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'Flushed Away' With VFX Supervisor Wendy Rogers

Bill Desowitz discusses water and other 3D elements with Flushed Away vfx supervisor Wendy Rogers.

Flushed Away vfx supervisor, Wendy Rogers.

A native of Melbourne, Australia, Wendy Rogers joined DreamWorks in 1997, initially as a CG visual development artist on the Oscar-winning Shrek. She has since served as digital effects supervisor on Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron and then as lead vfx artist on Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. She previously worked on such live-action features as Batman and Robin, Batman Forever, The Frighteners, Waterworld, Natural Born Killers, Carlitos Way and Heart and Souls.

Bill Desowitz: Was there any noteworthy R&D work?

Wendy Rogers: I dont know per se that we ripped the edge off any envelopes in the making of this film. For us, we used the tools that we already had to tell a different looking film. We obviously had a lot of water that we had to do, but weve done water here before [with Shark Tale]. We spent some visual development time working out the way it would look so that it fit most appropriately in the style of the film. Character rigging was a big challenge for us because were not doing any simulation here there is no clothing or hair simulation. Its as though theyre all rigged to move like puppets. So everything is hand-animated. And many of the characters are mono-brow characters in the Aardman style, so we had to develop a slightly different rigging style for that with a lot of fine controls and that took quite a bit of time.

The crowds we made some innovations but more in process in how we did them rather than the technology we were using to do them. For example, in our rat city we would populate the sequence with a crowd milling about. And they were just background extras.

BD: In terms of effects, what about rendering the water in close-up to better match the stop motion look?

WR: Well, basically, water is one of those things where you need a fairly realistic motion to it. But you can render it with a stylized look. So what we were quite capable to do is keep it as graphic and simple as we could. Its largely opaque and has graphic foam shapes. Its not hyper real. But it would move organically the way real water would. And in many effects cases we used simulation.

BD: And there were some 12 water layers?

WR: Its hard to keep that water from looking too dirty even though were in a sewer. So we have different levels: specular, foam and flotsam and reflection and refraction. And different types of water in that sewer as well during various sequences: the boat chase and in the waterfall section, through rapids. Theres a full gamut down there.

This is a brief excerpt from the interview with Wendy Rogers. You can view the rest of the interview at the exclusive Flushed Away site.

Bill Desowitz's picture

Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.