With Surf's Up, there was a unique opportunity to put more than 20 minutes of breaking waves on screen as one of the major characters in the movie. All Surf's Up images © Sony Pictures Animation.

One of the most action-packed animated features this year in terms of visual effects was Sony Pictures Animation's Surf's Up. Visual Effects Supervisor Rob Bredow has been impressed with the overall visual effects work in this year's animated releases.

"I would say it has been a great year for visual effects in animated films. With Surf's Up, we knew we had a unique opportunity to put more than 20 minutes of breaking waves on screen as one of the major characters in the movie. It took the right combination of building on our history handling water in visual effects films like Cast Away and Open Season and a certain amount of faith on the part of the directors and producers to put their trust in our team's ability to pull it off successfully. The challenge of creating this diverse palette of waves to support the film attracted some of the best talent and that's really evident in the final shots you see on screen in Surf's Up."

JPP: How were your artists able to balance their creativity with the complex technology necessary to integrate water effects into the animation?

Rob Bredow: Our entire crew focused efforts in one specific area -- making sure that our technology was always used in support of our story. For Surf's Up, that meant we chose to actually animate the waves like we would a character instead of trying to drive the whole system with a simulation. That put the creative control in the hands of the animators and allowed us the creative flexibility to deliver waves that met the stylistic needs of a shot, rather than physics.

JPP: I know the surfing sequence were absolutely fantastic. The waves seemed to have various moods that gave them a character-like quality, which was fascinating. Did you have any problems varying the motion of the waves to give them this quality while still maintaining a realistic appearance?

Rob Bredow observes that Imageworks now shares the same artists and technologies for movies as Spider-Man 3 and Surf's Up.

RB: Of course, there is only so far you can adjust the speed of a wave or the crashing rate of the wave lip before it starts looking very non-water-like. To keep an eye on this during the development of the shots across the departments, we devised all sorts of visualization techniques to ensure our waves would be believable in the final rendering. This choice to put as much control in the hands of the animators and ensure that what they saw on their screen was a very close approximation of the final result down to the surface foam, the whitewater explosions and even the water texture really paid off throughout the film.

JPP: Finally, what are your thoughts on competing against your peers in the new VES category? Is it challenging? Exciting? What is your take on it?

RB: I think it is a great opportunity. The niche of visual effects for animated films can easily be overlooked because it doesn't fit neatly into the existing categories. What we're seeing more and more frequently now at Imageworks is that the same artists and technologies work on both a Spider-Man 3 and a Surf's Up. In fact, we shared and developed many techniques in tandem on those two shows. It's great to see organizations like VES taking notice of the visual effects in an animated film that's on par with the best live-action shows out there.

J. Paul Peszko is a freelance writer and screenwriter living in Los Angeles. He writes various features and reviews, as well as short fiction. He has a feature comedy in development and has just completed his second novel. When he isn't writing, he teaches communications courses.