Animators Catch a Wave in Surf’s Up
A few minutes into Surf’s Up and it is clear this is not your typical animated movie—the characters interact with the camera, there is a retro film clip straight out of the 1970s, and the water looks so good that you just want to dive in. The film follows Cody Maverick, a penguin that leaves his hometown of Shiverpool, Antarctica, to follow in the footsteps of his idol, surfing legend Big Z. Surf’s Up, the second feature-length animated picture from Sony Pictures Animation, stars the voice of Jeff Bridges and Shia LaBeouf, with cameos from professional surfers Kelly Slater and Rob Machado. The movie, produced by Christopher Jenkins and directed by Ash Brannon (Toy Story 2) and Chris Buck (Tarzan), uses a documentary style, drawing from the traditions of both the great surf films and Christopher Guest mockumentaries. “This was a really fun movie to get to do research for because it was penguins and surfing, which are two fun things,” says,” Rob Bredow, visual effect supervisor. To prepare for such an ambitious project, the team at Sony Pictures Imageworks went on some unusual field trips. “We took our entire crew surfing,” Bredow says. “We got a group to give us surf lessons—mostly I think we learned what it felt like to wipe out.” |
Getting the Penguin Look Right The characters and sets were designed to look quite natural, in keeping with the documentary feel, but they still have the heightened look possible with animation. For instance, while the texturing on the feathers is almost photorealistic, the characters have stylized markings on their sides. David Schaub, animation director at Sony Imageworks, describes how: “All the lead penguins have different patterns—unique lines for Cody and Lani, Big Z has the hibiscus edge, and Tank has his bad-boy tattoos.” |
Stock Footage Scratches Lend Authentic Look |
Rising Up to Meet the Challenge of Animated Water
It can be argued that the water plays as big a role in Surf’s Up as the penguins. From the inky waters in Antarctica to the turquoise waves on Pen Gu Island, the water reflects the mood of the scene and acts as a physical and emotional obstacle. It is the first movie to tackle so much animated water, with characters moving through, over, and under the surface. “The biggest challenge in this movie was the waves,” Bredow says. “Water is always a challenge, but especially breaking waves—that’s kind of the holy grail of water simulation. We wanted the audience to feel that they had ridden the waves themselves when they walked out of the theater.”
“The directors had always talked about the wave being a character,” Ford says, “So we took that to heart and said, ‘let’s make it a character as part of our character pipeline.’”
“We animated them like a character,” Bredow explains, “but, of course, waves don’t have bones, so you don’t animate them the traditional way—we used a series of blend shapes to control the movement of the waves.”
To make the surfing look more natural, various details were added to the water during animation, including wake trails and splash. To create the effect of the sea foam around the board, Schaub says that “a particle system was built, so that when the lip comes crashing over the top of the wave and hits the water, it triggers an explosion of white water that we can see interactively in the animator’s file. This gave us a pretty accurate representation of the ultimate shape and volume of the white water before it gets rendered-in effects.”
Maya Core of Sony Imageworks’ Front-End Pipeline
While the team used a combination of software to create the final water animation, much of it was done in Autodesk® Maya® software. “Maya is the core of the front-end pipeline at Sony Imageworks,” Ford explains. “It is used for modeling, layout, animation, and some effects work.” By leveraging the power of Maya Embedded Language (MEL) Python® and the Maya API, the team customized the software to overcome many of the film’s challenges. Schaub comments that, “We never have the question, ‘well, can the software do that?’ Because if it doesn’t, the way the program is built allows us to create a tool that will do that.”
Although the movie has a lot of action, one of the strongest scenes in the film is a quieter moment, where Cody and his hero, Big Z, carve a surfboard together. At more than 1,800 frames, it is a much longer sequence than is typical in an animated movie, where clips rarely run longer than a few hundred frames. “There was concern that it wouldn’t hold up as a performance in the movie because it’s so long,” Schaub admits, “but we really wanted to prove that we could do this. You rarely get to do these long bits of performance, and it was great to have these extended moments where you could really let the characters perform.”
“Whenever you get a scene that is that long,” Ford says, “you get an animator working on it for months.” To overcome this production obstacle, they had to find ways to break up the sequence so that the animation could keep moving down the pipeline. Schaub explains: “We found convenient break points by acting the scene out ahead of time. Layout would set up a session with four or five different cameras placed the way they would be if they were filming it on set.” Once the sequence was performed and filmed, the directors reviewed the footage and decided where the cuts could logically go.
Of course, animation is only half of the performance and the scene also succeeds because of the remarkable voice talent. In traditional animation, actors typically record their lines individually in separate voice-over sessions, which can create a canned feel. Surf’s Up breaks new ground because the actors were in the same room, which allowed them to improvise. “A lot of people have commented that the dialogue felt like the characters were really there, actually interacting with each other, and that’s because they actually were,” Ford says.
Since its release, the critical feedback for Surf’s Up has been glowing, as Bredow can attest. “People who have seen the movie have really appreciated the attention to detail that has gone into it. The question that I’ve loved getting from various people is ‘How did you paint out the surfers and put the penguins in?”