You’re always trying to find the best and new ways to do things.” Technology gets better, and people ask for more! But that’s what makes this type of job interesting. Riccarand notes, “We did a lot of new work on lens aberrations, and the in-house renderer has been greatly improved because with each movie we want to render more and more. It can be hard to do a battle like that in the daytime, but the lighting helps a lot.” Advancements were made in the area of compositing. You want to do things that are not too scary but good to see and impressive. You have the superpowers of the characters plus various simulations everywhere, like smoke and dust. “FX Supervisor Simon Pate drove this sequence. We did a lot of tests to produce something that looks real and that has good subsurface scattering, but the texture and painting of it is appealing.” Plenty of destruction occurs in the finale battle that unfolds in Brooklyn. I couldn’t do the skin realistically, as it needs to be pleasant to look at. There is a closeup shot of the hand of Donkey Kong, and you see one of his fingers at a huge scale. “It has to have a lot of detail to feel real, but it doesn’t need to be realistic. “Donkey Kong has numerous layers of fur,” Riccarand explains. and Donkey Kong was achieved through proprietary software. Grooming for the moustaches of the Mario Bros. One of our co-directors, Pierre Leduc, previously was our animation director on a lot of movies, so his experience helped us in getting the proper silhouettes and poses.” ![]() The idea was to put the character in the light and simply have him singing. We have some good key lights and lots of reference from jazz concerts. “That was one of the craziest ideas! It’s like a jazz concert, but him singing to his girl. They are the same design as Nintendo, but had to have some magic in order to have them fit into the movie.” Something not part of the gaming experience was having Bowser sing in a concert inspired settings and lighting. “The Question Boxes are opaque with a little light source inside. “It had to respectful but on a bigger scale.” There was constant feedback from Nintendo, with signature elements like Question Boxes being incorporated into the storytelling. “That was fun because the idea was to take something that exists in the game, however, then put it into a more cinematic environment,” remarks Riccarand. ![]() Some scenes are a direct homage to actual gameplay. When you’re outside in sunny daylight, it’s more complex to light the characters in a believable and interesting way.” “Night sequences are easier to hide things with mist and darkness, and you can use high contrast lighting. It is something iconic from the game, so the viewer knows what they are looking for so we needed to pay attention in order to not disappoint them.” Scenes in World Bowser take place at night, while the Mushroom Kingdom action unfolds in the daytime. There was a lot of modeling and procedural environments in order to do the set extensions. Explains Riccarand, “People love that! The Mushroom Kingdom was a nice set to do. ![]() It was a bit more cartoony, but with realistic lighting.” A staple of video games is to have a world filled with giant mushrooms. The lava had to be stylized to work with the characters in the scene. You can’t have multiple simulations rendering overnight to have them ready for the day after. “But when it comes to scale and a thousand shots to do, we had to be smart to find a good solution that doesn’t cost too much. “It was not scary to do because our proprietary software helped us to deal with the smoke,” Riccarand states. This is because the interaction between the characters, the cast and camera can be tricky, as their relationship with each other needs to be like a dance in order to get a good position.”īowser lives on a volcanic world and resides in Lava Lake Keep. “We did two passes of previs, one animated and the other with characters. Sequences were mapped out using storyboards and previs. “We do a lot of proprietary software and jump at the possibility to do what we need in order to achieve the look that the director wants, whether it be physical or cartoony,” Riccarand says. That’s what I love about it.” When doing simulations in animation, it’s all about achieving the proper balance between plausibility and stylization. Directors want something bigger, more realistic and interesting. “The way we use effects has changed hugely because technology and software has evolved a lot,” Riccarand states. In the middle of the zany craziness is Illumination veteran Milò Riccarand, who was the Head of CG on the project and has seen the evolution of effects utilized by the Paris-based animation studio since Despicable Me became a global sensation.
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