CGI Dreamworks Animation Studio Pipeline | CGMeetup

Hayate troops my name's skipper you probably recognize me from my wildly successful Madagascar movie I stole a lot of seeds and a lot of hearts and I wasn't born a handsome and well-dressed movie star no the talent people at DreamWorks Animation made me what I am now keep up private it's no walk in the park making an animated feature film takes grit spit and a whole lot of duct tape to get these movies out there - John Q public now this beautiful piece of machinery here's the pipeline movies flow in only one direction in my version but in reality the scene can make stops ow - order in Reverse loop-de-loop you get the picture but we're going to keep it simple for now go straight forward through this baby we have 15 stops to make so strap on your safety goggles hold on to your butts and let's dive into the first stop commence operation make a movie first stop story now great movie ideas don't just jump into our laps some are completely original some come from children's books comic strips really just about anywhere but here's some exclusive intelligence from the front lines madam director that directors role in the movie is to have the vision for the film so that the three or four hundred people working on the film can all be working towards the same purpose first we have a script but the movie is not just a script we have to visualise it into the medium that you will see in theatre the first step to do that is to do a storyboard the job of story artist is to take the script and to kind of draw out the comic book version of the movie we draw thousands of drawings to kind of come up with a sequence and we take that we pitch it back to the director to the story team and producers they get the visual concept of what the script could be if everybody likes it which is doubtful what it's not that doubtful we do good work and sometimes they really like it the story panels are turned over to the editorial department yeah shiitake mushrooms editors kept the sketches together in a story reel so the directors producers and executives can see a blueprint of the movie tooth is this elite unit has their myths on the film throughout the entire process how's it going they're editorial you keep it up huh that's right skipper we take the storyboard panels and we build a sequence out of those at that time of course we don't have any dialogue because the actors have not recorded yet so we record ourselves doing the voices the director storyboard artists whoever's kind of around who can do a relatively good performance we then add a little music sound effects whatever's needed to tell the story we try to make it as polished as possible so that storyboard real becomes the sort of foundation of the movie normally editing is associated with the the post production side of moviemaking but in this case you're right there at the very beginning you're right you're throughout the whole process but at the very beginning is quite critical because you're still trying to figure out what the movies about and it's really great to be part of that process Harley Polliwogs cursed my Dibble diet hey you let these paint cans lying around Kathy sorry skipper the art department is made of a bunch of artists and they're called visual development artists the reason is because they develop things visually the film has to have a look so the artists will sit down at their computer or at their pencil and paper or whatever medium they work in and they will create what the film looks like everything from the characters to the props to the environment every single thing that you see in the film is designed by an artist and it gets approved by the art director production designer and then we as in her department put it in front of the director to see if it's the film that he wants to make now this toups is the modeling department they have a tough job around here tougher than making a soup sandwich tell them what you do Brian modeling we basically build all the characters the environments the props everything you see in a film we it it has to be built it has to be created we receive two-dimensional artwork from the art department and it's our job to bring it into the third dimension to give it volume the other thing that we do is we create where we sculpt the characters we get drawings from the character designers and then what we do is we end up with an armature or a wireframe of the character and then we have to basically sculpt that character and make it look good from every possible angle I've just held together with wires that makes me feel empty inside now modeling hands up other digital sculptures to rigging riggers or character tease design how the character moves we're essentially puppet makers we place all of the joints muscle and fat underneath the skin hey who you calling fat sure I'm a little chubby but underneath is a svelte armature and we make all of the skin deforms every little wrinkle that you see every facial expression that's a control that we put in so that the animators can take this digital puppet and act with it now I've been called a lot of things but fat and puppet and on my favorites so let's move onward shall we will slide into the surfacing Department next coming out of modeling characters props and environments are flat and gray yikes not my best look surfacing artists that colors and textures making the surfaces look smooth and shiny like glass bumping gritty like dirt or slick and suave like a handsome penguin surfacing artists determine the surface quality of particular assets or characters basically the color the texture or how the light interacts with the surface itself so we have a material library which is comprised of like metals woods plastics and that kind of thing so take metal for example it can have paint on top of it it can have dirt it can have rust it can have scratches various things and we would add that clip and fish sticks there's my cheezy dibbles I wondered when is way rough layout is where all the pieces start coming together it's where the movie starts looking like a well a movie rough layout is an interesting department because it comes sort of at the nexus point of pre-production and production so we receive information in the form of storyboards from the story department and then recreate them in 3d space on the computer with a virtual camera where we determine the Scimitar afee for the film and the initial staging and blocking for the characters so we're sort of the gateway into production final layout sounds like we're almost done but guess what we're not by a long yeah that's right skipper after rough layout finishes their shots the first job we do is to prepare the shots for animation that's