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WORLD
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THE MAGAZINE FOR DIGITAL CONTENT CREATION AND PRODUCTION
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Animated shorts hit a
high note with viewers
At Your Service
Service providers bring
3D scanning to studios
The Race Is On
Project Gotham Racing 3
revs up gaming
Hanging A Shingle
The ‘hidden costs’ of
opening your own shop
Music
for the
Eyes
February 2006 www.cgw.com
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THE MAGAZINE FOR DIGITAL CONTENT CREATION AND PRODUCTION
WORLD
Computer

Also see www.cgw.com for computer graphics news,
special surveys and reports, and the online gallery.
www.cgw.com

FEBRUARY 2006
Computer Graphics World
|

1
Departments
Editor’s Note 2
French Inspiration
France has always been known for art,
and today, the country has carried over
that tradition to the CG realm, teaching
and inspiring digital artists to pursue
their passions and dreams.
Spotlight 4
Products
Silhouette FX’s Silhouette Paint
A u t o d e s k ’ s D i s c r e e t C o m b u s t i o n 4
for the Mac
Dosch Design’s Viz-Image series
Video Viewpoint 6
Adobe’s Suite Production
As video turns digital, a host of new
applications are becoming available.
With its Production Suite, Adobe is
ready to help users migrate to these
new markets.

Portfolio 34
Jiri Adamec
Digital Training 36
A wide range of virtual tutoring
and training options allow artists to
master software at their own pace.
Reviews 38
Bauhaus’s Mirage 1.5
Features
Cover story
Short and Sweet 10
ANIMATION

|
Artists and fi lmmakers test
new styles, equipment, and ideas with
animated short fi lms, some of which may
end up on this year’s Oscar short list.
By Barbara Robertson
Point Person 20
SCANNING

|
3D scanning technology
is proving itself as an important studio
modeling tool, and service providers are
helping the facilities get this job done.
By Debra Kaufman
The Fast Track 26
GAMING

|
Bizarre Creations revs up
its Project Gotham Racing 3 franchise,
injecting the title with fi lm-like effects
running on the new Xbox 360 engine.
By Karen Moltenbrey
Starting a Small Studio 30
BUSINESS TRENDS

|
Ready to hang
your own shingle? Don’t forget the
importance of location. Some other
things to consider: planning for expenses
,
fi nding clients, and pricing your work.
By William “Proton” Vaughan
On the cover:
Pixar’s “music men” told the story of the
studio’s animated short fi lm “One Man
Band” with music, not words. See pg. 10.
10
February 2006 • Volume 29 • Number 2
See www.cgw.com for a more
in-depth version of this article.
NEW
@
cgw.com
Web story exclusives:

The French Student
Revolution
E-Magiciens in Valenciennes, France,
showcases animation from some of the
most creative students in the country.
See the winning entries from this
annual event.
Integration is Key
At Autodesk University in Orlando, Florida,
the crowds were big, but the emphasis
on “keeping it digital throughout the
production pipeline” was even bigger.
Iomega’s REV Drive
Backs It Up
Check out this fi rsthand look at the
Iomega REV 35
GB
/90
GB
drive, a low-cost,
portable backup device that redefi nes
the way data is archived and shared.
20
26
© 2006 Pixar.
30
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______
KELLY DOVE: Editor-in-Chief

KAREN MOLTENBREY: Executive Editor

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS:
Jenny Donelan, Audrey Doyle,
Evan Marc Hirsch, George Maestri,
Martin McEachern, Stephen Porter,
Barbara Robertson
SUZANNE HEISER: Art Director

DAN RODD: Senior Illustrator

BARBARA ANN BURGESS: Production Manager

CHRISTINE WARD: Ad Traffi c Manager

SUSAN HUGHES: Marketing Communications Manager

MICHELLE BLAKE: Circulation Manager
michelleb@pennwell
MARK FINKELSTEIN: Vice President,
Computers & Electronics Group

