Digital.Art.Media Helps Rhythm & Hues On Dolittle 2
Santa Monica-based digital.art.media has announced their work helping DR. DOLITTLE 2 lead VFX studio, Rhythm & Hues, on 53 shots. digital.art.media helped created the lip synch needed to make many of the animal characters talk. "New systems could not circumvent the need for thousands of man-hours to be expended on very tedious artistic work," said Marc Kolbe, president of digital.art.media. "But the effort is worth it when you see the movie. Skilled artists, powerful computers and fast software make this the most natural and realistic talking animal film to date." A variety of tools were employed by digital.art.media, including the untraditional use of a PalmPilot to log shots. Matching the motion of live-action animals to digital faces was accomplished with proprietary software and 3D-Equalizer. Animation and modeling were completed using Alias Maya and SESIs Houdini. Matador helped artists remove some original images from plates. Texturing was done with Photoshop and StudioPaint. Compositing needs were met with Shake, Cineon and Discreet Logics flame*. All of this work was performed on SGI workstations, Hewlett-Packard Intel NT boxes and Boxx Technologies Linux RenderFarm. "We were given a lot of freedom to generate facial movements for the animals," Debert said. "This led several artists to put mirrors on their desks so they could watch themselves mouth specific sounds. Many of the DOLITTLE animals have the facial characteristics of several digital.art.media artists." digital.art.media's film credits include work on INDEPENDENCE DAY, SPY KIDS, GODZILLA, MEN IN BLACK, DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, LITTLE NICKY and SWORDFISH.