00:00Kung Fu Panda is a remarkable film.
00:02We're seeing things come to life on screen that, frankly, we've not been able to do before.
00:07It really is the combination of great action with the mystery of China,
00:12fighting Kung Fu, fur, and, of course, a great story.
00:19We wanted it to be a real big action movie as much as it was an intimate character story.
00:30Plus, we have characters with fur, and they wear clothing, and those are both very complicated in most movies.
00:36You get to choose one of those two things.
00:40Then, when you ask somebody to jump 20 feet in the air and do a rat pass kick,
00:45wearing cloth, things get tricky.
00:47So we were very ambitious, and everyone else who worked on the film was just as ambitious,
00:51and worked really hard to figure out how they could contribute some creative solutions
00:56to some of these very complicated, complex artistic problems that we kept presenting them with every single day.
01:03But all the departments came together to really put their best work in,
01:08from animation to effects to rigging to character effects.
01:17We found very early on that the rigs, which is the internal skeleton of the character,
01:23they wouldn't hold up to the physicality of Kung Fu.
01:26It was just too much strain and burden on the rigs,
01:29so we had to go back and re-engineer and redesign all the rigs for all the characters
01:34so that we could actually be able to do martial arts.
01:46This shot was one that really showed off what you guys were doing with the MiG for Viper.
01:51It was very important for Viper to be able to twist in ways that should be impossible,
01:56and also to have all the breaking forms in her shape.
01:59It was important for us to actually be able to keep the rigs.
02:08This was a great test for the technology, the character design that we put in there,
02:13and once we saw this, we kind of felt like we had a character that was going to fall on
02:18it.
02:21Overall, I think the coolest thing that you achieved with the surf's saying
02:25was you maintained the intent of the design.
02:28The idea to keep it believable was to actually make them almost more like plush toys.
02:33Teddy bears getting in Kung Fu fights, which I think is the great contrast in the film,
02:37that you've got this soft feel, and then you've got the heart impact of Kung Fu.
02:47We did short fur that wasn't dynamic.
02:50We didn't want all the fur to be bouncing every time the character bounced.
02:53So because of that, we also had to spend a lot of time grooming.
02:55We went messy. We went clean.
02:58We ended up having to just put a lot of dense fur on there because it was so short,
03:02and we needed it to be structured.
03:04The other image of short fur was we had to deal with clothing on a lot of our characters.
03:12Yeah! Excellent!
03:13We knew we had furry characters with clothing,
03:16and we had to figure out a way to use computing power to solve that,
03:20to make this movie possible.
03:21Smooch is our technology for fur to move in contact.
03:26Smooch allows us to slide the clothing over the surface,
03:29and for the fur to actually move and push down in the areas where it is,
03:33and then it actually springs up as the clothing releases it.
03:38Once we had that kind of look, we can then customize it in terms of how much fur lays down,
03:43how fast it springs back, to really get that kind of naturalistic look.
03:47An important part of this was automating it.
03:49When you have 1,500 shots, several characters, maybe even crowds,
03:53that all used this technology needed to be something that we could use as an artistic tool,
03:57but also used it as a computing tool.
04:00We wanted a system whereby a lot of the stuff would go through automatically
04:03so that we could really concentrate on the action.
04:23We wanted to break the last big obstacle, which was the breaking of the bridge.
04:32The first thing we're given is basically an artwork.
04:35From rough layout, we have a kind of a choreography of, in general, how things should work.
04:41So this is kind of the input that we give to the system,
04:45where we paint the different colors on the outside of the geometry,
04:48and the system takes that as input and spoon out basically the final pieces of your broken bridge.
04:54At the same time, we start adding the detail to add scale to the shots,
04:59the rocks that emit from the cracks as the big pieces crack apart,
05:03stop that exploded from the seeding that's falling down.
05:07It's important for us to really sell the scale and make it believable.
05:09It's a marriage between really art direction and technology,
05:13which I think exemplifies to some extent how we approach people.
05:24The ultimate showcase of all the technical work, all our great departments did,
05:30you know, rigging, character effects, special effects, clothing, everything.
05:34It was probably the road bridge, probably the single most taxing and demanding,
05:38technically complex sequence in the whole film.
05:47There wasn't a single department that was confident about the, you know,
05:51oh yes, I've done that before.
05:54We had breakage, we had water, we had, we didn't come from destruction,
05:58we had impacts on the characters.
05:59We had all sorts of crazy stuff that no other movie needed,
06:03the real two never done.
06:04And it's one of the things we're most proud of in the movie.
06:06But all we really want people to do is to be involved in the story of,
06:10you know, the Furious Five fighting Tai Lung and getting caught up in the fight.
06:14And hopefully all of that other stuff,
06:16even though it required thousands of manners to get right,
06:18hopefully all of that just goes away, just get lost in the story.
06:26When you're making computer animation,
06:29technology is the essence of what we do.
06:31And having the best tool set in the hands of great artists makes great movies.
06:36The ability to create richer and more compelling images
06:41is something that we look to do literally each and every time with each movie
06:47beyond what we've done before.
06:48Today's technology are bringing to life films that we couldn't have even imagined a couple years ago.
06:53And it's exciting to think about where that's all heading for the future.
Comments