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Computer Graphics World
FEBRUARY 2006

www.cgw.com
editor’snote
Kelly Dove
Editor-in-Chief
French Inspiration
Lively, captivating, and often dark, French animation continues to inspire
artists worldwide. And, in Valenciennes, France, art is more than pretty pictures;
it is a way of life—even for the local government.
On a recent trip to Lille and Valenciennes, two cosmopolitan towns near
Paris, I was introduced to a new way of teaching and inspiring artists to pur-
sue their passions while helping them to “achieve the dream.”
It all starts in the schools, where artists are put through rigorous testing to prove their
talents long before they are accepted into an art program. One such school, Supinfocom,
which I visited in Valenciennes, requires students to work on a project, such as a brand
identifi er for a mock company, creating a unique artistic treatment based on a strict list
of criteria. This type of project is a pre-qualifi er for admittance, and only a handful of
students will make the cut—space is limited, and only the crème de la crème students
will be fortunate enough to add the school to their resume. While it would certainly be
easy for the school to expand and admit students who have more promise (and money)
than talent, it’s pretty obvious the school’s leaders value a solid reputation more than a
hefty bank account. Also at Supinfocom is SupinfoGames, which offers similarly struc-
tured admittance requirements, but with a focus on game creation and development.
During the fi rst and second year, students at Supinfocom focus on design and ani-
mation using programs such as After Effects. Teamwork becomes vital in the third year
as groups of three and four students are challenged to use the latest 3D modeling and
animation software to create animated projects. Team-based learning is certainly not a
new concept. The challenge for the small team of students is to work together to create
an animated short—from start to fi nish—and compete against other classmates and stu-
dents from other schools at E-Magiciens, a small trade show and conference similar to
SIGGRAPH in the early days, only with an enormous animation festival/competition.

While there are certainly many training facilities in the US that offer team-based learn-
ing, most are focused on instructor-driven projects and ideas that utilize large groups of
students to produce an animated project. At Supinfocom, the average team size is three
students, and everyone is involved in each phase of the production
pipeline—from modeling and animation to compositing and edit-
ing of the fi nal project. Clearly, as the teams establish a rhythm, the
individual strengths of the team members are identifi ed, and the
team divides and conquers to meet their deadline. The ultimate
goal for the students is to be on the winning team at E-Magiciens;
winners are quickly recruited to join top studios.
Perhaps the most inspirational part of my trip was realized while visiting with The
Valenciennes Chamber of Commerce, and seeing fi rsthand its commitment to the DCC
community. The Chamber funds a business incubator with self-contained offi ces, where
content creators can move right in and get right to business, utilizing their talent with-
out worrying about overhead, business equipment, etc. The incubator has everything
you need—a boardroom, a small television studio, and even a cafeteria—to get business
off the ground. But the gravy train doesn’t last forever. There is a three-year time limit to
get established, and once companies are successful, they must move on to allow for new
businesses to incubate. It’s a commitment to the DCC community that cities in the States
should consider adopting to help more small studio owners “achieve the dream
.”
Pretty pictures
help launch
small business
in France.
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Computer Graphics World
FEBRUARY 2006

www.cgw.com
spotlight
EFFECTS TOOLS
VISUAL EFFECTS
Your resource for products, user applications, news, and market research
PRODUCTS
PRODUCTS
IMAGE LIBRARIES
PRODUCTS
Autodesk Media and Entertainment’s Discreet Combus-
tion 4 visual effects software is now available for the
Mac OS. The latest release offers vector paint, particles,
effects animation, and 3D compositing for use in the cre-
ation of motion
pictures, episodic
television shows,
and commercials.
New features in
Combustion 4 in -

