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Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC use live-action cinematography techniques to help tame DreamWorks new 3D animated feature How To Train Your Dragon<\/em> By Debra Kaufman<\/p>\n Before Lilo & Stitch<\/em> director\/writers Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois even began storyboarding their new 3D CGI animated feature, How to Train Your Dragon<\/em>, a DreamWorks adaptation of the popular British children\u2019s book by Cressida Cowell, they knew they wanted a live-action cinematographer.<\/p>\n \u201cIn traditional [hand-drawn cell] animation, there\u2019s a lot of focus up front about the lighting scheme when you\u2019re solidifying your camera work,\u201d says DeBlois. \u201cWe\u2019re both new to CG animation, and we discovered in the CG process that these two processes are separated by months. You have a lighting department casting lights on the shot and they have no effect on the actual composition of the shot, which is done substantially earlier.\u201d<\/p>\n The pair knew the advice of a live-action cinematographer would help bridge the gap between the two processes, as well as enhance the look of their film, which centers around an age-old war between dragons and Vikings in some unnamed cold and austere Northern island. Instantly, both directors thought of the same man.<\/p>\n \u201cRoger Deakins was our top choice,\u201d says Sanders, who says they both admired the DP\u2019s use of lighting, particularly in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford<\/em>. \u201cCG is so detailed that it is more important for it to be lit carefully and tastefully. What we loved about Roger\u2019s work was that incredibly cold light.\u201d<\/p>\n Deakins, who had consulted briefly with Pixar on WALL-E<\/em>, agreed to lecture and provide pointers to the film\u2019s layout and lighting teams. \u201cThen we asked him if he\u2019d consult with us, and to our surprise he agreed,\u201d says DeBlois. In fact, Deakins remained on throughout every step of the process, from creating a look until the final DI.<\/p>\n \u201cIt just evolved as we went along,\u201d the six-time Oscar nominee recounts. \u201cI love live action but this has been very interesting. I\u2019ve enjoyed the involvement and the process. It\u2019s the same thing really: creating images and moving the camera.\u201d<\/p>\n The partnership began with Deakins, Sanders, DeBlois, head of layout Gil Zimmerman, visual effects supervisor Craig Ring, and production designer Kathy Altieri bringing in images that evoked the look. \u201cIt was a whole range and collage of impressions and images of northern islands,\u201d Deakins reports. The directors had already shown Deakins their favorite images from the DP\u2019s own work.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things about Roger\u2019s light we love is that he\u2019s never afraid to let things fall off into inky blackness,\u201d Sanders explains. \u201cWe were tending towards those scenes where color was being bled out and replaced by grays and warm greens. The air was so thick with icy fog that everything has a ghostly mood to it. Those were the kinds of things we were super excited about.\u201d<\/p>\n Zimmerman, who was layout head for DWA\u2019s Shark Tale<\/em>, as well as model development supervisor for Disney\u2019s Treasure Planet<\/em> and Tarzan<\/em> says there is a tendency to over-light in CGI animation, in part because so many VFX\/animation artists toil for so long to create everything in the frame. \u201cIt costs to create every leaf, so they like to see everything lit,\u201d he explains. \u201cWe usually like to create these colorful fill lights, a little too saturated, and put them everywhere. It can be beautiful but it\u2019s not photographic. To create the sense of exposure and go very dark, if not all the way to black, is pretty revolutionary in animation.\u201d<\/p>\n Deakins introduced the idea of lighting the entire scene rather than the objects in them. \u201cBuilding the lighting within the shot scared some people,\u201d he says, \u201cbecause you have so many lighters working on shots, so it requires coordinating the look.\u201d Deakins started by producing half a dozen frames – a candle-lit interior, a foggy exterior – not just to get the look of the film, but to practice the way the software worked and how they could create the looks. Working with Ring and Altieri on specific reference shots, Deakins quickly found out how difficult it was to create naturalistic lighting in the computer.<\/p>\n \u201cThe light is a point source and you can put a bit of diffusion in front of it,\u201d he explains. \u201cBut there\u2019s no equivalent for the big soft source [bounce light] I\u2019d use on set. If I wanted to create a soft light, I\u2019d use a large number of individual sources and diffuse each one, which is very time-consuming on a live-action set and a bit of a nightmare in the computer.\u201d<\/p>\n Secondary effects – how sunlight bounces off objects or spills into a room – also required painstaking work. