Party time in Oscar’s penthouse apartment. All images courtesy of DreamWorks.

In the opening shot of Shark Tale, the artists got a chance to play with the company’s famed logo. As CG supervisor Kevin Rafferty observes, “The little DreamWorks boy is fishing, remember?”

In what Rafferty calls “a comedic entrance into the film,” the camera dives beneath the surface into an underwater city where mobster sharks keep a tight fin on the fish population. Explaining the “reveal” of this world, Rafferty notes, “We have a couple of our `star’ sharks swimming over what looks to be open seas above a kelp floor. But as the camera cranes down, we realize that we’re not in open water — the sharks are swimming above the rooftops of a brownstone neighborhood. We crane down further, and the kelp becomes coral and the coral becomes building columns and then you start to see a fire escape — a fire escape under water! That opening is exemplary of our wanting viewers to do a double-take, and realize they’re seeing a `brownstone’ made of coral!”

Shark Tale was the first foray into an all-CG feature for both Rafferty (above) and DreamWorks’ Glendale animation team.

Animating an all-CG feature is a first for Rafferty as well as for DreamWorks’ Glendale team. Which is saying something, given Rafferty’s extensive career on the leading edge of CG effects filmmaking. His credits include The Last Starfighter, Digital Prods.’ pioneering effort that brought CG models into live-action filmmaking. Then at PDI’s L.A. branch, Rafferty worked on Batman Returns and Cliffhanger before moving up to ILM. There his many credits include the digitally diverse movies Casper, Dragonheart, The Mummy Returns, The Perfect Storm and Star Wars: Episode One — The Phantom Menace.

Building the Beast
Before he could tackle the lead CG supervisor role on Shark Tale, Rafferty had to help build the CG team. “I came to DreamWorks at the end of 2001,” he recalls. “My last day at ILM was a Friday and my first day at DreamWorks was the following Monday. We had what we called a brain trust — all of the leadership for Shark Tale had been drawn from ILM, PDI, Centropolis, Sony Imageworks, Digital Domain, Tippett Studio, Pixar and Blue Sky. Having leadership from several different studios was great because everybody had their own subset of experiences, and varied ideas about how to mold a new pipeline. My first couple of months were spent sussing things out on a whiteboard.”

In the back of their minds was DreamWorks’ ultimate goal of uniting this new CG division with the company’s Shrek hit-makers at PDI in Northern California. “When we were setting up this studio, one of the main undercurrents was our desire in the future to have PDI and DreamWorks Animation work with the same pipeline,” adds Rafferty. “But when we started looking at that vis à vis the aggressive scheduling of Shark Tale we realized that the PDI people would still be up to their ears in Shrek 2 while we’d be training our hirees.” Since Rafferty had worked previously with PDI’s proprietary software, he knew it was “inherently more complex than an off-the-shelf system. We were ready to try to embrace PDI’s pipeline, but we couldn’t impose on the PDI folks to entertain our questions while we tried to get everything done on the schedule that Shark Tale had.