"What we ended up with was a bunch of blend shapes for the face, which were basically morph targets. So I created a list of face shapes for Paul that [seemed] appropriate. I checked it with the client and made sure they were happy with the direction. And then we started to come up with a rig that the animators could work with quickly and hit a familiar workflow; the character would magnetically go a certain way. That was the hope, anyway. But it was virtually impossible because the assortment of animators I got had all kinds of experience levels and all kinds of backgrounds: CG feature animation, visual effects, commercials and gaming. We needed something to marry their experience."

DNeg provided two ways of shooting reference for the animators: using a Flip camera and having them mess around in the moven suit. "So the animators would put the suit on and capture their performance in 3D. Even though it wouldn't match perfectly with Paul, we could get a rough performance. We dumped the capture onto an early Paul rig and have it in the scene file for the animator to manipulate. They could show this previs style, MoCap session. It was a real coup. Here they really flexed their creative muscles to come up with the right performance for Paul. We boiled it down to three or four takes, showed it to the client and progressed from there. Later we increased performance fidelity and added facial animation. The client wanted us to test the limits of the performance. They empowered us to try things out."

They used Maya with proprietary rigging and created their own user interface for the animators called Muppet with a library of poses to stay on model. They also used Nuke and PRMan; the proprietary Squirt for smoke; and Houdini for other particle effects. "We relied on a lot of heavy lifting from matchmove, lighting and comp to ensure Paul was seated believably in the plate. It was a very collaborative process and in some cases Paul's level of interaction was such that comp had to manipulate the actors and props in the plate. (painting in new eye lines, replacing hidden body parts and set pieces)."

The face, of course, was a big challenge. "Getting the facial performance to look good was heavily dependent on the lighting," Beer continues. "With such unique features and complex shading, Paul could very easily read as creepy, or simply not read at all. We would sometimes run into the Clutch Cargo syndrome where the mouth felt disconnected from the face. We even had to pay close attention to the effects of shutter blur on lip sync and blinks."

The director, Greg Mottola (Adventureland, Superbad), had never done a vfx film before, but Beer says he took to it immediately. "We showed him rough animation with no facial on it or a lot of noise in it with the moven suit," Beer adds. He understood where we were headed and gave us good, articulate direction.

"If Paul works, it's in large part thanks to us; if he doesn't, it's in large part thanks to us."

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.