Haunted Mansion is literally a theme park ride on the screen. And it’s photoreal and it feels like you’re there. Sarnoff said there are both obvious and subtle vfx shots, depending on the purpose. “I mean, the haunted mansion itself doesn’t really exist, so we have a nice part of the set piece that is beautiful but the vast remainder of it, like the graveyards, are digitally created.”

Imageworks created a photrealistic look for Haunted Mansion. © Disney Enterprises Inc.

Interestingly, when it comes to The Haunted Mansion and other films, Sarnoff confirmed that while there is a part of Imageworks and Animation that never meets, there is a blending of other aspects. “We’ll be utilizing a number of people across the different projects in a blending of talents — the painters, texture painters, some of the animators and a lot of the TDs. On an animated project, you don’t have to take a plate from the outside world and interpolate it into the computer, which is called our batch-whipping department. They don’t exist in animation so they will stay only working on the live-action films. And we don’t necessarily need as robust a background department on a live-action film as we would on an animation project. So we’ll actually have a larger background department for animation than we would on a live-action film, but the people can be moved from one to the other and certainly the software and the mechanisms by which we actually control the shots are actually the same.

“Part of the invisible part of running an animation or visual effects facility is trying to figure out where everybody is. Where all the shots are. How do you manage to do a few thousand shots at a time? Sony Imageworks has now about 750 people in it. We will swell and go up a 100 at any given point and each one of them have a specific set of shots and/or jobs to do and to manage those people over a cross of a number of different projects is in itself a visual effect for us. We look at that as probably our greatest asset. When new companies start up and only doing one thing, the area they have the most trouble managing is how you do different types of shows or how do you do multiple shows? Last year Imageworks had 10 different projects in it. Big, small, gigantic, everything in between. Some that lasted only about two or three months, some that have been here for two-and-a-half years. And to move people in and out in-between projects is one of our greatest accomplishments in the last few years.”

Sandra Rabins (left), evp, Sony Pictures Animation, wants each project to have its own feel, look and style. Penny Finkelman Cox (right), evp of Sony Pictures Animation, works with Rabins and Sarnoff to ensure that animation will be produced by their two divisions for years to come.

For the most part, the projects that Imageworks is most gratified by are the ones where they are involved in the early design stage, such as the Spider-Mans, Stuart Littles, Polar Express and Big Fish, which contains minimal vfx. “It’s a lot easier to sell when you have an absolutely wonderful story. This particular project has all the advantages of being quirky and also having a great story. You know the effects are there to enhance it rather than to sell it.”

On the animation side, which is run by exec vps Sandra Rabins and Penny Finkelman Cox, Imageworks is in the process of working on a 3D development slate, drawing on a talent pool of 175 people. “When we announce the first project, we’ll probably have the second and third one lined up too,” Sarnoff said. “The nice part of that for this facility is that it affords us the ability to plan out our years, not just in 2003 and 2004 but also 2005 and 2006. And it gives us a certain utilization of improvement within the company so that now that I know that I’m going to be doing those types of projects, how do I layer in the other types of projects that are going to come into the facility to make sure that we don’t either overbook or underutilize the specific project.”

Currently in development at Sony Animation are Astro Boy, Open Season (based on the humor of cartoonist Steve Moore in which animals turn the tables on the hunters), The ChubbChubbs! (inspired by the Oscar-winning Imageworks short), Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs (based on the children’s book by Judi and Ron Barrett about a land where food falls from the sky) and Surf’s Up!, a new twist on Romeo and Juliet.