Technology has come a long way since the original Fred MacMurray film, so the new Shaggy Dog is much more cutting edge. All images © 2006 Disney Enterprises. All rights reserved.

It’s been 47 years since Disney first turned a story about an average guy that miraculously changes into a sheepdog into a big screen hit. Now almost 50 years later, the House of Mouse is contemporizing their family classic, The Shaggy Dog, with funny man Tim Allen following in the paw prints of Fred MacMurray, as a family guy transformed into a furry alter ego. Technology has come a long way since the high concept, low-tech original, so it makes sense that the new Shaggy Dog is much more cutting edge and illustrative of the actual human-to-canine transformation process. Under the supervision of visual effects supervisor Stephen Rosenbaum, several vendors worked on the film with the 3D character work going to the highly respected Tippett Studio. Tom Schelesny was the Tippett-based visual effects supervisor and he details how he and his team tackled the upgrades to the concept of the film.

“Our involvement with the project was based more on the fact that we, and I, had done this style of work in the past,” Schelesny details about why Tippett was awarded the film. “There is a subtlety required for comedy, which in a way goes beyond just the technical requirements of creating a computer graphic image. It’s a subtlety that’s not really present in let’s say a horror movie. In a horror movie, something that is intended to be frightening may be unintentionally funny, and that’s OK. But if you are working on a comedy and something that you intended to be funny turns out to not be funny, it’s usually not an option,” he chuckles. “So their interest in us had very much to do with our comedy work in the past, including the sequel to The Mask, The Son of the Mask, so my sensibilities were already working in that area.”

“This is not one of your classic visual effects films, in that the main characters in it are not computer graphic characters,” he continues. “The main character is Tim Allen. It wasn’t one of those situations where we had to augment anything he was doing. He is a very talented physical actor. In fact, it was quite surprising when we got out there, they’d roll the camera and he would just turn it on. It gave us a huge confidence in the project because it wasn’t like they were going to solve any problems in the show with just throwing visual effects at it. Clearly a lot of the responsibility fell to Mr. Allen and he is actually very funny. So the kinds of things that we needed to do, which go against our general visual effects m.o., was to not to mug for the camera for every shot. Generally, we mug for the camera to show everybody that they are getting their money’s worth in terms of a visual effects character. But for the computer graphics characters in this show the comedy was in their situation. They weren’t juggling plates; instead it was a King Cobra that has the tail of a shaggy dog. With that came different challenges, like does he act like a King Cobra or something else? Our main impetuous on the show was to come up with a supporting cast to support Tim’s performance.”

Detailing exactly what Tippett brought to the table, Schelesny explains, “We did about 110 shots. We weren’t the only vendor, but we did all the 3D animation and characters. We had about 50 artists at our studio working on it for about a year. We modeled and animated using Maya. We created 12 computer-generated characters.” Giving some context as to how they were integrated into the film, he details, “At one point in the show, we find ourselves in a lab and there are all these animals that were being experimented on with this ‘shaggy dog’ virus, which are very, very small, green, furry dog-shaped cells, that swim through your bloodstream. They were using that to try and find the fountain of youth, because the original shaggy dog was from Tibet, it’s not Tim Allen at all. The Tibetan dog is very old and the evil scientists got onto this thing to find out what makes this dog live so long via this virus, so they can find a fountain of youth and be trillionaires. So they had all these failed experiments and the things we did were a King Cobra with a sheep dog’s tail in CGI. We did four rabbits that bark like dogs and sit in lotus position and meditate. We also did six lab rats, which would bark, chase their tales and sit up and beg. The last mutated animal was something called the ‘frog dog,’ which had the body of a bullfrog and the head of a bulldog. It was very disturbing,” he chuckles.