing,
and it has a few little kisses of detail, the
scalloping of edges that feels like a feather, then
that whole thing is made of feathers. I don't
think that audiences really question it - it just
feels like the shape you're used to seeing in
drawings. It already has that shape language
built into it inherently. Engineering that to
actually work in a rig, to do so fluidly and quickly
and hit new shapes on the fly was a big feat. It
took a whole lot of controls and a whole lot of
blood, sweat and tears both by the rigging
department and the animation department to pull
that off.
That was a fundamental issue we knew was
going to be unique that we had to solve no
matter how this movie was going to turn out. It's
a movie about storks and they're going to be
onscreen a lot. We wanted to do something fresh
and unique with their wings but not make that
something you think about. I'm pretty proud of
how that turned out.
Second, one of the more showcased things that
Warner discussed right off the bat was the wolf
pack. It's a really hard thing to describe and I
don't want to spoil too much. Basically, the
concept is that whenever the wolves are in hot
pursuit, they can just shout out, “Wolf pack, form
a…” and then fill in the blank with some vehicle
and they all jump into that shape. It's super
absurd, very pushed and just an over the top
concept that catches most of the audience off
guard. Warner was clear from the very beginning
that they wanted this to look impressive,
something they could brag about.
Plus, it’s only really funny if it looked hard to do.
What was unique with that animation is at Sony,
we're getting more and more used to creating
incredibly pliable characters, really pushing
extremely broad expressions - if you can think it
you can make it. What was unique to this is it's
not just one character, it's 50 to 200 characters
depending on what shape they're all jumping
into, which becomes this squishy, pliable
expressive unit. The trailer shows a wolf pack
submarine and you can see that submarine isn't
just a submarine. It doesn't become a rigid thing.
It's all these funny-faced characters performing
within the shape. But, that shape as a group has
to read as a nice squishy silhouette as well.
Plus, immediately, in one quick beat, you need to
read exactly what it is.
I was up more than a couple nights worrying how
we were going to actually pull that off. We did
invent new workflow and a couple of new
internal tools in order to get that going, figuring
out a whole constraint and rig swapping system.
Usually with big scenes like that, with lots of
characters, there's some way you can invisibly
split it into lots of tiny things. But, we couldn't
do that here because they all had to squish up
against each other and they were all interacting
with each other. There's no such thing as
breaking it into bite sized chunks.
DS : It’s like a big scrum.
JB: Yeah, exactly. The final two that come to
mind were more performance related. The third
one is about babies. The whole story hinges on
you falling in love with this baby right off the bat
- the cuteness of the babies has to hit you right
in the heart. So much of that was reliant on
nailing the baby design. Once we started getting
into the baby’s performance, once we felt
confident your first impression of this baby was
that it looked adorable, it was a big challenge to
get into the baby’s thought process, especially
for those of us that don't have babies.
We didn't want them to be knowingly cute. We
didn’t want them to coyly bat their eyelashes like
they know they're cute and they're manipulating
us. It just needed to be “cute.” We did lots of
research, watched documentaries on babies as if
it was wildlife footage, watched animator’s home
videos, things like that.
It's too easy to fall into the habit of making
them knowingly coy, that sort of Baby Herman
intelligence that they put on with the “Goo goo,
ga ga.” We wanted to stay far away from that.
That works for Baby Herman because he has
that other side of his character where he's a
gruff, cigar smoking old guy. But our babies are
just babies and they needed to relate to parents
as, “That's what my baby's like. I know that.
That is exactly what it feels.” But it still has to
be a cartoon language extraction where it feels
simple and not just every little pixel moving with
life-like reference. We wanted cartoon language
that was relatable, which was much trickier than
you might think.
We learned that with a baby, less was more.
Letting them live within the design, sitting in a
pose where if they move, they move for a really
good reason. Since none of us are babies
anymore and you can't ask babies what they're
thinking, figuring out the reason they're moving
was often a challenge. But, it was easy to see
when it just felt wrong. Why is that arm lifting,
why is that choice being made?
