<em>Bolt</em>: Disney Gets Reborn Again

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Bolt [1], opening today, overcame a rough start to become the first feature completely overseen by Pixar for the new Walt Disney Animation Studios banner. All images © Disney Enterprises.

We all know the importance of Bolt (bowing today): it marks the first feature completely overseen by Pixar's John Lasseter [2] and Ed Catmull [3] for the new Walt Disney Animation Studios banner. And we know the difficult history Bolt endured prior to the new regime as American Dog [4] (with director Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch [5]) being replaced by Chris Williams (the Glago's Guest [6] short) and Byron Howard (Lilo & Stitch lead character animator) because his experimental, picaresque vision didn't jibe with the brain trust's.

So, with a new plot (canine TV star believes he's a real superhero, only to be accidentally let loose in the real world, where he's befriended by a jaded cat and hamster fan boy) and a new character design, a crew was quickly assembled and set on an 18-month production schedule to make the release date.

As Catmull points out, it was important that the new team meshed together so well and handled the accelerated schedule: there was no time for lethargy yet the heightened sense of urgency helped cut through all the fat.

And, as Lasseter, reiterates, "We brought over the notion of a filmmaker-led studio from Pixar and the stories come from them. We create a brain trust, and we're all very honest with them about their movie. There are no mandatory notes at this studio. But other than that, it's all the filmmakers here at this studio. We're like cousins. Every now and then, we'll take a film up to Pixar and show it to the brain trust up there, or the Pixar films will come down here and show it to the brain trust down here, but everything is kept very, very separate."

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As the new boss, Lasseter had set high standards for the Disney animators. He wanted the craziest, over-the-top action opening sequence ever seen in an animated film, and the team delivered. [7]

For Williams, "There's something in our DNA where we're always referencing back to Disney classics. But at the same time, we work with John Lasseter now and he's always going to be pushing you to create really great original characters that resonate. And that's very much the Pixar way, where you want to do something new and exciting. So I think we're in a place where we can benefit from that Pixar approach to constructing story, but at the same time, have this heritage that people are always talking about: those classic Disney movies. You always feel that flavor, I think."

Howard emphasizes that you never lose sight of that power of emotion. "I was watching the opening of Dumbo the other day: the scene where these storks bring babies to the zoo. And without saying a word, you see this mother elephant reaching up to the sky, hoping it's going to get a baby. And she doesn't and your heart breaks. You're hooked. These are emotions that exist in Disney films and no matter how funny you try and make them, at the heart, we're going to go for that key emotional response. That's the way John told us how he starts his films, too. 'What's the biggest emotional punch that you're going to get? What does your film revolve around?' And then everything stems from there."

And emotion was key as Bolt (John Travolta) guilessly searches for his "owner," the teenage co-star, Penny (Miley Cyrus), across the country while bonding with Mittens, the cat (Susie Essman), and Rhino, the hamster (board artist Mark Walton).

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Rhino the hamster posed the most unique problems. To find the best-looking designs, the team created "paloozas," a creative refining process that transformed Disney's workflow system. [8]

"The trio of characters really plays off each other emotionally and dynamically," Howard continues. "We knew that since John was our boss and his standards are so high that our animators wanted to live up to them and exceed them. The nice thing about John, too, is that he is such a film fan. The opening action sequence, for example, was important to show what Bolt has experienced every day of his life for five years and where his head is. And John told us that it has to be the craziest, over-the-top action sequence that anyone has ever seen in an animated film. And so we really tried to do our homework and study action and rise to the occasion. And we threw everything at our technology team. It's not a small film by any means. It's got just a few main characters, but it has a vast scope and they go across the country and there are explosions and helicopters and tons of different sets and all these problems to be solved. And they knocked them all down [with the help of Visual Effects Supervisor John Murrah, who's worked with Michael Bay]."

Meanwhile, for the character animators, the challenges of Bolt meant creating a completely new working method. While Bolt is the lead character, Rhino posed the most unique problems. The first thing was to make the character look appealing. To hone in on the best designs, the team created something called "paloozas," which are a creative refining process that began with a successful "Boltapalooza" (for the dog) and progressed to "Mittenspalooza" (for the cat), "Pennypalooza" (for the human girl) and "Rhinopalooza" (for the hamster). The team also underwent an enormous change in workflow. Instead of moving from modeling to rigging to animation, which would then go back and forth for approvals, and could cause huge problems if a rigging change was required, they worked more collaboratively. There was the formation of a character team that worked interactively, starting with modeling and moving to rigging and then to animation, but proceeding back and forth in a fluid, circular motion. This system has proved so effective that the change in workflow has become the new standard at Disney.

As for Rhino, the animators turned to squirrel designs from Sleeping Beauty (stylized but anatomically correct) for inspiration. "Rhino was originally rigged as a quadruped, and worked very well that way," explains Clay Kaytis, the Rhino supervisor. "But the story demands really said that he needed to stand on two legs and act anthropomorphically. Of all the animals, he was definitely the most human in acting. And it was such a struggle to get him on his hind legs and be upright."

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Animators turned to squirrel designs for inspiration for Rhino (right). Originally designed as a quadruped, the story demanded that he be a biped and act anthropomorphically. Rhino was then re-rigged using a new PSD. [9]

So Rhino had to be re-rigged using a new PSD (pose shape deformer), and distance locators constantly needed to be adjusted. "There were too many in the neck, so we added locators in the arm," Kaytis adds. "Basically, we had to keep what he had and not throw away the rig, so it was a requirement on our part to figure out how to add everything to this rig so he could do two things within the same body. So we got together with the rigging TDs and they were very supportive. As animators, I made a small team and we explained the requirements, they went away for two days and came back with this solution of rigging. They actually experimented with it a little bit on previous characters, but nothing went into production with it. But they felt this rig that was a hybrid of a quadruped and a biped would shift between two different modes within a shot. For two months straight, we worked on it and in the end it was an awesome rig. It's the most complicated rig I've ever animated with. And it was kind of scary for animators to get their hands on it for the first time because sometimes it was like being in the cockpit of a 747. But the animators said it had everything it needed."

