Five vfx houses created the effects in the live-action version of Charlotte’s Web. Tippett Studio was responsible for Templeton (left) and Wilbur. Courtesy of Tippett Studio. All images © 2006 Paramount Pictures. All rights reserved.

This month marks the release of Paramount’s much awaited live-action version of E. B. White’s classic children’s tale, Charlotte’s Web (Dec. 15). The process, as producer Jordan Kerner explains it, involved making two movies. "We made one movie with our wonderful live actors. Then we made another movie that added computer images, face replacements, eye rhythms, moving mouths and facial expressions that mimic the actors. Hopefully, this second movie fits seamlessly with the first."

To accomplish this, five visual effects houses joined forces to create the computer-generated effects: the Tippett Studio in Berkeley, Rhythm & Hues (R&H) in Los Angeles and Australia-based houses Rising Sun Pictures (RSP), Fuel International and Digital Pictures Iloura. Through the cineSync program developed by RSP, director Gary Winick, Kerner and the visual effects staff could fully communicate in realtime even when thousands of miles away from each other. First, let's take a look at the two effects houses on this side of the Pacific before moving on to RSP.

Joel Friesch and Blair Clark were the visual effects supervisors for Tippett Studio. “We were to create Templeton, which is the rat,” says Friesch. “He was going to be completely CG throughout the whole film.” This, as you can well imagine, presented several challenges. “First off the rat had to be photoreal,” states Friesch. “He had to cut against and with real animals. So, if our rat didn’t look real that kind of blows the whole illusion of real animals talking. That was our biggest challenge. The second one was to build a photoreal rat and yet still give him the ability to act because he had a definite character curve throughout the movie. So, we had to make sure he could still act and show emotion. Then our next challenge was that, a third of the way through the production, they came to us and asked if we could do some crows. We had not really prepared for that in pre-production. So, we had to build a feather tool and create crows that were also photoreal and squeeze it into our pipeline. Our crew, our pipeline and our schedule were set up to do the rat and this was a little something extra.”

Tippett Studio’s previous experience creating furry animals gave it an advantage when working on Templeton. The challenge on Charlotte’s Web was to make a photoreal rat that could act and emote. Courtesy of Tippett Studio.

Tippett Studio has done quite a few furry animals for various productions, including the sentient cat from Catwoman and the Russian Blue from Cats & Dogs, so creating Templeton was something they could really sink their teeth into. Having a proprietary fur tool already in the pipeline along with detailed movement studies allowed the artists and animators at Tippett to accelerate and enhance their renders to the point that they were ahead of the other vfx houses working on the production. “We were always moving, and the cup was constantly changing, so we were having to change things,” Friesch explains. “Sometimes we’d work on a shot and find out that the shot was cut. Then we’d stop and find out the shot was back in again, so we’d have to start up again. Things like that were always happening.” However, because they were always ahead, Tippett tended to take the lead in completing the shots. “So, in the shots that we had to exchange with Rising Sun or R&H, we’d pretty much have our rat down and give them an alpha channel, and then they would take the shot and put their character in.” Since Templeton was completed first, this enabled the Tippett crew along with director Winick to establish the eye lines that the other companies would follow in subsequent shots.

Not only did their previous experience with furry animals allow the visual effects team at Tippett to speed up their production but also to be more creative. “Among other things, this show didn’t have huge technological leaps, where you had to figure out how to do something,” continues Friesch. “It was a nice show for our artists to really concentrate on being creative because they didn’t have to worry about any of those limitations. The stuff that we had to do, we had pretty much done before on other shows. So, we were pretty confident that we could pull the rat off. The artists could just create and didn’t have to worry about technology so much. It was a little different for the crows, but it wasn’t so bad. But for Templeton, it was nice just watching people be creative.”