Garfield: Bringing the Cat to Life | movie | 2004 | Official Clip - video Dailymotion

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A mini-documentary on the making of the Garfield live-action movie. Released alongside the movie as a feature on the DVD | dG1fMU90QUoxLW1Ia0E

Transcript

00:00 I hate Mondays.

00:23 Garfield is the star of this movie.

00:26 It's technologically on the cutting edge, what we're doing with Garfield.

00:30 We're making a movie right now that has no character of Garfield in the picture.

00:36 It has little balls and spaces where he's going to be.

00:41 And what we're going to be doing over the next months and months and months is actually

00:45 creating a live performance in a computer that when you see it in a theater is going

00:50 to make you believe that this is a real cat.

00:52 And that's what we're going to need for the next 12 months of the movie for us, for our

00:57 schedule.

00:58 So on set we're gathering basically kind of where things were, measurements, surveying,

01:03 where we actually come out and measure with a device that actually measures distances

01:08 between two points on the set so we can basically rebuild the sets in the virtual world on the

01:13 computer.

01:14 And he's wearing lederhosen.

01:15 I'm sorry, Garfield, not now.

01:16 In addition to recreating the sets, we try to record what we can from lighting information.

01:22 So we have a gray ball on the set and that shows us kind of just what the general lighting

01:25 was for the shot.

01:27 So wherever you see a highlight on the ball and like the fill, we kind of use that as

01:31 a guide to tell us how the director of photography lit the set.

01:35 And then the silver ball, the one that looks like a Christmas ornament, they show us kind

01:38 of what basically were the reflections of the room, what was things like his eyes or

01:42 maybe some of the general color of his skin.

01:45 You'll use the ball to recreate the general feel and color from the environment.

01:50 Once we finish principal photography, we'll go into basically post-production where we

01:55 will get a cut of the movie and then we'll bring that film into Rhythm and Hues and we'll

02:00 go ahead and scan it in and bring it on the computer.

02:03 And once it's basically digitized, we have a computer version of that, we can start building

02:09 the world from all the set information we've gathered.

02:12 And we take that and we take it and track it.

02:14 We go to tracking, which recreates the camera moves that were on set.

02:18 And from tracking, that'll fan out to two different areas.

02:21 It'll go into animation where they're actually working with the digital.

02:24 And at the same time, that'll branch over to lighting.

02:28 And lighting, we'll, using kind of a stand-in for Garfield, we'll start lighting that Garfield

02:33 into the set, taking into consideration the digital hair that goes along with it for Garfield.

02:39 We took high dynamic range imagery at the set where we basically took a lot of photos

02:44 from a camera that takes a 360 degree view of the world for us so that I actually can

02:49 see here in the sphere everything that the camera saw when they shot the plate photography.

02:55 So I have a good idea where to place the lights based on what they wanted.

03:06 This is something that we did early on just to try to understand the basic anatomy of

03:11 Garfield, working out just his body type, how short his legs would be versus how fat

03:18 his stomach would be.

03:19 And what the art director actually did when he went and did the sculpture is went in and

03:26 one side is finished where you actually see skin over the surface of the creature.

03:32 The other side, we actually basically peeled the skin away so that we could actually see

03:35 the underlying muscles.

03:37 So when the animation department goes in and actually rigs this, they actually go off of

03:43 these muscles.

03:44 Basically, again, you're trying to create something that exists in the real world so

03:48 you're actually able to lay out these muscles on the computer and as Garfield.

03:53 In reference to the CG cat, it comes down from rigging and modeling.

03:59 They create the character and once the modelers get done with it, it goes to the riggers and

04:03 they put all the controls on it.

04:05 We've got well over, probably around 200 controls on Garfield that we can do every little joint

04:12 of his finger, of his arms and all that kind of stuff.

04:14 So what we have to do is set the key frames to the different poses and just key frames

04:19 on top of key frames which will give him the performance of the acting.

04:24 And we work to build Bill Murray's dialogue.

04:27 And once we get done with it, we ship it off to the tech animators and the lighters who

04:32 take care of the fur and give him the orange quality.

04:35 We work with a gray cat so we don't deal with color or any sort of high res thing.

04:39 We just work with a simple gray cat.

04:51 The talking animals, we still have to model their faces in the CGI world because essentially

04:57 we have to get rid of their face and replace it with a CGI face so we can do sync animation

05:03 with the dialogue.

05:04 We're also going to add expressions and things like that.

05:07 So the process is to just, you shoot the animal for real and then we have data integration

05:12 people who are here that are taking measurements and complete photographs 360 around the animal

05:18 and measurements so we can recreate their skull structure and facial structure in the

05:24 computer later that we can then sync up with whatever the dialogue is.

05:29 I think the biggest challenge with Garfield again is it's the kind of incorporating, capturing

05:34 the essence of what has made Garfield popular and successful and loved for so many years

05:39 and bringing that to life.

05:42 Taking it from the comic pages, two-dimensional comic pages to a movie and featuring it in

05:48 400 Garfield could exist in this world.

05:50 And if people go to see the movie and walk out of it and say, "Wow, Garfield was really

05:55 there," then we really accomplished our job.

05:58 Garfield has left the coldest man.

06:09 When Garfield the movie is released this summer, you will see an orange cat that represents

06:13 the very cutting edge of computer technology and animated characterization.

06:17 But in today's screening, you'll be seeing four cats.

06:21 The first cat is this stuffed toy we used on the set to line up the shots.

06:26 You'll be seeing a little bit of him.

06:28 This second cat is a simple blocky computer-generated cat that we used in the cutting room.

06:33 You'll be seeing a lot of him.

06:36 This gray cat is what Garfield looks like during the animation process.

06:38 You'll be seeing a lot of him too.

06:40 But when the animation is all completed, we send him into what we call fur and lighting.

06:45 And he comes out looking like this.

06:50 So when you see this cat, or this cat, or this cat, just try to think of this cat.

07:14 Watch out for this thing, it could go.

07:17 Watch out for this thing, it could go.

07:21 Watch out for this thing, it could go.

07:27 Very well.

07:28 Oh, buddy.

07:29 Odie!

07:30 Odie!

07:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Garfield: Bringing the Cat to Life | movie | 2004 | Official Clip

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