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t just happen like it would on the set, and the kind of computer power you need to do those things is enormous,\u201d Deakins continues. \u201cI worked with guys in two or three rooms, play with something and then come back in an hour when it rendered.\u201d<\/p>\n Zimmerman says selecting the right lenses was also an issue, because CG animation tends to use shorter lenses to ensure that the audience sees as much as possible of the animated world. To achieve a photographic look, Zimmerman required a longer lens palette. \u201cHaving Roger come in influenced that,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat helped me was the vote of confidence that the choices I made were the right ones.\u201d And because the movie was going to be released in 3D also played a significant role in lens selection.<\/p>\n \u201cMost people feel 3D works better on very wide lenses, and that it has to be sharp from the audience to infinity,\u201d Deakins states. \u201cBut, Gil and I, and the directors, felt the film should be shot on slightly longer lenses than ordinary, so we selected a range of lenses very much based on how I would shoot live action. My feeling was we can use longer lenses and depth of field in an interesting way.\u201d<\/p>\n Zimmerman points out that wider\/ shorter lenses do work better to create volumetric imagery in 3D. \u201cBut that creates a potential for someone who doesn\u2019t look authentically photographed,\u201d he adds. So the layout head chose 21mm for points of view and 24mm or 28mm for wide establishing shots. For close-ups, they went with 35mm and 40mm instead of 50mm, and went with 30mm or 32mm for over-the-shoulder shots.<\/p>\n \u201cDigital tools are so facile,\u201d Zimmerman continues, \u201cthat you can put a camera wherever you want and have pristine lenses that you can do whatever you want with. To make the camera feel like live-action, we had to pick and then stick with a straight and reasonable lens palette. We had to hold ourselves to these limitations.\u201d<\/p>\n Working with DreamWorks stereographer Phil McNally (see Close Encounters of the 3D Kind \u2013 this issue) to realize the 3D, Zimmerman says the filmmakers tried to use the stereo to its creative advantage. \u201cWe used it the same way we used camera motion, pace, color script: to help charge scenes with emotion,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n One such example is the relationship between the film\u2019s decidedly un-Viking like hero, Hiccup, and his burly, war-loving father. \u201cWhen the relationship is strained we flattened the stereo to enhance the sense of detachment,\u201d says Zimmerman. \u201cAnd as their relationship deteriorates, we used stereo to create even more distance between them. At the end, we accentuated the stereo to bring the two closer to each other and the audience.\u201d<\/p>\n Another technology choice that helped to bridge the gap between animation and live-action cinematography was a camera capture room featuring a Cartoni head and an encoder to stream the animation in real-time. Similar to what James Cameron employed on the 3D Avatar<\/em>, the technology enabled Zimmerman to do final camera moves on finished animation. \u201cIt\u2019s revolutionary,\u201d he says. \u201cWe could move the camera like a guy working sticks, recomposing the shot in a life-like way. We got standard two-shots and close-ups with feeling, because they\u2019re not locked off. There\u2019s a lot of handheld movement, especially in the final scene with the giant dragon who breaks through the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n Sanders and DeBlois both felt that their push to create a live-action cinematography look to the film was the right choice for their 3D animated project, a bold and dramatic sign, perhaps, of things to come. \u201cRoger so upped our game,\u201d says Sanders. \u201cWe learned so much from him.\u201d<\/p>\n Deakins, who is now consulting on his third animation feature, this time director Gore Verbinski\u2019s Rango<\/em>, says the experience of working with animators has been satisfying. \u201cI was very cautious at first, because I didn\u2019t want to tread on anybody\u2019s toes,\u201d he recalls. \u201cThey do fantastic work, and my brief was to bring a live-action element to it and that\u2019s what I wanted to do. And we got along famously. A number of the lighters said they found it really worthwhile. Other [cinematographers] are consulting on animation films. It\u2019s definitely happening, and I think it\u2019s probably a very good trend.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Roger Deakins, ASC, BSC use live-action cinematography techniques to help tame DreamWorks new 3D animated feature How To Train Your Dragon By Debra Kaufman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-specials"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.icgmagazine.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/images\/dragon2.jpg\")
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