When the train arrives, Hero Boy’s room and props shake violently. Stand-alone props with animation curves applied could not make it through the pipeline as-is, so a procedure was scripted to drive a rigged component.

Once the performance had been replicated, I still thought that something was wrong. Even though breathing animation had been added, our boy still looked dead. Tom was absolutely still in the reference, so we couldn’t add gratuitous movement — we had been down that road before! So what was the difference between a sleeping boy and a dead boy? With that question in mind, I strapped a laser pointer to my head, lay on the floor and watched the little red dot on the ceiling. Try as I might, I could not keep the little dot from chattering all over the place, even while holding my breath. Beneath the random noise was a very distinctive rhythmic bounce — the heart! Obviously, the dot would not have moved at all had the pointer been strapped to a cadaver. So now we were on to something. Noise curves were added to the body, neck and head to emulate the noise pattern that I saw projected on the ceiling. Animator John Matthews hunted down an audio waveform of a heartbeat, and used that waveform as another driver on the same joints. Believe it or not, these very small nuances make a huge difference in the viewers’ perception of that kid lying there — subliminal as it may be.

Acquiring Tom Hanks’ likeness in the face of the boy was a losing battle until it was decided to add a hint of Tom in the brow area in order to help sell expressions.

July 17, 2003
In the next shot, our hero gets up out of bed and goes to the window. This was a very complex shot with lots of contact moments between our character and props in the room. There was very little movement coming through in the motion capture spine, so the offset spine and redistribution controls were used to create a more natural compression and flexing in the spine as the character crawled across the bed. Deformers are used to animate depressions in the mattress and pillow as the character moves through the scene. Representative geometry is deformed and animated to define the desired behavior of the blankets, which will ultimately be simulated. As lead animator Chad Stewart continues to animate the feet and hands, the snapping controls “explode” when put to the test.

When we see our character posed at the window for the first time, it strikes everyone that his arms are freaky-long! The character goes back to modeling to shorten the arms — and we squeeze in a few other fixes while we’re at it. Because of this, the character must be re-rigged, and the snapping problem ultimately gets resolved as well.

July 21, 2003
In our next close-up, Chris hears the bell and looks over his shoulder toward camera. There is a very specific look on Tom’s face in the video reference that Bob is intent on replicating. When he saw our work he kept saying that he “just wasn’t seeing Tom in our boy.” However, the boy is a very different character design with little or no resemblance to Tom. Acquiring Tom’s likeness in the face of the boy was a losing battle, unless we deformed his face to look more like Tom’s. The area that Bob was focusing on was the brow region, and the shape of the boy’s brow was very different from the distinctive “Nicholson-arch” that Tom has. It was decided to add a hint of the Tom Hanks likeness in the brow area in order to help sell expressions like this in the future.

August 19, 2003
New textures were painted on our boy to represent the Hanks brow shape more accurately. Once this was approved, the hair-patch layout for the eyebrow was modified to match. The end result is that the desired expression comes through. Since the brow design changed, all shots leading up to this had to be reworked and all works-in-progress (which there were many) were upgraded to incorporate the design change.

To avoid this problem moving forward, the character design was locked. Our work in the future would be an interpretive evaluation of one character transposed to the next. We don’t want to skew our characters’ face in the interest of caricaturing the facial topology seen in the video reference. Instead we are reading between the lines and transferring the intent of an expression from one character to the next. For instance, there is a series of shots when the boy is frustrated that he cannot hear the bell. There is no dialogue, and little physical likeness between Tom and the boy; however, Tom’s mannerisms and expressions clearly come through.