clude a diamond
keyer, time warp,
B-spline vector
shapes and group
pointing, custom
capsules, an optimized Gaussian Blur, merge operator,
and enhanced paint tools. Combustion 4 for the Mac is
priced at $995.
Ready for Combustion
4 on the Mac?
Silhouette Paint from Silhouette FX
offers a nondestructive motion-sta-
bilized paint tool for image resto-
ration, dust busting, and wire and
rig removal that the company says
can handle the demands of motion-
picture and television visual effects.
The product is available as an add-on
to Silhouette’s Roto application, a stand-
alone tool, or a plug-in for Adobe’s Final
Cut Pro and After Effects.
In addition to multi-layered match-
moving capabilities, Silhouette Paint
can nondestructively apply color, tint,
erase, blemish, mosaic, and grain
brushes to 8-bit, 16-bit, and fl oating-
point clips. To match a foreground ele-
ment, paint sources can be transformed
on the fl y by rotation, corner pinning,
and scaling in addition to being offset

in time or XY space. Four independent
clone sources are maintained simulta-
neously for added fl exibility.
Silhouette Paint can be integrated
with Silhouette Roto’s Shape tool for
motion tracking, variable-edge soft-
ness, and realistic motion blur. Brushes
can be applied to shape layers and auto-
matically matchmoved. Blemishes, for
example, can be automatically erased
over time. Silhouette Paint is priced at
$495 and Silhouette Roto sells for $595.
Silhouette FX Introduces Nondestructive Painting
See the Forest, the
Trees, and the Signs
Dosch Design has introduced fi ve new collections in
its Dosch Viz-Images series, offering everything from
road signs and streetlamps to plants and trees. Three
new Road Sign libraries each have 500 images that
include hazard, right-of-way, speed limit, construc-
tion and tour-
ism signs and
symbols in
JPEG format.
The Forest
Trees collec-
tion features
100 trees, and the Urban Features collection includes
benches, hydrants, streetlamps, mailboxes, and more.
The images in these two collections are supplied in

uncompressed TIFF, PSD, and JPEG formats. All col-
lections support CAD, 3D design, and image-process-
ing programs, and are priced at $79 each.
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Introducing
The Powerful, Approachable, Complete 3D Solution experience it at eovia.com
Inspire
You are the creator. You look for inspiration
everywhere. You want your work to inspire others.
You constantly desire something that will take
your designs to the next level, keep you competitive.
Productive. You want to lead, not follow.
Something great is here now.
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viewpoint
Video
Kathleen Maher
is a senior analyst at
Jon Peddie Research,
a Tiburon, CA-based
consultancy specializing
in graphics and multimedia,
and editor in chief of

JPR’s “TechWatch.”
She can be reached at

6

|
Computer Graphics World
FEBRUARY 2006

www.cgw.com
By Kathleen Maher
Adobe has a long history in digital video with its Premiere and After Effects soft-
ware and, in piling it all into one box, the company is trying to give its customers what
they want—true compatibility between the different modules of the Production Studio,
better tools for collaboration, new presets for After Effects, more and better templates,
enhanced ease of use for DVD creation, and fundamental improvements in Audition.
The Pieces of the Production
Adobe’s newest release of Production Studio is available in two versions: Standard,
which includes After Effects 7.0, Premiere Pro 2.0, and Photoshop CS2 ($1199) and
Premium, which adds Audition 2.0, Encore DVD 2.0, and Illustrator CS2 ($1,699).
One of the guiding principles for Adobe’s development is that the use of Photoshop
and Illustrator is almost universal among creative professionals, making back-and-
forth compatibility a built-in advantage for Production Studio users right from the
start. Expanding on this, Adobe has created consistently similar environments for
Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Audition.
Taking intercommunication between the software programs even further, Adobe
has added Dynamic Link, which enables users to work smoothly within modules with-
out having to perform intermediate rendering. I talked to people who were already
using the Production Suite as beta testers for Adobe and they universally tipped their
hat to the power of Dynamic Link.

