00:00Spirit is able to outwit the wranglers and freeze the herd, but in doing so, he himself gets caught.
00:12The filmmaker's journey to bring Spirit to life began over four years ago, with a decision to make a different kind of animated film.
00:20An unprecedented blending of hand-drawn animation with 3D computer animation, creating the most technically complex animated movie made to date.
00:28This is, as far as I'm concerned, a redesign, a rebuild, and a reinvention of traditional animation.
00:37The goal for this movie was to create a film that uses what is unique about traditional animation, but creates a world and an environment that audiences now expect and have seen in 3D movies.
00:50And I believe that marrying the best of those two worlds together will create a new kind of animation.
00:58It's not traditional anymore. It's not digital. So, I've been calling it traditional.
01:04The tools and technologies developed for Spirit are some of the most advanced that have ever been created for animated filmmaking.
01:20So, now we have very powerful machines in the hands of animators, and the result of that you will see in Spirit.
01:26Spirit's homeland is revealed in a breathtaking, groundbreaking opening sequence.
01:35A single, continuous, three-minute shot that redefines the artistic and technical capabilities of animation.
01:42From a technical standpoint, it's got it all. The camera going through those canyons and over that river and flying with that eagle, things that were virtually impossible before we were able to do that.
01:57It is everything that can be done in animation.
01:59We actually spent almost nine months just designing the camera move for the shot.
02:05There's no cuts, nothing to bring you out of that world, where we fly through all of the major landmarks and places of nature within the Wild West.
02:15And almost all of the environments are done using 3D techniques.
02:19But then we've integrated 2D characters and other elements into it to make you feel like they're all part of the same world.
02:24When you see Spirit running with his herd, and they go up onto this bluff, and the camera does this 360-degree camera move around Spirit, some of that is computer-generated and seamlessly moves into James Baxter's animation.
02:40I really challenge people to be able to point out where that happens.
02:45In Spirit, the effects were very naturalistic. So, you know, there's a lot of organics, water, fire, dust.
03:02So most of our work was creating natural phenomenon, mist, snow, star twinkles. It just adds a little bit to the traditionally drawn animation.
03:12One of the dramatic high points of the film is the sequence we call Saving Rain.
03:18Both of the main characters are swept down river rapids, while characters in the sequence are hand-drawn traditionally.
03:25A lot of environments and effects are produced using digital techniques, and then integrated with additional 2D work as well.
03:31This is another traditional drawn effects animation of kind of like a splash from the top down, and that's actually what we use to get all this real soft-looking foam on the surface.
03:42And in order to kind of pull the audience into that, we took a cinematography style, which is very kind of live action.
03:50We used all digital sets so that we could get in there and move through them in a three-dimensional way,
03:55and try to put the camera right down on the water like the whole thing was being shot by a raft that's floating down the river with them.
04:01So it all has a kind of a hand-held feel to it. It's all very dramatic.
04:10Being able to create effects that fit into some of these beautifully painted backgrounds and some of this amazing animation,
04:18to just know all of the people that are crafting all of this and putting it together and how much thought goes into every scene,
04:26it's quite awe-inspiring, actually.
04:28Spirit presented other challenges to the filmmakers, such as realistically rendering the complex movements of a horse.
04:38Animating Spirit is the most difficult animation assignment ever given.
04:42There's nothing more difficult than to animate a horse,
04:45and we are very, very lucky here at DreamWorks that we have one of the greatest animators working today, James Baxter.
04:53It was quite daunting at the beginning, because when I first started to draw horses, I suddenly realized how little I knew.
05:00So we went to experts, anatomy experts, anything that we could get our hands on to figure out what makes these animals work.
05:07This is a subject that has confused many, many people.
05:12There are pictures of Leonardo da Vinci struggling with this view himself,
05:16and it's a huge achievement to be able to show a horse gallop correctly,
05:23because there's a lot of parts.
05:25Every frame and every cell in the animation has to be separately handled,
05:29and there's a neck and there's a head and there's a flying mane and there's two ears and there's four legs.
05:34That's terribly complicated to control that from one frame to the next to the next.
05:38It's tough to do expression.
05:40So my job is not to force you to do a perfectly anatomically accurate horse.
05:44My point is to give you your point of departure so that you know just how far you can push it.
05:53So we had to design his face in such a way that it still felt like a horse,
05:58but it had elements to it and you could convey emotion with, like, eyebrows.
06:02Real horses kind of don't have eyebrows.
06:05They have eye wrenches, but not a big dark eyebrow like we have.
06:09It's a very useful device in animation, your eyebrows, to convey emotion.
06:14The single most overriding thing that is not just that the anatomy is technically correct,
06:22but what drives the animator's pencil is what's in the animator's heart.
06:27There is nothing that takes the place of what happens when an artist, an animator,
06:39gives life to a character with a pencil onto a piece of paper.
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