In animation, Alex McDowell found that previs began too late to serve his design needs, so for Bee Movie he devised “d-vis,” which starts at the beginning of the design process. All images ™ & © 2007 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Production designer Alex McDowell, who has been at the forefront of previs innovation in live action, has helped DreamWorks Animation become more efficient as a result of his tenure on Bee Movie (opening Nov. 2). And now that he has gotten his first taste of 3D animation, McDowell looks forward returning again. He spoke to VFXWorld by phone in Vancouver, where he’s working on Warner Bros.’ Watchmen with director Zack Snyder.

"In many ways, doing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory pushed me toward working in animation because it was that hybrid,” McDowell reflects. “I was sitting in the visual effects houses alongside modelers and surfacers and lighters and designing almost live in 3D, which was really exciting. And also giving me a measure of control over those things that I wouldn’t have normally for a couple of reasons: First, you can’t always create the kinds of surfaces and materials that you can imagine, and you also have so much more scope in the virtual world to design exactly what it needs to be -- physics alone deter some of the design that we envision. So after going through that experience really closely, interfacing with visual effects, the Bee Movie experience was a leap into full virtuality.”

However, when McDowell was brought in two years into the development process, he ran into a formidable obstacle: In animation, previs is called rough layout and begins way too late to serve McDowell’s design needs, as he utilizes them in live action. “The problem with layout, I think, from a design point of view is two-fold: One is that the proprietary [Emo] software of DreamWorks doesn’t allow you to manipulate the environment once it goes into rough layout, at least not easily. That’s a practical problem, which means if I waited till rough layout and wanted to make changes, which was the standard pre-Bee Movie, I’d have had to pull the model out of layout, back into modeling, make the change, convert it back into Emo and then layout would redo the camera and action to align with the change in environment.

“The other problem by the nature of the ‘traditional’ pipeline is that you have to finish design before it goes to layout. And, for me, design is as much about what the camera does in the space as it is about driving the action. And for the past few years, that’s been what’s great for me about working in live action. Because we are now able to place the camera and actors in a virtual environment, which means we can be more intuitive about the design, the director has much more early control and we can talk collaboratively about the real function of what the environmental battle is going to be for the action and then design specifically to that. And the traditional animation layout process doesn’t really allow that. You have to make a lot decisions about environment and then you place characters, which very often haven’t been developed fully until they get to rough layout, and the camera has never seen character in environment until they get to layout. And so -- to use a ridiculous example -- if there’s a wall or even a piece of furniture that’s sitting in the way of the director’s blocking, you may not discover that until you are in the middle of (very costly) production."

So first McDowell had to make his case: “When we first started talking about it, there was a sense that there was no difference between previs and rough layout or that the two were in conflict. If you did previs too early, you’d be treading the same ground as rough layout, which you’d have to tread again later. And so what we first had to do was show how previs is proven to work in live action as a planning, design and layout tool.