For example,
Michael Kolowich of Diginovations in Concord, Massachusetts, works
with Adobe’s video products to create corporate videos for the area’s universities
and museums. He notes that the freedom of working interchangeably with Premiere
Someday video might replace
newspapers, e-mail, and even
magazines. Not that this would
necessarily be a good thing, but
video is becoming a signifi cant
form of mass communication.
And, as video goes digital, it becomes a
more fl uid medium, moving from the TV,
to the PC, to handheld devices. And it will
have to shape-shift accordingly. Adobe’s
latest lineup of video tools and utilities
is designed to keep up
with new applications for
video and to simplify the
lives of Adobe’s custom-
ers, which is not a simple
task by any stretch of the
imagination.
There are plenty of
contenders for the atten-
tion of video profession-
als, including Avid’s
Pinnacle line of products,
Sony’s Vegas+ DVD suite
and a swarm of upstarts
led by Sonic and Ulead,

Adobe appears to be aim-
ing directly at Apple.
Yet, Adobe is exploiting
several advantages—its
ownership of creative
tools such as Photoshop
and Illustrator (which are
ubiquitous in the indus-
try), its possession of PDF
(the de facto standard
for document exchange),
and its acquisition of
Macromedia’s Flash, a
leading format for small
form animation used
widely in phones and
on the Web.
Adobe
revamps
its video
products and
takes aim
at Apple.
Production Studio’s Bridge component is a centralized fi le browser with media management
capabili ties, allowing users to fi nd and work with all fi les related to projects within any of
the Production Suite modules.
Adobe’s Suite Production
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FEBRUARY 2006
Computer Graphics World
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7
Pro and After Effects is “incalculable.”
Interoperability, notes Kolowich, actually
makes the programs more powerful than
they would be on their own. For example,
he says that one of the aspects of video
that separates professionals from amateurs
is the skillful use of animated titles. He
has been able to take advantage of Adobe’s
inclusion of text animation and presets in
After Effects since the last introduction of
Adobe’s Production Suite, but now feels
like it is an embedded utility. “It’s like the
Adobe Titler on steroids,” he says.
Other work fl ow improvements in
the Production Suite include Bridge,
Adobe’s name for its centralized fi le
browser with media management that
helps users fi nd and work with all the
fi les related to projects within any of the
Production Suite modules. Also, Adobe
has added DVD creation to its Premiere

Pro program, recognizing that users
may need to quickly output a DVD with
good-looking menus rather than go to
Encore to create a professional-level DVD
designed for distribution.
Adobe’s attention to work fl ow issues
speaks to some of the challenges its cus-
tomers face. A large part of the video
professional market is made up of small
studios—owners are very often the cre-
ative director, the videographer, and the
IT person. For the small house, work
fl ow and communication can be particu-
larly challenging because it involves the
shooting and editing of sound and video,
delivery, client input, and so on.
Chris Randall of Edit 1 Media specializes in wedding vid-
eos and corporate videos. In fact, he fi nds that one business
often feeds the other. Most of the time, Randall and his team
will shoot the video while Randall’s wife takes over the editing
tasks. Randall favors the new multicam features in Premiere
Pro to simultaneously view and work with multiple sources,
since the workloads at small production houses can be stagger-
ing. In fact, he recently was editing 15 video projects simulta-
neously. Randall notes anything that helps make his job easier
and reduce editing time goes straight to his bottom line.
Videographers are also coming to grips with the transi-
tion to HD. Interestingly, video producers are fi nding that
even their wedding clients are becoming interested in HD
video because they’re buying high-def large screen TVs

