Known for its animation of CG critters, Tippett Studio helped create the hyper Manuel the Rat and laid back Iguana Chico for Beverly Hills Chihuahua. Unless noted, photos courtesy of Tippett Studio. All images © Disney Enterprises.

In the 13 years since the talking animals of Babe earned a visual effects Oscar for Rhythm & Hues, we've seen increasingly articulate menageries on screen. Walt Disney's Beverly Hills Chihuahua (opening today) features a chattering class comprised of all manner of pooches, voiced by an enviable cast that includes Drew Barrymore, Andy Garcia, George Lopez, Edward James Olmos, Cheech Marin and Paul Rodriguez. Director Raja Gosnell also brought his experience integrating digital character animation into live action films, having directed two movies starring Scooby Doo.

But Beverly Hills Chihuahua required more than the muzzle replacements of real dogs and a bevy of their digital doubles. It also called for all-CG animals that could deliver lines and look real enough to be believable alongside photographed dogs. "This movie is very much in the vein of Shaggy Dog," says James W. Brown, animation supervisor at Tippett Studio. The Northern California shop has become known for its animation of CG critters, especially recent characters like Templeton the Rat in Charlotte's Web and the chipmunk Pip in Enchanted. Beverly Hills Chihuahua featured two CG critters that had to have acting chops: The hyper Manuel the Rat (voiced by Marin) and the laid back Iguana Chico (Rodriguez). "Yes, another rat," laughs Brown. "We've got rats down pretty good. But this is a family film, so we didn't go for complete realism. We didn't want anybody to be grossed out by a rat."

"At Tippett, it is imperative that we view our creatures in an environment free of surprises," says Page Frakes, Color Pipeline supervisor. "On Beverly Hills Chihuahua, our art, TD and compositing groups utilized Cine-tal's Cinespace for film-look emulation and we were happy with the results."

The Dog's Life
Brown explains, "In the 165 shots we did for the movie, there were a lot of crowd shots of dogs and digital doubles. We did a number of digital doubles of stunt dogs, especially for things that the dogs couldn't physically do, like jump onto a moving train." Tippett Studio employed data captured by Realscan 3D to create digital versions of actual dogs in the film. Realscan was able to deliver accurate likenesses of these dogs by using a handheld system that merged data from several capture sessions. The resulting full body scans were delivered to Tippett, while scans of the dogs' heads and muzzles went to Cinesite for the muzzle replacement animation.

But it is in the scene where pampered pooch Chloe (voiced by Drew Barrymore) meets the rat and his iguana pal that we see the different types of animation in Beverly Hills Chihuahua come together. "Chico and Manuel are best friends who try to con Chloe out of her very expensive, Harry Winston diamond collar," says Brown. The attention-getting aspect of the con is that the duo makes it appear as if the iguana is eating the rat. So the physical interaction among the characters was key.

"Manuel pushes on Chloe and rubs her fur," explains Brown. "So on set, the production people prompted the dog playing Chloe to react. Then, when we put in Manuel, we did some fur displacement on the body of the real dog where he touches her. It's in there because at Tippett we love to go for realism!"

Realscan captured data that Tippett then used to create digital versions of the film's dogs. A handheld system merged data from several capture sessions. Courtesy of Realscan 3D.

Paling Around
Brown observes that the biggest challenge wasn't with the dogs but with the close interaction between the film's CG animals, Chico and Manuel. "The big issue that we had with this, which is something we hadn't dealt with a whole lot before, is that those characters are so close in their friendship as con men that the personal space around them is very small. They're bumping into each other and trying to hide behind one another, so there's a real interaction. We had 65 shots of Manuel and 53 of Chico and nearly every sequence had them together. They push each other so much it was almost like animating one character."

Brown led a team of 16 animators on Beverly Hills Chihuahua, including lead animators Ryan Hood and Mike Brunet. Lead character rigger Jeremie Talbot also played a key role in selling the interaction between Manuel and Chico, notes Brown. "When the rat pushes on the iguana's ribs, for example, we see his elbow going into the skin a bit. We used our deformer system to add these types of things. A lot of it is based through (Autodesk) Maya but we do have some proprietary plug-ins that our rigging department wrote through MEL scripts. They allow our animators to create these deformers a lot faster than if we had to do it ourselves."

Imitating Life
Unlike Templeton the Rat for Charlotte's Web, this time Tippett chose some "off campus research" to get the correct look for Manuel. "He's a wood rat, about 6 to 8 inches long, which is larger than your normal rat," says Brown. "So we went to the Lindsay Wildlife Museum near Berkeley to watch a rat there that had been rescued. We got to sit and watch him and what we noticed was his high energy. Nothing was slow. We couldn't capture that completely for our rat because we wanted audiences to be able to read his behavior on screen.

"The iguana was an interesting challenge because doing a reptile was fairly new for us, and this one had to act believably," Brown recalls. "A guy who works here is big into reptiles and he knew a guy who brought in a couple of iguanas. One of them was five feet long. We had four video cameras going at once while the iguanas were running and climbing up and down on things. We ran four cameras because iguanas are very skittish animals and they can move with great speed. Luckily, there were two of them so we got a ton of reference footage from every angle.