Director Kirk Jones wanted to keep the magical nature of the lead character ambiguous so FCFC stayed away from obvious visual tricks. All Nanny McPhee images © 2005 Universal Studios. Courtesy of Framestore CFC.

A dysfunctional family, irrepressible children, traumatized nannies… until one day, a very special nanny shows up, sets out to perform some magic, and pulls the family back together. Happy end. Remember? 42 years after Mary Poppins enchanted millions of children around the world, Universal Pictures releases Nanny McPhee (Jan. 27), a new take on the pitch. This time around, the nanny (Emma Thompson) doesn’t have the good looks of Julie Andrews, nor can’t she sing “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.” Yet, magic keeps happening around her, although director Kirk Jones was keen on not having her actually perform “obvious” magic on screen. “Unlike Mary Poppins, Nanny McPhee seems ambiguous about the magical nature of the character,” says Andrew Rawling, CG supervisor at Framestore CFC (FCFC). “Kirk wanted to have real situations in which the viewer would get the feeling that something was going on. We had a lot of natural events that went a bit different, just a bit. For instance, whenever Nanny McPhee hits the floor with her stick, it creates magical sparks, but we made them look like the contact between the floor and the metal end of the stick could have generated natural sparks… This particular animation was created in Houdini, although we could very well have used Maya.”

Even though little on-screen magic was required, FCFC still crafted 150 vfx shots for the movie, under Mike McGee’s supervision. Most of them were “invisible” effects, beginning with environments. The Brown family’s house was created as a full-size set, but the production only built facades for the set of the nearby village. Digital matte painter Kevin Jenkins complemented the partial sets and extended the village with a church, 17 extra houses, gardens, walls and trees. “We had helicopter shots in which you could see the whole village,” Rawling observes. “We first tracked the shots in Boujou and Matchmover, and then modeled simple 3D geometries in Maya. The CG facades were then carefully painted in Photoshop to match and extend the real sets. We used lots of reference photographs of architectures, windows, doorways and all sort of details to create a typical village ambiance. The matte paintings were then projected onto the geometries from the camera point of view, and the various layers combined in Shake, our main compositing package.”

Even though little on-screen magic was required, CG supervisor Andrew Rawling and his team at FCFC still crafted 150 vfx shots, most of them “invisible” effects.

Wreaking Havoc in 2D
Several “invisible” effects shots involved placing the Brown children in outrageous situations, or simply in uncomfortable settings. This included a scene in which the baby girl is found laying inside a cooking pot full of cabbages! “To keep the baby as comfortable as possible, we filmed her from above on a soft mat and keyed/rotoscoped her from the background,” recounts digital effects supervisor Gavin Toomey. “She was suitably smeared with a little practical effects gravy on the day, but all of the cooking pot element was shot separately and composited around her in Shake.” Soon enough, the baby becomes the joyful subject of another experiment: the children build a catapult in the kitchen and explore the laws of gravity with crockery, chickens… and their baby sister. “We actually got the baby’s father, dressed in a green suit, to hold her up against a greenscreen, and we filmed various takes of the baby slowly moving in an arc motion. We then found the best frames for the action (and expression) and applied a 2D move and natural looking motion blur. The baby was giggling away while we shot her elements, and I think it helped the comedy factor of that sequence. For safety reasons, we shot all the flying crockery as separate elements. We kept the process as simple as possible by using physical effects and compositing that in with a difference matte. By avoiding any need for CG elements, we also avoided the implications of on set interaction, as items shatter against the kitchen set and the objects within it.”

The baby girl also necessitated subtle effects work for shots in which she was supposed to speak. Using Inferno, 2D artists selected takes in which the baby’s mouth made the proper shape for particular sounds. The mouth was then extracted from each selected take and subtly morphed with other mouth’s shapes to create the illusion that the baby was pronouncing words. A completely different approach was used for a scene in which a donkey starts acting like a human being, sending a kiss, for instance. Since the scene was much more cartoony, FCFC opted for a full muzzle replacement. “The donkey was wearing a leather strap across its face, so we used it as the boundary for our CG replacement,” Rawling notes. “It really helped a lot to hide the transition between the CG muzzle and the real head. The animation was created in Maya and rendered in RenderMan. We had about 10 different mouth shapes, which we blended to animate ‘human’ expressions.” The donkey was actually an animatronic and rod-controlled puppet built by Animated Extras. For the scene in which the animal is dancing, puppeteers animating the body, back legs and the supporting rig and wires were removed from the frame and replaced with a clean background.