called an impress we'll create a master shot replacing all the simplified characters in geometry with a higher res version that other departments have created and we'll prepare that for animation by placing in the character in a start position and animation we'll take that scene and and animate it then the shot will come back to us and we'll do final set dressing we also do a stereo pass where we'll set the stereo for the left and the right eye we are preparing the final composition we look for opportunities to try to have an immersive experience and to draw in the audience the character animators start bringing the characters to life so in traditional animation we used to draw all the key frames of the character and then that would get played back at 24 frames per second so nowadays we don't really draw that much anymore we really just kind of pose out the character using this CG puppet there's sometimes 3,000 controls in one character with the dragons on How to Train Your Dragon we had five to six thousand controls animation is basically like if you were to compare it to live-action filmmaking we're kind of like the actors so we'll look at references online will shoot reference in the acting room and then we'll import that a lot of times into our software and we'll use that to start animating we try to bring the personality in the performance to the characters and we figure out how they walk how they talk how they move now remember that elite unit editorial has been keeping the movie together this whole time how's it going they're editorial you keep it up skipper tight fit ah I wish you didn't find those cheezy dibbles someone slimmed down my wireframe the crowd's Department is in charge of the extras of the film that's right skipper ideally an animator in the animation department would be able to animate all the characters on screen but if there's just too many to handle then that becomes property of the crowd Department because there's just no way that one human can animate all those things so we'll try and achieve the performance that the director wants through automated we'll create just a few little animations that can be applied and mass to a whole bunch of character walking talking buying a hot dog whatever actions we need for a particular scene and then we'll take all those actions and put them together with a brain like like a robot brain that decides what actions to use when and in the end we can achieve a performance that looks like at crowd doing a multitude of different actions character effects are all the things on a character's body that a movement and style the character effects department is responsible for everything that's moving on a character that is not the character animation itself we do clothing simulation hair dynamics fur interaction prop animation anything that characters interacting with if we need to put the squish into characters fingers when they interact with the object if they sit on a couch and the cushions underneath them need to bulge and deform that's character effects time for a bags the fun staff explosions demolitions massive wreckage and destruction the kids love it whoa whoa whoa it's not just explosions and demolitions we do a ton of different things we add effects like have to pay attention to all the little details that you take for granted in live-action so little things like footprints or like leaves rustling in the wind we actually think those happen and it's not just that when you have dragons or fairies changing color like you know we come up techniques to do things that nobody has seen before on screen the other end is like make sure the fire or the smoke you just right so we have the general problem solvers of the production pipeline in other words we get nothing for free Coover damage the pipe is sprung a leak Gorsky secure those lug nuts excelente that's why we have TD or technical director to step in when disaster strikes this pipe has more twists and turns in the whales intestines don't ask me how I know just keep up troops next up is the matte painting department so in our animated movies the characters act on a set that comes from modeling we take care of everything that's beyond that set so lots of skies lots of clouds and mountains vistas of all sorts sometimes cityscapes the art department does wonderful color keys that kind of inform what they want to see in the backgrounds then we take assets built for models that may exist beyond that point of the set and do paintings that use the arts color keys as like a touch base what you end up with is an image which is like the last puzzle piece that slides in the back of everything okay turn on the lights without lighting stuff would be really dark so in lighting we take the cameras we take the models we take the animation and we take the surfacing and we use computer animated lights we then use our compositing software to combine that with the matte painting to get the overall look of the final shots we're always looking for ways to bring more motion to the tail to create compositions that help tell the story hey this thing's starting to look classy nap time Oh things look Stevie Dada an editorial yet things are moving nicely clean up image finally artists clean up all the popping buzzing Smuts and other undesirable rendering artifacts from our images well we're just about out of this gorgeous pipe and what do you think comes out of the other end a movie almost skipper first we have to complete the music and sound while all that great work is being done at DreamWorks campuses a composer comes in and write some music that heightens and enhances a story and will record the actual score with an orchestra then the final mix happens where audio levels the equalization the perspective and special treatments on dialogue are all mixed into the final version of the film and viola a perfectly formed animated feature film is born hello little guy we started with an idea or a script storyboard visualized matte paint mod rig surfaced recorded laid out animated affected did lit and released that friends is how you make a movie nice you

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Keywords: CGI, Dreamworks Animation Studio, Dreamworks Animation, Dreamworks Animation Studio Pipeline, CGMeetup, CG Meetup, short film, animated, shows, Pixar, VFX, visual effects, breakdown, behind the scenes, Sci Fi, Showreel, movie, computer-generated imagery, cartoon, best, award winning, hd, computer animation, high definition, high resolution, animated shorts, animated movies, cgi movies, beforeand after, making of, gfx, tutorial, mocap, motion capture, digital, fx, motion, art, modeling

Id: ru0tQRJ4qKs

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 04 2016