Open Season - Visual Effects Production Notes

With an all-star cast, and talented directors, Sony Pictures Animation debuts OPEN SEASON this fall in theaters around the world. Martin Lawrence voices the character of Boog, a nine hundred pound domesticated grizzly bear who shares the spotlight in the action-adventure comedy OPEN SEASON with a hapless, fast-talking mule deer named Elliot, voiced by Ashton Kutcher. OPENS SEASON is directed by Roger Allers (The Lion King), Jill Culton (credits include Monsters, Inc., and Toy Story 2), and Anthony Stacchi (credits include Antz),

Without a Visual Effects team, OPEN SEASON would have a much different look. Just picture this: naked hunters in pursuit of hairless animals inhabiting our leafless forest. Not the most alluring image, right?

Visual Effects Supervisor, Doug Ikeler, had the difficult task of creating the look and style of all digital imagery in OPEN SEASON. He led a team of talented artists at Sony Pictures Imageworks confronted with developing groundbreaking tools for effects. "Creating our stylized world was a challenge on its own," says Ikeler. "Then to create cloth, hair, water and other effects that move in a realistic manner, and live within that distinctive world-that was the real challenge."

Cloth
In order to maintain the simple graphic style of the character designs, the crew simulated only the clothing that was absolutely necessary. Ikeler explains that, "The viewer would notice if the clothing didn't move in reaction to the character's movement. And if the clothing moved too much, it would affect the design shapes that we were striving to keep, and adversely draw the viewer's attention."

Therefore, Shaw's thick, puffy vest would blow in the wind, but his shirt underneath would remain "attached" to the character's movement. To preserve the vest's contour, the technical directors used a targeting system, blending the cloth into predefined shapes. As Shaw moved, deformers compressed his vest to maintain volume and thickness.

Similarly, Beth wore a shirt and shorts that had to maintain a bell shape. Target shapes in her clothing kept her on model. These core shapes helped the animators concentrate on the acting in the film, and not lose focus on tucked-in collars and unzipped trousers.

Hair
One of the most challenging of all 3D elements is hair/fur, simply because there is so much of it! "Elliot has the most hairs, about 3,500,000," explains Chris Yee, CG hair lead. "Boog has 1,600,000 and Beth has 150,000 hairs. All together you are talking about hundreds of millions of hairs." Because each strand is hand-animated, creating these hair fibers quickly becomes a massive task.

To help simplify this process for the animators, the Visual Effects team developed a new "comb" technology. The new tools enabled fur to move as basic groups, yet still allowed each hair to shift and act independently of each other. This was essential to creating the stylized, authentic fur in the film, but in reality, the animators' job had only just begun.

Because OPEN SEASON is full of active forest creatures, the 'Viz FX' team had to create many different fur styles. A rabbit's hair, for example, is much softer than the course and clumpy fur of a grizzly bear. And each animal's fur reacts differently to various elements like wind, water, mud, dust, and of course, sticky candy food fights. Ikeler's team took great care to ensure that each strand would respond realistically to these influences. And after many a bad hair day, they were able to produce some of the most groundbreaking and advanced effects work to date.

Water
What could possibly be more difficult to create than hair? Yes, it's the most basic element of all…water! Fur at least stands still from time to time, but water is constantly changing.

"The water in the Splash Mountain sequence was one of the greatest challenges in the movie," says CG Supervisor Darren Lurie. "Water, in general, moves in a certain way and if you try to slow it down or have it flow in ways that are not realistic, it tends to not look like water. In comparison to our stylized trees, rocks and flowers," he continues, "the water is one of the most realistic things in the movie. We wanted it to seem alive and have that scale and magnitude. In Splash Mountain, water is like a character."

Throughout the film, water behaves in a calm or raging manner, or presents itself as a trickle or rainstorm. Consequently, Ikeler's Visual Effects team had to create a realistic water system; one that flowed naturally, splashed, and interacted with its surrounding environments and characters. This new water technology produced its own foam, white water, mist and waterfalls. And after color and lighting are applied, the water seamlessly integrates itself into the stylized 3D environment created around it.

During the exciting Splash Mountain sequence, all of these 3D elements come together and are put to the test. Cloth, hair, fur, and water collide in some of the wettest, most adrenalin-filled two minutes and thirty seconds seen in an animated film.

The Imageworks Visual Effects crew, who are too often the unsung heroes, makes the digital world come to life. They take the tiniest details and recreate them in an animated world. From an itty-bitty purple gumdrop to gigantic thundering waterfalls, the Visual Effects team brings reality to the elements we take for granted. Without their crafty work, we would literally be left with only the "bare" essentials.