and looking ahead. Corporate clients are likewise moving
to HD, and, of course, the broadcast industry is racing to get to HD. But the other
reality of video is that it’s big and demanding. Luckily, hardware manufacturers
are coming to the rescue. To keep up with the trend, Adobe has added support for
the Aja Xena HS and also native support for HDV. In addition, Adobe’s support for
OpenGL gives hardware graphics boards the ability to accelerate processes. One
of the most obvious advantages will be support for high dynamic range imagery,
thanks to OpenGL, and also support for effects and plug-ins.
Adobe was among the fi rst to spawn a plug-in community with its SDK for Photoshop
Encore DVD’s fl owchart simplifi es organization when creating interactive
menus, multiple audio tracks, subtitle tracks, and more.
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FEBRUARY 2006
Computer Graphics World
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9
and, later, for After Effects. It is continu-
ing the effort by reaching outto third-party
partners in video hardware, such as Aja,
for example, and also audio hardware
partners, third-party software developers,
training program developers, and expert
support. The evolution of OpenGL and
Adobe’s enthusiastic exploitation of the
API defi nitely opens up new opportunities
for hardware and software developers.
Adobe has made several signifi cant
improvements to Audition and, as a
result, believes many customers will be
able to work totally within Audition, and
not rely on additional products for audio
work. Features, such as support for ASIO
(Audio Stream Input/Output) for multi-
channel hardware, puts Audition more
fi rmly within the realm of professional

audio products, and Frequency Space
Editing lets users zero in on a particular
sound, or frequency, to actually see the
area that needs work.
The Bottom Line
As always, it’s not about the pieces, it’s
about the whole. Much of the Adobe
Production Studio has been evolving to
this point—some of the features, such
as presets, titles, frequency space edit-
ing for Audition, and so on, were actu-
ally included in earlier versions of the
software. Nor are these features unique,
but they are necessary. Apple’s Final Cut
Pro, for example, has multi-cam features,
Apple introduced Motion to compete with
After Effects, and Apple has very strong
audio editing tools. What’s most impor-
tant is the way the pieces fi t together and
the way in which they enable people to
work with each other creatively. Perhaps
one of the most revolutionary additions
to the Creative Suite Production Studio
won’t even be realized until the prod-
uct is used in the creative commu-
nity. Adobe has enhanced its Acrobat
PDF format to work with video content,
allowing collaborators and customers to
attach notes for items such as sequence
fi xes, additions, deletions, etc.

And, some of the real changes in
the use of video are just taking shape.
Kolowich is encour-
aged by the poten tial
of the wide-ranging
hosts for video and the
merger between Adobe
and Macromedia. As a
former executive with
Lotus and publisher at
Ziff-Davis. Kolowich
is also a veteran of the
vast changes in work
habits caused by digi-
tal technology and the
arrival of the Internet.
In his work with college marketing he sees giant change coming as kids who grew
up swimming in digital media reach college and the workplace. “It’s a tsunami,” he
says of the change in media that’s on the way. As a video producer, he sees that radi-
cal new ways of working will have to be developed to create content suitable for HD
and content that can be sent to mobile phones, media players, and online. Kids, he
believes, will treat video just like they treat words, pictures, and music.
With Production Studio, Adobe is concentrating on the professional side of the
equation but with key technologies in video and communications, Adobe is well
positioned to ride the wave as it changes our concept of media.
Audition’s Spectral View can be used to apply effects or edits to
select frequencies of a particular time span.
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Computer Graphics World
FEBRUARY 2006

www.cgw.com
. . . .

Animation
Short
and

For many, the art of animation reaches its highest
peak in the smallest medium—short animated fi lms. Free from the
strictures of box-offi ce appeal and client approvals, these artists express personal
ideas, test styles, and sometimes simply have fun. Largely invisible to the mass market, the
primary venues for these short projects are fi
lm festivals and animation festivals.
Each year, though, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honors one short animated
fi lm with an Oscar and at least three with Oscar nominations. To qualify for the Oscar race, the short must
have won an Academy-qualifi ed festival or opened in a theater. The short-fi lm branch of the Academy narrows
the qualifying fi l
ms into a smaller group, from which they announce three to fi ve nominees in late January. Academy
members vote on the nominees during February, and this year’s Oscar winner will be announced March 5.
Of
the fi lms likely to be on the Academy

