Noah Catan and the team at Bent Image Labs used his Pantheon software tool to add critical volumetric shading to the key opening scenes of the film, set in Harold’s illustrated book world, without making the characters and their simple lines look like the came from a completely different world.
In 2021, Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) student Noah Catan, now graduated, began development on a lighting software system for SCAD Animation Studio’s 2023 short film, The Pope’s Dog. It took Catan a year to develop the software that became “Pantheon: Volumetric Lighting for 2D Animation,” meant to enable 3D lighting effects on 2D animation, similar to the revolutionary technique that made a name for itself on Sergio Pablos’ Oscar-nominated 2019 Christmas film, Klaus. But, for the last two years, working as a VFX artist at Framestore, Catan hadn’t gotten the chance to use the software in any of his professional gigs outside of SCAD projects.
That is, until he was recruited by the crew of Carlos Saldanha and Sony Pictures’ film adaptation of Harold and the Purple Crayon, now available on Digital, releasing October 8 on Blu-ray and DVD.
“I really didn’t think I’d ever touch the Pantheon software again,” shares Catan, who served as a lighting supervisor with Bent Image Lab on Harold. “It had been used for Time Flies, another SCAD Animation Studio short film about two flies making the most of their short lives. But that was it. I’m primarily in the VFX world, working on live-action stuff. The work I did on The Pope’s Dog was more of a hobby. Then suddenly I’m getting a call from producer Trever Stewart at Bent Image Lab.”
Directed by Oscar-nominated industry sweetheart Saldanha, well-known for directing Ice Age, Robots, Rio and Ferdinand, Harold and the Purple Crayon is based on the classic children’s book by Crockett Johnson and stars Zachary Levi as an adult Harold, who has brought himself out of his 2D adventures into the physical world just by drawing it. But when the power of unlimited imagination – aka the purple crayon - falls into the wrong hands, it will take all of Harold and his friends’ creativity to save both the real world and his own.
The live-action/animated hybrid film features visual effects by Day For Nite, Clear Angle Studios, Folks VFX, Mammal Studios, OPSIS, Rising Sun Pictures, and Spin VFX, with Bent Image Labs handling the 2D animation. Having primarily worked as a compositor on projects like the live-action One Piece and The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, Catan says Harold provided an exciting chance to dive into 2D animation once again and refine his customized software.
“I got a cold call from Trever who said he’d read some of the articles written about The Pope’s Dog,” explains Catan. “I think one was actually from AWN. And he said they needed somebody to do this volumetric shading technique. They had already animated the sequences, shaded them flat, and it felt like it looked too much like an old Disney movie. They brought me on to help rework the visuals and apply that look we’d achieved on The Pope’s Dog throughout Harold’s animation.”
Bent Image Lab let Catan assemble his own two teams of freelancers – a lighting team and a color key team – to work with the studio’s regular compositing team. Noah’s personal crews consisted of 21 people in total, half former The Pope’s Dog artists. The other half were still SCAD students who Catan knew were gifted in painting and concept art and amply capable of visualizing a 2D scene in 3D.
“It was a treat to be able to hire so many people who worked on The Pope’s Dog,” shares Catan. “That was one of the best feelings and best parts of the project. We started as this scrappy student film team, and now we’re a scrappy feature film team.”
When Catan first began working with Bent Image Lab, one of the first people he hired was the former lighting director on The Pope's Dog, Molly Cooper. Catan had been asked to join the Harold team at the tail end of the film’s production and Bent’s compositing team had done line work and flat shading for the characters, but really hadn’t designed them with additional lighting in mind. Cooper, having been one of the key players in designing the look and feel of The Pope’s Dog, went back and forth with the team at Bent to get the right designs and shading concepts down for Harold’s animated characters.
“It took a couple iterations to get it right,” says Catan. “At first, we were going with too much shading where the darks were too dark, and we kept pulling it back more and more until we got to this very subtly shaded look that still had that nice, rounded feel to it. There are a lot less lines to Harold as he’s coming from a children’s book. Adding too much shading made it look like the lighting and shading techniques were coming from a totally different universe than the character design.”
In total, there was about a month of R&D (Research and Development), with Catan and Cooper going back and forth on the look for Harold and conducting test shots to send to Sony.
“We had to do three big test shots over the course of that month, and it involved a lot of late nights,” says Catan. “Actually, the whole production was full of late nights. Two months is usually not enough time for something like this, but we got everything done in that small window.”
One of the most invaluable, time-saving aspects of Pantheon’s pipeline is its Color Matte.