We came up with a rule of thumb where
whenever a baby was introduced to something
new in the environment, it could react in one of
several ways. The first process was fairly
familiar: wide eyed staring, just straight
absorption that you could stay in for a good long
beat, just taking in new information. Then if it
didn't upset the baby, they could reach out and
try and touch that thing. If touching it didn't
upset the baby, then they put that thing into
their mouth. That was the normal thought
process of how the baby discovered anything.
We saw there's a really specific rhythm to that
and if we didn't hit that rhythm, it just felt off.
Then fourth would be Tulip herself, our lead
actress. We wanted a unique female lead, where
she could be broad and funny in an incredibly
exaggerated way, staying far away from the
princess tropes. She's very much not a princess.
This is the antithesis. It was my personal
mission to make sure it didn't look like a whole
bunch of dudes just animating a girl. We also
wanted to really push her range so she felt fresh
and unique. Hopefully we ended up landing
there. But finding that exact flavor was a bit of a
mission. Honestly, so much of that came from
the lead actress, Katy King. She really, really
nailed that character. She was a lot of fun to
animate to. She has fantastic timing, really
emotive lines. Honestly, the cast as a whole was
great but she was always on her game. She was
the bar we had to live up to.
DS : Were any new technical innovations or pipeline
tools developed for this show? You mentioned the
wing rigging as well as the wolf pack formation
rigging. Can you tell us a bit more?
JB: Well the challenge it's not like we can buy
external software - it's internal stuff. Our wolf
tool was a thing we're calling Pack-It, piggy-
backed onto a system developed during the
recent Alice through the Looking Glass movie. In
that film, there were these time characters, a
second, minute and hour. The seconds are little
tiny robots and 60 of them all together make a
minute and 60 minutes all together make an
hour. It's so great when something is being
developed and the following show gets to pick
up on it and bring it to the next level. We'd have
been in a lot of trouble if that happy accident
hadn't been developed. We got to customize it
specifically for wolves.
The idea was we could have hundreds of
characters in one file but just have one rig. That
only works when they're all the same type of
character. Luckily they were all wolves in our
case. It's like a game of hot potato - you're just
choosing which one ends up with that rig.
Switching who gets rigged takes about four
seconds, then you update that animation and
choose whether that animation you just updated
gets propagated to other characters that are
relevant or it’s a new, unique thing. That ends up
being a huge time saver. You get to keep
improving performance, going back and dialing it
in. Even with this tool, it was an incredibly
laborious process. Each wolf transformation took
about a month in animation. This would've been
a lot more laborious if we didn't have that tool.
DS : How different was this project from your work
on Hotel Transylvania 2?
JB: Honestly, every project feels like it ends up
informing the following one in some way. That
just seems like a natural order of things. I
definitely feel the fact that we've previously
made Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs , Surf's Up
and Hotel Transylvania very much informed what
kind of movie this was. The Hotel Transylvania
films specifically were so pliable, really pushed -
Genndy Tartakovsky’s taste is so specific, it
demands that in animation, we must be very
conscious of what the underlying drawing the
character is living in looks like. That often means
breaking the rig completely, pushing it to a place
where it was never designed to go, then
sculpting from there.
That is a whole new thought process we’ve been
working on here for the last few years. Animators
aren't just moving the bones and controls around
- they also end up sculpting and thinking of their
performance as a drawing they're living within as
well. We end up getting to focus more on
performance, acting choices, where we're looking
and when. Style is something we think about a
lot here at Sony, the ability to be pliable and
make the performance feel spontaneous. We
don’t have to engineer this expression for weeks
or months and then hit it. We can make it
happen on the fly.
One of the things that's so great about 2D, one
of the strengths of traditional animation, is the
spontaneity, the expression that only happens
once. It's not like it goes over and over again.
The strength of CG animation has traditionally
been the puppet stays in form, stays structured.
Now that line is getting blurrier and blurrier
because we're getting better at being pliable,
spontaneous and squishy. We really enjoy doing
that at Sony.
This project was certainly challenging - we all
were pushed to the next level, but in the way
you want to be. It was creatively challenging in
exactly how you want to be challenged as an
artist. The day to day involved incredibly
collaborative teamwork. This was a fun movie to
work on, which you don't get to say that about
all the films. The relationship that Warner had
with Sony, I don't think could have gone better.