Peter Pan: Hook, Line and Tinker
“We would speed her up, change her mass and alter her position so that she always appeared very light and tiny, while also paying attention to the idea of macro photography, to ensure she wouldn’t simply look scaled down,” explains Farrar. “For the luminescence, we came up with the idea of having Tink look like a little candle. She provides the illumination, incorporating a subsurface light scattering effect, and then everything else quickly falls off to darkness. Rather than use a cheesy 2D effect we hit upon the idea illuminating a volume of animated pixie dust particles in the same way as sunlight coming through a window.”
Bringing Neverland to Colorful Life
Finding a way of generating and animating the little fluffy clouds of this dream world required further research and development. The director had in mind a cotton wool consistency, but how to achieve that without having fabric-like strands? “It was a real headscratcher. When the children arrive in Neverland they bound off the clouds as they would trampolines, and then when Hook realizes they’re up there he blows a hole right through. We need to be able to integrate the actors, and have the clouds flexing, stretching and responding to movement, all with a beautiful lighting scheme.”
Beyond the extensive digital doubles work, much of ILM’s lot focused on bringing Neverland itself to life. This included a spectacular introduction shot, in which Pan’s return is heralded by the rapid transition from winter to spring. “Neverland is completely iced over, then as it begins to warm the ice cracks, Hook’s ship rights itself and flowers come into bloom,” says Farrar. “It’s a one-off, yet we spent about six months writing all the software and shaders for it,”
A single illustration by Hogan, depicting a pink, magenta and cyan-tinged formation ultimately provided the color reference for the entire cloud world. With the matte department working on the more distance formations, custom-written software was written to enable ILM artists to paint cloudscapes using Photoshop, flesh them out in 3D and then output them to RenderMan for some scenes. A volumetric solution, achieved using Maya and Mental Ray, offered more control for scenes in which the children more directly affect cloud shape. (Softimage|3D, XSI and Alias Power Animator were also utilized at one point or another on the show.)
Having worked on the show for nine months in Australia, then back at ILM from May 2002 until near the close of 2003, Farrar now marvels at what was achieved: “At the highest point we had 300 people working on the show. I tell ya, once we get up to full steam it’s amazing what this company can do. Even though we had other shows going on, we were sometimes turning out over 40 finals a week, despite most shots being complex and many frames in length. We’ve never done so many shots in such a short space of time, and in fact even worked on a couple of hundred more than never made it to the final cut.”
Nevertheless, with the shoot running four months over schedule and ILM’s determination not to sacrifice quality any step of the way, something had to give. Thus Digital Domain stepped in to take some of the workload, principally an extensive sequence in and around a castle and a CG incarnation of the story’s famed crocodile.
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