GV: What was different here from working on Davy Jones or any of those other visual effects shots is that we're usually bringing in a photographic plate and so lens and distance and focus and depth-of-field are all pre-determined. This was about camera and placement of camera and moving things around in the frame and composing the shots. Layout was a completely new thing for them. So there were some birthing pains there and the interactive motion capture camera was a great way of saying, "Here's how we do it in live action -- we cheat everything." You're remarking everybody so you don't have a cactus coming out of somebody's head. And the other thing was getting the animators out of the mentality of the shot and into the mentality of the scene, which was great to see them slowly embrace the idea of working on a movie and everything that's in it. And to see that turn after lengthy discussions about where Rango is coming from: What's his emotional state? How is he going to walk? Are his shoulders down? Is he full of bravado or is it a lie? And is it a knowing lie? Really seeing them grasp at that and videotaping themselves and acting in front of mirrors?

 

BD: How much did the animators rely on the performances of Depp and the other actors?

GV: There was a lot in the storyboards for the basic bones of the shots, so the storyboards were getting us into animation pretty quickly in terms of blocking. And the storyboards were all on set when we were shooting. The vocal performance from Johnny has a lot of different people in there: Don Knotts and Jack Palance, when he puts it on. And you'd see a lot in his expressions, but he doesn't look anything like Rango, so everything has to be translated. And not everything he's doing will read once it's translated into a lizard, so you have to completely keyframe animate it, but you try and capture the spirit of it, so quite often it'd be a target.

BD: What about the look of your characters and the environments?

GV: We weren't in the pursuit of photoreal, but we were in pursuit of an emotional reality that required a tremendous amount of detail in close-ups of eyes and all of that. Early on, the environments were always going to be compromised in resolution and detail because we wanted to focus on the characters. But, by default, ILM is so good at matching into plates. You turn the sun on in their computer and immediately it feels more realistic. It's not multiple sources; it's one pinpoint source. And that quickly showed that certain things weren't going to hold up at a low resolution. So the environments are minimalistic, but in the town, as you get into the interior of the bar, and things like that, it's very important that you get a tremendous amount of detail: trash in a corner, dust and smoke -- stuff you get for free on a live-action set that has to be built and rendered and lit. That turned out to be a lot more work than we anticipated.

 

BD: How difficult were the action sequences?

 

GV: The action sequences are useful to move from storyboard into early previs, so in our story reel, we had, for instance, the flying bat sequences. Before going to ILM we brought in a couple of guys to previs that entire sequence because it was just hard to get timings. You're making assumptions that it's going to take this amount of time for this fly by to occur, music and pacing. You can do that with a dialogue scene where you know the compositions are going to work, but the bat sequence was really tough and took a tremendous amount of time.

BD: And, finally, why the decision not to go out in 3-D?

GV: I watched the movie; [and] I don't think there's a dimension missing. I don't feel like, "It's flat," or it's missing anything. We talked about it early on and it just didn't seem like we needed to go there.

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN & VFXWorld.