This was actually the first character that Kaytis has supervised and consequently his first rigging experience. "My solution had never been done before, but my riggers said it could be done and we ended up patenting the whole process of measuring the neck rotation. It was risky but very exciting. I stopped production on Rhino shots while he was being fixed, and that's where I say the leadership put a lot of trust in us. If it didn't work, it would've been a disaster on my part, but, luckily, it did work."

In terms of the overall visual style, the original plan for American Dog was to adopt a very painterly look in homage to Edward Hopper. As detailed in The Art of Bolt, this arguably posed the most complex challenge. Art Director Paul Felix continued working on Bolt with Look and Lighting Director Adolph Lusinsky. Although they maintained this painterly direction, they toned it down slightly in keeping with the more believable-looking character design.

Applying such a rigorous painterly approach to CG required lots of R&D on the part of the technology team (under the technical supervision Hank Driskill). As a result, Disney filed four patents on the R&D done in 2006 and 2007. These patents involved the massing/editing system, colloquially known as "look A/look B," which they fed into shaders so compositors could control depth, light and shadow; the normal painting techniques that make light play across a surface like painting (in which more detail was painted in modeling); the ray painting system in which a virtual object has painterly edges thanks to a series of cards with a transparent map (inspired by the matte work of Disney great Peter Ellenshaw); and the painterly shadow work.

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Bolt continued in American Dog's painterly direction, but it was toned down for a more believable-looking character design. To accomplish this painterly look in CG required lots of R&D. [10]

Lusinsky says their painterly look included brick detail in close-up, edges on models that look like brush strokes, integrating matte paintings more seamlessly into 3D spaces and applying distinctive lighting and detailed sensibilities for each city on this road trip. For instance, San Francisco contains cobblestones coming up from the asphalt in old shipping yards; a gray haze and de-saturated color palette for New York's garment district; turquoise haze for Kentucky and Ohio; the neon look of the Las Vegas strip or the baked in mid-day heat on asphalt; and the Santa Ana winds with purple skies in L.A.

The idea was to combine the urban, cinematic look of Hopper with the naturalistic exposure sensibilities of air/atmosphere in the cinematography from the films of the '70s (most notably Vilmos Zsigmond's McCabe and Mrs. Miller). This included lens effects such as light scattering, blooming and lens flares.

Felix cites the painterly influences of Pinocchio [11] and other Disney classics while further exploring the new CG techniques for normal painting (3D painting on normal maps with receding detail) and ray painting, which provides brushstrokes with perpetual painterly edges.

"They did a lot of testing to try and figure out that balance [between achieving the right look but not be too distracting]," says director Williams. "A lot of people have commented to us that there's something so real about the world, but actually there was quite a bit of abstraction: the further you get away from the camera, the more broken up the shapes get. It's softer. And I think that's because it starts to mimic your own eye and your ability to diffuse detail that is unimportant. And so while, on the one hand, it's more abstract, on the other hand, it feels more believable. But that was something they had to tinker with a lot: If a character gets this close to an object, how diffused, how painterly should it be? And it still has to serve the story. Why is that object way over there suddenly crisper? And why does this thing so close to the camera suddenly feel so broken up like a painting? And so often times we'd have more than one version of an object, so there were two U-haul trucks. If Bolt and Mittens were close to it, we'd bring in the one with more resolution to it, but if it was farther away, it allowed us to go more for that painterly thing and have that spectrum from right next to the camera all the way to the horizon, with Paul Felix and the technology team figuring that stuff out as we went along."

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The painterly look included brick detail in close-up, edges on models that look like brush strokes, integrating matte paintings into 3D spaces and applying distinctive lighting and detailed sensibilities. [12]

Howard adds that they were constantly fighting what the computer does so well, "which is creating perfect shapes, perfect straights, perfect curves and completely blended, even colors. And there are so many imperfections and trying to create that imperfect, organic world is such a challenge. As the industry matures, you'll see a lot more of this organic [treatment]."

In fact, this maturation will serve Howard well on his next project, the equally painterly Rapunzel [13], which he is co-directing with Nathan Greno (head of story Bolt). They have replaced Glen Keane and Dean Wellins. Keane suffered a "personal, non-threatening health issue," but will stay on as exec producer.

"It's been going very good so far -- the same kind of schedule that we faced with Bolt, maybe a little longer," Howard offers. "There's been a lot of development work done already. It's exciting for us because we're given an opportunity to work on a fairy tale. Again, John is here and he loves Disney more than anything else and you want to raise the bar every time and live up to expectations for a Disney fairy tale: it has to sit next to those other classic films. When I was being trained in CG animation, it's so different from drawing. And I gravitated toward story because I wanted to stay as a hand-drawn artist. I miss that immediacy of pencil and paper even though I use a tablet now. But with Glen's help, I think we can make the toolset more user- friendly.

"There are masters that now exist in CG animation: people that have become so facile, so fluid with their style and their command of the tools and it's great to see. So there are stars out there at Pixar and Disney and DreamWorks as well. I see stuff that feels like a great drawing; it feels well composed and it feels like a controlled performance, and it's great to see that kind of maturity happening."

Bill Desowitz is senior editor of AWN and VFXWorld.