In fall 2006, Michael Holzl was part of the animation team that successfully landed The Incredible Hulk for R&H. All images ™ & © 2008 Marvel Ent. Courtesy of Rhythm & Hues.

The Incredible Hulk, Marvel Pictures' new version of the comic book classic (now playing from Universal Pictures), has more than a couple of fresh twists. While we've seen versions of the character on both small and large screen (as recently as director Ang Lee's 2003 movie Hulk), this time there was a team of collaborators who brought a different take on the material. Notable among them was director Louis Letterier (best known for The Transporter films) and actor Edward Norton as Dr. Bruce Banner/the Hulk. In this telling of the tale, when Banner mutates into a muscle-bound, raging green Hulk he meets his match in an equally muscle-bound villain called The Abomination -- a mutation of a character played by Tim Roth. Making two world-class actors transform into massive CG mutants was the assignment given to the animators at L.A.-based Rhythm & Hues.

Michael Holzl, a lead animator at Rhythm & Hues, has a nickname that seems tailor-made for this project. The folks at R&H call Holzl -- who's from Australia -- "The Thunder from Down Under." He began working with R&H on 2002's Scooby Doo and developed a reputation for being able to tackle high-action animation. In the fall of 2006, Holzl became part of the original R&H animation team that launched the studio's efforts to land The Incredible Hulk.

"I was on at the start -- with three or four other people -- before we even had the film awarded," Holzl recalls. "We knew we had a good opportunity to get it. The film was awarded in March 2007, so we were working on it for a while before we knew we actually had it. I'm a huge fan of the Hulk and I definitely wanted to get onto this show. So we did tests to get the director excited."

The R&H team used the studio's proprietary animation software Voodoo to previs several key elements of the movie. "That was part of getting us the film," Holzl believes. "A lot of shots had been presented to us as: 'Hulk has to get from here to there… make it look cool!' Later, the director would decide how he wanted to film things based on our previs stuff. He could see the timings and the flow of sequences before he even filmed them. So when he films the action, he wouldn't forget that we'll be putting a nine-foot-tall green character into the scene."

Designing the outsized title character so that he could move realistically was a central challenge for Holzl and his fellow animators. "We looked at Conan The Barbarian and Lou Ferrigno to get a sense of body builders' movements, and we filmed ourselves acting things out, motion-wise. We looked pretty silly doing that, but it came in handy."

Unlike past interpretations of the Hulk, in which the character seemed to resemble something as big as a Macy's Thanksgiving parade balloon, this time the character is more modestly scaled. "Ed Norton had quite an impact on that," says Holzl. "Ed wanted him to be a little more athletic rather than just a mass of muscles. This Hulk is a bit leaner and more agile. In the last Hulk movie, the character would grow depending how angry he got. In this film he doesn't grow so much as get stronger as he gets angrier."

Michael Holzl.

The color of this Hulk was also based on a different green paint chip. "Everyone was well aware of his being neon green in the last film," notes Holzl. "So the color was discussed heavily. They went though different variations -- especially with regard to the color of his blood, and whether it should be red or green. In this film the Hulk does get beaten up enough where he gets cut and bleeds. He did go through different looks, where there were variations on very de-saturated greens where it was almost his normal skin color with a very subtle green in it. That looked pretty realistic, but it didn't give you the feeling that it was The Hulk. It's very hard to make a person look real in green, as well as having the proportions that he does. So they ended up choosing this darker green."

When it came to determining how broad the character's movements would be, Holzl asserts, "It's so easy to go too far. When you have human character doing superhuman things you still have to make him look like he could be alive. In this film, The Hulk could only jump a half-football field at the most!"

Motion capture was an obvious tool for a film like The Incredible Hulk, and the task of capturing the majority of the data was handled by Giant Studios, in collaboration with R&H. Holzl admits to being "an early skeptic" about motion capture, believing that it took away some of the animator's role. "But now I've changed my tune quite a lot. Even when we had a shot that we'd have to keyframe -- for example, a jump that wasn't quite 'superhuman' enough -- we could still see the motion-captured jump 10 different ways, and move around it in 3D. So it's better than video footage. We could see it in every direction and pan around. If there was a MoCap that we couldn't use at all, it still gave us plenty of reference that would help us fill in the blanks. There was no way, as keyframers that we would have gotten that amount of detail to act upon. It definitely enhanced my keyframe animation."

Holzl also notes, "For movements that were very specific to camera or that involved interactions with other elements, it was necessary to keyframe. But we always went through the MoCap data every time a shot was opened. We looked at the actions we had MoCapped to see what was appropriate, or what we could take from it that would help us."