Animated movies are not just kid's stuff anymore. In the past 15 years, the process of creating animated motion pictures has grown from a hand crafted artistic production, to high-tech digital artistry pushing the state of the art in computer generated animation. In a very competitive feature animation business, studios are pushing to raise the bar in technology to both make their movies more eye popping and to hold down production costs. This informal discussion will cover the process for making animated motion pictures at DreamWorks feature animation, from a technical perspective. Each of the artistic steps in the process will be discussed, and the relevant digital tools, techniques and challenges identified. We will look at the technology organization of an animated studio and discuss how automated tools are created for improving the quality and efficiency of animated film production. You should walk away from this meeting knowing what the people at the tail end of the movie credits do. 

Mr. Wike graduated from the US Military Academy, West Point, in 1976 with a BS in Engineering, and earned an MS in Computer Science from USC in 1986. He was a developer and project lead at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, TRW Space and Defense Systems, and at a small AI startup company. He has been in his current role at DreamWorks for over three years.

Before his talk, Jeff Wike showed video trailers for two not-yet- released animated films; "Chicken Run,"  an animated version of the movie "The Great Escape" -- using chickens as the prisoners surrounded by barbed wire and snarling dogs, and an adventure animation, "The Road to El Dorado", a historical comedy that follows two con men (animated klutzes) that stow away on a ship and end up stumbling upon the City of Gold.  It was interesting and entertaining, but hard to describe.
 
Animation started about 160 years ago, but has used digital techniques extensively only since 1990 with the film "Rescuers Down Under".  Other notable animated movies were "Beauty and the Beast" and "Toy Story".  Two 1998 movies were mentioned as examples of the cost differences between animation techniques.  "Prince of Egypt" was a high quality film that cost about $110 million whereas "Rug Rats" cost $20 million.  The two films brought in about the same amount of money during their initial release.  The challenge is to provide techno-animation that will produce high quality productions at lower costs.   There is an incentive to provide
high quality productions, although they are expensive, since 80% of animated features make money.  One way of reducing costs is to do 3-D digital modeling of objects and project 2-D images from them.  These images are  merged into the animation, reducing the amount of highly labor intensive hand animation.

The animation always starts with an idea.  The whole point is to tell a story, which includes doing the music and the dialogue initially before the animation is done.  Visual development is the art of the movie.  Dialogue is the screenplay, and what the animators match their product to.  The movie layout is broken into story segments down to individual segments or shots.  Animation and cleanup animation to correct problems or accomplish changes require about 500,000 drawings per film and account for 60% of the cost.  The head animator draws about every 100th picture and other artists draw the intervening pictures.  Traditional special effects were all
hand drawn and this is an area where digital effects are being used.  An artist will draw one splash on paper, then scan it in.  The "soft" splash or digitized image of the splash can then be repeated at different orientations to give a much larger splash, without requiring the artist to hand draw the entire "complex" splash.  One of the things the automation technicians need to do is write a software package that can replicate the splash, and display it from various perspectives, with various orientations.  

At this point Mr. Wike showed a movie called "Road to El Dorado Effects" that demonstrated how the effects were produced.  There were some particularly effective sailing ship effects that were generated by 3-D digital modeling.  Characters in the animated films are all hand drawn and the artists do not want to turn these over for computer generation because they don't believe that it is capable of providing the correct feel of the character that can be achieved by drawing.  They are less concerned about special effects and backgrounds so that is the area currently provided by computer generation.  Printouts of the backgrounds, overlays, and layouts are provided to the animators for drawing reference.  Artists work on paper attached to computer screens and the results of their drawings are scanned into the computer.  Why not input directly into the computer with some type of stylus?  Animation has been done for a long time and animators are reluctant to change their ways.  Matching up lines from one animator to another is currently an art, not a science and so far is best done using pencil and paper.  New tools are being developed, and they will be used first for backgrounds and special effects before trying to use them for characters.  

Mr. Wike described the organization of the animation studio that has production groups for particular movies and the animation technology group broken into hardware, systems, and software groups.  He said that most of the software is developed using C++ and some Java.  Digital people get credit in the listings at the end of the film.  He was asked, "How did you get into the business?".  He said that eight guys from TRW went over as a group.  An ex-employee of his at TRW had gone to work at Dreamworks and called him up to say "You just have to come over here".  He said there are also two people that he had worked with at JPL who are now working there.  He said that animated films have producers and directors just like regular films, but no actors except for voices. Directors interact with the voices and the sounds of the films and there is very little modification of sounds.  If they have a sound problem they redo it.  Mr. Wike says that DreamWorks has openings for a range of talents from new engineers including people who don't yet have their degrees through senior software personnel.  

This was a joint meeting of the Los Angeles ACM Chapter and the Engineering Management/Education/Professional Communications Society Chapters of the IEEE Los Angeles Council and the seventh meeting of the LA Chapter year.  It was attended by about 27 persons.

Mike Walsh, LA ACM Secretary