’s secret list of nomination candidates this year, only two were ani-
mated solely with 3D computer graphics tools: Pixar’s “One Man Band” and Shane Acker’s “9,” which won Best in
Show at SIGGRAPH 2005. Two other shorts, though—Anthony Lucas’s “The Mysterious Geographic Explorations
of Jasper Morello,” which won the Grand Prix at the prestigious 2005 Annecy International Film Festival, and Cédric
Babouche’s “Imago,” which has taken honors at several festivals—used a 2D/3D mix: 2D characters in 3D back-
grounds. In addition, many advocates of hand-drawn fi lms use computer software the
se days, if only to edit and
composite their scanned images, as did John Canemaker for his fi lm “The Moon and the Son.” The other fi lms
likely up for nominee consideration are the traditionally animated “Badgered” by Sharon Colman, which
received a Student Oscar nomination, “The Fan and the Flower,” a black-and-white hand-drawn ani-
mation by Bill Plympton, and Michael Sporn’s “The Man Who Walked Between the Towers,”
which is based on the 2004 Caldecott Medal-winning children’s book.
Chances are, three of these fi lms will be nominated for the Oscar. And through
these projects, artists have demonstrated that animation can be as rich a
medium as live-action fi lms.
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www.cgw.com

FEBRUARY 2006
Computer Graphics World
|

11
Animation
. . . .
Pixar rarely enters its short fi lms in com-

petition these days. Instead, the Oscar-
winning studio releases a short with each
feature fi lm and showcases the fi lms at
festivals, albeit out of competition. To
qualify for this Oscar race, the studio qui-
etly screened its “One Man Band” in a
commercial theater. The short’s world pre-
miere, though, was at Annecy, and its US
premiere during the December opening
of the Pixar exhibition of artwork at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Directed by Mark Andrews and Andrew
Jimenez, “One Man Band” takes place
in an old-world piazza. There, a peasant
child about to toss a coin into a fountain
becomes the focus of a musical sparring
match between a tired, tune-making regu-
lar and a charming, fl ashy new performer.
Bass, the piazza’s one-man band regu-
lar, has his arms fi lled with an accordion,
drum, tuba, clarinet, cymbals, and a few
horns. Treble, the energetic upstart, wields
bows and piccolos. At fi rst, each upstages
the other in turn, but soon the compe-
tition for the little girl’s coin turns into a
cacophony, with both musicians playing at
the same time, one on each side of the girl,
until she . . . well, that would be a spoiler.
Sometimes Pixar creates short fi lms to
exercise new technology; sometimes the

fi lms exercise new talents. This fi lm gave
several artists, from lead animator Angus
MacLane to the directors, their fi rst supervi-
sory opportunities. “Our biggest gain on this
fi lm is that we had new people in every lead-
ership role,” says producer Osnat Shurer.
The fi lm originated as a challenge from
Ed Catmull, Pixar’s founder and presi-
dent, to Andrews and Jimenez.
The pair had followed
di rec tor Brad Bird to
the studio to create
storyboards for The
In cred ibles. Before
that, both had
worked on Bird’s
The Iron Giant
.
“He asked if
we’d
like to do a
short,” says Andrews
of Catmull’s challenge.
“So, we did lunch and
tried to come up with an
idea. But we kept coming
up with ideas for features.
We had to define the
parameters for a short.” In addition to
length, they listed the following: a single

idea that an audience can get in 10 to 15
seconds, variations on that idea which
predict an outcome, a twist on the pre-
dictable outcome, one or two characters,
and one environment. With this list in
mind, they developed three stories: one
from Andrews, one from Jimenez, and a
third, which became “One Man Band.”
“We’re both musicians, so we won-
dered what we could do with music,”
says Andrews. “That’s how we came up
with the image of a one-man band.”
Then, they added a second character.
“Our idea was to have one character
who is good at something (but doesn’t try
very hard) challenged by someone younger
and better,” says Jimenez. “We showed
the ideas to John [Lasseter, the executive
producer] and he lasered in on this one.
He said, ‘I can see Andy in that character
[Treble] and Mark in the other one [Bass].”
At fi rst, the directors sketched story-
boards that had the musicians perform-
ing for a crowd. Eventually, the crowd
began to shrink until the audience com-
prised a mother and a little girl, and then,
only the child. One reason for the change
was the budget. “The short-fi lm directors
learn to work within creative boundar-
ies,” says Shurer. “There are per-charac-

