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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 4.8 - NOVEMBER 1999

Stuart's Not-So-Little Journey To The Big Screen
(continued from page 2)

Anderson and his animation crew also conducted research on Stuart's personality and movements. How would he act? What would his facial expressions and body positions look like? Ultimately, they drew their inspiration from Michael J. Fox's voice-acting, Buster Keaton films and mime artist Bill Irwin.

"We taped Irwin doing all sorts of performances as to what Stuart might look like when he talks to the Littles, how he would look when he brushes his teeth with this oversized brush," says Anderson. "Bill's such a great actor, and his influence gave Stuart a really nice rhythm. All the animators got copies of those tapes and looked at them throughout the process."

Though Fox, Keaton and Irwin influenced Stuart's human personality, the animators had to reference a different species to get his anatomy right. So at one point, the real McCoy was brought in -- a live rat. "The rat was very helpful," notes Anderson. "We studied his face, primarily looked at how his nose moved, how his cheeks moved, when his eyes blink, how his lids work."

Minkoff adds, "We needed to find different ways of exaggerating what seems natural about a mouse, without falling into the trap of being too cute. A texture and an edge had to remain."

The Littles pose for their first family portrait.
© Columbia Pictures.

Quiet As A Mouse On The Set
Meanwhile, back on the set, the actors rehearsed their scenes with an absent leading man...er, mouse. Apparently, Stuart was too busy being coifed, clothed and...well, created to show up for work. Laser pointers were used to show Davis, Laurie and Lipnicki were Stuart would stand in relation to them, and they would improvise holding Stuart in their hands.

Chen explains, "We'd practice with the puppet, we'd have the maquette on set, and we'd practice the choreography of how they're going to hold Stuart."

The experience became so real to the actors that at one point, states Minkoff, Laurie actually mimed gently setting Stuart down on the floor even though the camera wasn't rolling. Apparently he didn't want to harm his fellow, furry thespian.

Next came what's called "the reference pass." According to Chen, three different kinds of racquetball-sized balls were used to reflect the kind of real-world lighting that would be reflected in Stuart's eyes and on his fur. "The actors would hold the balls in their own hand, and that way we could see the way the balls pass through the lighting, if they cast shadows at a certain moment," he says. "Then, using these balls, the animator has to place many different lights on (the animated) Stuart to make him look like he's moving through different light sources in a particular space."

Once the scene was shot, the selected take was then scanned into the computer, color timed and sent onto the match-move stage where, notes Chen, "the artist re-creates in the computer the camera that was used to actually photograph the live action plate. And by re-creating it, he has to match the type of lens that was being used. The computer graphic camera does the same type of movements as the real camera does, that's why it's called match-moving. It matches it so that the perspective will work."

Chen opines that match-moving is perhaps the hardest part of this labor-intensive process. "If the matching isn't done to the highest level, you'll see Stuart slipping, or he won't feel like he's walking on the surface or sitting or walking up the steps or whatever it is that he's interacting with. If the perspective doesn't feel right, there'll be something odd about the shot."

Clothes Make the Mouse
After match-moving, the shots were sent on to be animated by Anderson and his team of 30 animators. According to Anderson, one of the biggest creative and technical concerns was having this many people work on just one character. "Because when that happens," he says, "you have to worry about the consistency of the character. Are 30 people going to be able to make it look like the same character all the time?"

Part of maintaining this consistency was assigning different scenes to different animators based on their own artistic strengths. "There was an audition process...which was to evaluate crew so Henry would know how to cast a shot," Weiss mentions. "It wasn't, `You're bad, you're good.' It was who understood the character the best for a particular kind of scene. Who's best with this time of day, that kind of thing. We divvied up the scenes based on people's certain strengths for animation."

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