I knew it was all going to be in the eyes. It has the range of expression that maybe your dog does. So we used reference from everything-from an octopus to a walrus to a seal and a beluga whale.Īnd I wanted it to emote like an animal, not like a character. So I set it in this North Dakota boom town, and I put a kid that was down on his luck in a gritty junkyard, and I wanted the creature to seem as real as I could, but as impossible as I could. I wanted to ground the live-action, I wanted to ground the movie. It’s just big and fun and it’s a very broad idea, and I wanted to make the contrast between reality and our monster as crisp as I could. Creech was crafted as a cg character by MPC.Ĭan you talk about Creech and what you did to bring out his personality?Ĭhris Wedge: Well, the concept of our movie, in case it hasn’t occurred to you, is really silly. We had maybe 1200 creature shots to animate and integrate. And it was a very, very long post schedule on the movie. There was a lot of previs that was done before the shoot. On the other hand, my experience in animation counted obviously where the creature animation came in – just developing that from scratch and coming up with a concept for how it would look and how it would fit in the car, how it would move when it wasn’t in the car, and how it would make the car move. I loved blocking things out in the morning and bringing the actors in and shooting out the set. That collaboration with the actors and everyone on the set was fascinating and rewarding for me. You don’t have to tell him or her how far to move their eyebrows and how long to hold it to make the expression play. And on a movie set the performance comes with the actor. You work hard for every character performance. In animation you struggle for every performance. I really could ask for anything and I’d get it without complaints.Ĭoming from animation, what then were some of the hardest things to do in a live-action film?Ĭhris Wedge: Oh it’s a pretty good trade-off, I’d say. The amount of integration they could do was mind-blowing. This is the long way to answer your question that, yes, it’s absolutely advanced a thousand-fold from where we were. I mean, we did magnificent stuff with just handheld cameras that was all rotoscoped and then they would start laying the creature in. Whatever you cut, we’ll roto.’Īnd they did. And I’d say, ‘Don’t you guys have some markers or don’t you take some measurements here?’ Or, ‘Isn’t there some piece of camera gear that can repeat the move or something?’ And they’d say, ‘No, we’ll just roto it. And, you know, we’d be there in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night in a junkyard set that we’d made with all this grit and complex environment to interact with and integrate to. DP Don Burgess and Director Chris Wedge (right) and on the set of Monster Trucks.Īnd then on this movie, I went in with the effects company assuming there’s going to be all sorts of technology around when we shot the plates. Well, there was hand roto, that’s all there was. There was no such thing as roto’ing by hand. We locked off the camera as much as we could, although I know we used some repeatable rigs every once in a while. But, yes, when Blue Sky was coming up we did do a lot of effects work and we had to be very careful, mostly due to the level of our technology, when we shot things. Coming back into the live-action world with Monster Trucks, what did you notice in terms of any big changes and developments in how vfx were done, or what might have stayed the same?Ĭhris Wedge: Well, the last live-action that I actually shot myself was in college. Cartoon Brew: You worked in live-action visual effects for a couple of years before Blue Sky became solely an animation studio.
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