Sony Pictures always had the goal of producing an all-CG animated feature. Projects like Stuart Little provided the company with valuable lessons on setting up a pipeline. © Columbia Pictures.

From the AWN/VFXWorld Exclusive Open Season Diaries.

It starts with a strong foundation.

For nearly a decade, navigating through the most explosive and dramatic shift in digital production, Sony Pictures Imageworks established one of the most robust production environments in the industry. During the period starting in 1997, Imageworks steadily grew its character animation capabilities, always with the goal of ultimately producing all-CG animated features. The roots of today’s pipeline began production of Stuart Little.

The pipeline really involves four major areas: creative set-up, production management, technology, animation and rendering.

The basic production pipeline at Imageworks was strong and nimble enough to accommodate everything required for animation production. Much of the credit for this goes back to lessons learned on the Stuart Little films and the Academy Award-winning short The ChubbChubbs.

The ChubbChubbs was designed to break the system. The idea was to produce a short film with a wide array of characters, multiple detailed environments, expressive character animation and lots of visual effects. The project was also designed to test the technology and technical infrastructure at Imageworks to ensure that operation could support and manage the simultaneous production of an all-CG project at the same time as live-action visual effects. While The ChubbChubbs was in production, Imageworks was fully engaged on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Stuart Little 2 and Spider-Man.

While the backend infrastructure at Imageworks had the technical firepower to support animation production, the first new addition to the production pipeline was the creative front end of animation.

Since Imageworks was well situated from the standpoint of producing the imagery, one of the first orders of business for Sony Pictures Animation was the establishment of full-fledged story and visual development departments. One of the reasons that Open Season has such a polished look is that there was already a strong base of animation talent in place when the unit was formed. The idea was to parlay the resident talent and additional artists whose talent and experience was even more animation specific. This was a largely talent driven component of the pipeline and the company was able to attract some of the very best artists in the business.