“There's something similar in the VFX compositing world called Crypto Matte where, if somebody renders a complicated scene, they have this pass where each individual object or each individual shape has its own color,” explains Catan. “So, it's easy to select any object you want and then make a certain change. Our Color Matte is a simplified version of that, where the Toon Boom Harmony artists would have to go in and manually color every single shape on a character differently so that we would be able to select those in our lighting setup.”
He continues, “For example, if we wanted to put a shadow on Harold’s face, we wouldn't have to cut out the face from the rest of the character because we already had a color assigned to it that we could select and control. It was an incredibly helpful approach and also very time-consuming and expensive on the front end, but invaluable to our process in the long run.
The Color Matte was something Catan and his team leaned into much more on Harold than in The Pope’s Dog, which was more focused on shapes than color mapping.
“With The Pope's Dog, we had a lot of overlapping shapes, and the shading was a lot more detailed because we were really looking for that Klaus look,” says Catan. “In Klaus, every character has a ton of overlapping shapes. Everything is layered, even their clothing. So, the faces are broken up with tons of shadows everywhere. And it was the same for The Pope’s Dog. We could select a shape to dictate how we wanted things shaded. But on Harold, most of these characters were just one shape, with little to nothing separating things like their arms, legs, even noses, from the rest of their body.”
Nothing except maybe Harold’s jawline.
“We had to shift our entire pipeline, our entire methodology, to try and make that work, which is why it had to be color-specific,” Catan continues. “We couldn’t use shapes.”
The tool allowed Catan to add more layers to an otherwise very simple, flat character design.
“The Pantheon toolset I developed doesn’t let us do everything in and of itself,” notes Catan. “It’s a whole pipeline process that caters to those tools. There are several steps involved and it can be challenging fitting Pantheon into an already established workflow. But everyone on the cleanup and compositing teams was great to work with and our teams collaborated really well to create something super cool.”
Though they primarily worked on character design, there was also plenty of back-and-forth feedback between Catan’s team and the film’s background artists to make sure the shading and lighting of the animated settings were cohesive with the characters.
“We would receive the initial background paintings and elements that they did for a shot and then we would light the characters considering those backgrounds,” says Catan. “Of course, there were some scenes where we had to light the characters in a totally white void, which was another challenge. It was much easier working with those cityscapes where there was a clear light source, or when the characters are all by a campfire.”
Out of all the maneuvering, MacGyvering and overall skill growth Catan says he experienced working on Harold with Pantheon, he notes the most valuable experience was learning how to run a team efficiently.
“I'm not just working on lighting shots and doing my own thing,” says Catan. “I’m assembling a team, managing a budget, wearing all these different hats while coordinating with Trever and Bent Image Lab co-founder Ray Di Carlo while they coordinate with the director Carlos. I learned how to keep up morale when everybody's pulling a ton of late hours and learned how to keep everyone happy and enjoying what they're doing.”
All 20 team members Catan brought onto Harold’s lighting and color key teams were credited except one, Indi Solis, who was brought on late in the process and would have been named technical assistant.
“She would basically take all the files and data we were being sent by outside teams and export it all in the correct formatting we needed for Pantheon,” says Catan. “And she would often fix any issues she saw off-hand before sending them our way.”
Davis Hardy, gifted at Python scripting and coding and who was responsible for cleaning up Pantheon’s tool codes, was credited as technical director.
“Davis also helped out a lot with textures,” notes Catan. “Which became a huge job because of Harold’s crayon drawings and the fact that his friends Moose and Porcupine are drawn by him as well. The lines had to have that grainy, broken up quality as if drawn by an actual crayon.”
Catan’s right hand, Cooper, whose color key team took all the shots and painted out thumbnail reference sketches for the lighting artists, was credited as color key supervisor.
“It was because of her that our team had a sense of lighting direction for each shot,” shares Catan. “I would have named her art director, but that title was already taken. I could go on and on about everyone on the team. They were all amazing.”
As Catan goes on to tackle the next live-action VFX project from Framestore, he says the next big Pantheon project is its public release.
“I said I wanted to make Pantheon public in the Spring of 2023 but, obviously, we didn't do it because we got the Harold job,” Catan explains. “But now that Harold's out, now that Time Flies is out, I would like to focus on getting proper documentation, proper tutorials and a proper release for Pantheon. Most students and schools these days have the infrastructure to use it, and I’d like to make it possible for them to do this without me.”
He adds, “We’ve seen it used for a school short film, segments of a feature film, but I’d like to see someone do something really ambitious with this. Let’s go for a full-length feature. A realistic Roger Rabbit, or something like that. I’m excited to see how it will be experimented with once we get this out into the world.”
This year's SCAD AnimationFest starts Thursday, September 26, running through Saturday, September 28. Genndy Tartakovsky is this year's recpient of the Award of Excellence. Read more about this honor and the festival program here.
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
