Check out the Yogi Bear trailers at AWNtv!

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the live-action/CG hybrid of Yogi Bear is that Rhythm & Hues is a co-producing partner for the first time with Warner Bros. The VFX studio has thus been able to leverage its considerable experience in creating characters from cartoon series (the Scooby-Doo, Garfield and Alvin and the Chipmunk movies) into more of an ownership role, which made Yogi an interesting starting point for conversations about their involvement.

For the 3-D shoot in New Zealand with director Eric Brevig (Journey to the Center of the Earth), Rhythm & Hues worked on several hundred shots, featuring its extensive animation, lighting and fur work for Yogi (voiced by Dan Aykroyd) and Boo Boo (voiced by Justin Timberlake). In addition, R&H did matte paintings and vfx work, (water, fire and cloth) and props animation. In addition to its proprietary Voodoo animation, R&H continues to use Maya and Houdini.

"Being a producing partner definitely added a new level to it," suggests Betsy Paterson, R&H's vfx supervisor. "We were able to be involved from design all the way through story, so that helped. You always have ideas to make things easier and better along the way and it was great to be in the room and listened to on this show. It was nice to feel more ownership of the final result.

"This was our first show shot in stereo. We built a while new stop in our pipeline, which is called the Stereo QC, which dealt with the plates as soon as they came in, making sure that the left eye and right eye matched and tweaking colors and distortion. We had to come up with new layers in our software to make sure that it worked in stereo and that the artists could see both eyes at the same time and their work was translated properly for the other eye. We built a new set of tools just to look for problems. Even without a 3-D display, you could see the disparity between the two eyes."

Paterson says there's a lot of interaction with people, lots of action in and out of boats on a river and water skiing and flying in the sky. "We did three minutes of full CG for the flying sequence, with all the mountains and rivers below them," she adds. She was dubious of 3-D at first, "but somehow the stereo made it useful for really making sure that we can feel the characters in those spaces."