VES Festival goers got a chance to check out up close the Batmobile from Batman Begins and Herbie from Herbie: Fully Loaded. Photos courtesy of Sarah Baisley.

From June 24-26, 2005, the Visual Effects Society hosted the 7th annual VES Festival, held this year at the Aero Theater in Santa Monica, California. The event highlighted the work being done in visual effects, special effects, animation and gaming. Distinguished panelists treated attendees to the tricks to bring some of the most recent blockbusters to the screen.

Friday’s Madagascar panel, which included art director Shannon Jeffries, character animation head Rex Grignon and vfx head Scott Singer, went into great detail about the technical and creative challenges of making this a fully realized 3D-animated feature at PDI/DreamWorks.

Jeffries stressed a common theme — making use of the “wow factor” in every component of production. Environments, which were inspired by ‘50s and ‘60s photos of the New York locales along with the works of Henry Rousseau for the Madagascar jungle, combined realism with stylization, emphasizing oversized proportions. Although the jungle looks very lush and dense, for instance, (the first reveal contains an astonishing 14,000 plants), it nonetheless required a lot of theatricality and staging, making use of silhouettes, veins and textures.

Meanwhile, the lead characters (lion, zebra, giraffe and hippo) are so angular that it made it tough to adapt to 3D. Therefore, to achieve the desired squash-and-stretch, the technical staff created isolation rigs with lots of deformation. This was new to DreamWorks and they especially isolated the spine and shoulder. Grignon said the effect was “elastic pajamas” that went way beyond what they were able to achieve in the Shrek movies. They wanted very cartoony performances, inspired by Bob Clampett, and made use of his signature “smear poses” to great effect, along with plenty of oversized poses.

Singer said the vfx underwent an overhaul too in the animation department. They decided to explore the meaning of CG effects. “What is gravity, what is mass?” It was evidently an eye opening experience: a balance between what looked good and what adhered to 3D rules. Not surprisingly, the jungle was the biggest effect, comprising 75% of the movie.

According to Singer, the biggest challenge was database manipulation. “Can a database be sexy?” They learned how to swap out components from layout to lighting, and made use of deflection vectors. They also created a hierarchy of plant rigs and utilized oscillation techniques to move the plants and trees.

Water, an integral part of the movie, became a lead character of sorts, and, in one of the funniest moments, Singer showed a clip of the animators performing spit research for the various comedy routines.

The Friday “Anatomy of CSI“ panel provided a very instructive analysis of the different vfx approaches to the popular franchise, which is built around the signature “snap zoom” that sweeps viewers into the micro level of the various crime scenes. The panel included Larry Detwiler, vfx supervisor of CSI: Miami, who began on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation with Stargate Digital; Andrew Orloff, vfx supervisor on CSI and CSI: Miami with Zoic Studios; and Max Ivins, vfx supervisor on CSI: New York.

Judging from the wide array of clips (which included a bullet traveling through a car window; a car collapsing from a bridge; a tsunami disaster and its impact on a bank; and lots of creative blood splatter), it surely is a complex production process melding motion control, 3D animation and compositing.