The original movie is remembered for its Tex Avery-like animation, while Son of the Mask draws its inspiration from Chuck Jones’ work. © 2005 Tippet Studios/New Line Prods.

When The Mask was released in 1994, it broke new ground by using digital technology to create extreme make-up effects that neither animatronics nor traditional prosthetics could have achieved. Supervised by Scott Squires at Industrial Light & Magic, the effects paved the way for a whole new range of characters.

Eleven years later, New Line releases a sequel... with a baby and a dog replacing Jim Carrey in the lead. In the movie, the baby is conceived when the father (Jamie Kennedy) seduces his wife while wearing the magical prop. As a result, the child is born with all the magical powers of the mask and learns to use them by imitating characters seen on television.

Selected to helm the visual effects was Jamie Price, who had just finished supervising the plate photography for the flooding of the Isengard sequence in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for New Line: “The film I started to work on was very different. Entire sequences were removed, new ones were added, plus we had a six-week hiatus in summer 2003 while portions of the movie were being rewritten. We shot in Australia in winter 2003 and wrapped in April 2004, and since I was also second unit director, I was able to direct a lot of the effects sequences myself, which was very satisfying. I shot all the effects plate and more, as I was also acting as second unit director. The last effects shots were completed in November last year. We originally planned for about 500 shots, but this was later reduced to around 380. Eight vendors worked on the project.”

Scott “Huck” Wirtz, animation lead for ILM, found that making a digital baby look believable was a challenge. He felt the key was to match the real and digital babies’ eyes, otherwise the double would fail. © Lucas Digital, Ltd. A

While the original movie is remembered for its Tex Avery-like animation, Son of the Mask draws its inspiration from Chuck Jones’ work, a more subtle school of animation in which gags often lead to an emotional moment. References to landmark cartoons abound in the movie, as the main character is a traditional animator who lives for his art. “We watched a lot of cartoons of the ‘50s,” adds Price. “The director wanted to reproduce in live-action some of the outrageous camera moves that Chuck Jones and his animators had created. Digital technology now makes these kinds of shots possible. For example, whenever the camera needed to pass though a window, we shot the plates without the wall and completed the set digitally. This category of effects included one shot in which the camera starts on the dog in the backyard, cranes up to the second story of the house, then goes through a window into a washroom. In reality, the washroom and the garden were two different sets that were digitally connected. An interesting shot that we did at Toybox was a camera move that went down to the dog digging in the garden, with the camera ending up shooting up at the pet, from below the ground surface. It was actually a spoof of the shot of Michelle Pfeiffer laying down, drugged, in What Lies Beneath. Here again, we had to combine two plates: in the first one, the camera went down to ground level, actually flying through the (CG) roof of the dog house; in the second plate, the dog was shot up on a glass platform, and finally the dirt and the doghouse roof were added digitally. All these shots were previsualized by Pixel Liberation Front.”

Giving Birth To a Super Baby
The main challenge for the effects team was the creation of a photorealistic computer-generated baby. Although a real child was used for all non-effects shots, a digital version was required for the many impossible stunts and tricks that the character had to perform. When Price called ILM to discuss the project, he was aware that the San Rafael facility was already at work developing another CG baby for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. “We actually ended up sharing the development of the technology and I believe that both projects benefited from this. The challenge was on two levels: first, the character had to look as realistic as a real baby, and second, it had to move like an adult while still remaining convincing as a baby. So, from a technical and an animation point of view, it was a major undertaking.”

ILM was first asked to produce a test shot of the baby jumping out of his high chair, bouncing around the room and, finally, dancing smoothly. The studio developed the test shot over a period of two months. “The main difficulty with this character was that, within a shot, it had to look like a completely photorealistic baby and then, make an outrageous move like inflating his head like a balloon!” notes lead animator Scott “Huck” Wirtz. “It was very hard to make it look believable. The first step was to create a digital baby as realistic as possible. We especially focused our efforts on the eyes. If they didn’t match the real baby’s, the digital double would fail.”