ter costs and set costs.”
Adds Andrews: “We had to focus on
the center and go for that, and work
with economies of time and
emotion.”
Once the crowd
shrank, the story
changed. “When we
got rid of the crowd,
it gave the fi lm
heart,” says
Jimenez.
“Before that, it was
just two guys fi ght-
ing.”
Because the “dialog”
in the story is the music
played by the two per-
formers, the directors
needed a musical score
before they started produc-
tion. Michael Giacchino,
who scored The Incredibles, composed
two themes that escalate and then over-
lap when the one-man bands play simul-
taneously. An orchestra of 38 musicians
played the music.
Sweet
CG shorts enable digital filmmakers to explore
novel styles, stories, and techniques

One Man Band
The character Tinny holds the
coin that prompted a battle of
the one-man bands in Pixar
Animation Studios’ latest short.
©

2
0
0
6

P
i
x
a
r
.
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12

|
Computer Graphics World
FEBRUARY 2006

www.cgw.com

. . . .

Animation
“[Lasseter] said it had to sound like
live music,” notes Jimenez, “like real
people were playing it. So, we recorded
the sounds of fi ngers sliding on metal.”
Although the animators sometimes
had the characters accurately play the
notes from the sound track, the two
one-man bands don’t have enough
fi ngers to match the music through-
out the fi lm. Instead, judicious use of
close-up shots of fi ngers on strings and cheeks puffed out to
blow horns convince the audience that the characters are creat-
ing the complex sounds.
The number of instruments became an interesting challenge
for the technical team: Each character had many surfaces. “Each
surface needs a shader, a texture map, and application space,”
says Bill Polson, supervising technical director. “You’d open up
a character, and the list of shaders would scroll up and down
the page—10 kinds of brass, the felt on the keys for the trum-
pet plungers, 10 kinds of wood... it goes on and on.” Although
the studio has built an infrastructure to handle that complexity
for the upcoming feature Cars, that infrastructure didn’t exist for
Finding Nemo or for “One Man Band.”
“Our pipeline at that point hadn’t handled characters with 400
or 500 shaders attached to them—it’s not like a fi sh that has four
or fi ve,” Lucas says, “so we just carried around big data fi les.”
To create the city surrounding the piazza, the team began

with six buildings. “If you look at a building from one angle,
you see one arrangement of windows and doors,” says Polson.
“If you turn it 180 degrees, you see a different arrangement.” So,
by rotating the six buildings, they created 12 variations. Five
different roofs and three types of shutters randomly placed in
open and closed positions created additional variations, as did
a mixture of shaders.
“A savvy CG person will see that it’s a parts kit, but the aver-
age viewer will probably see a city,” says Polson.
The crew also used matte paintings in the background and
in the foreground. “If you see shrubbery, that’s a matte painting,”
says Polson. “Our rule is that if we model a building, that’s how
we make a building, and we’ll use it all the way into the back-
ground for continuity. If it’s too heavy, we’ll decimate it. We don’t
have near buildings one way and far ones another way, because
then we’d have to worry about matching.” There is one exception:
The tile roofs on distant buildings were rendered onto cards.
For lighting, the directors made a painterly choice. “The
Zen of lighting was that we had light over dark over light over
dark,” says Polson. That is, they’d place a brightly lit character
in front of something dark, such as a building, and that building
would be in front of something bright, which would be in front
of something dark. To make this lighting seem logical, they cre-
ated a cloudy day, which made it possible to place the characters
in pools of light. Haze fi lters softened any brightly lit buildings.
Pixar uses its own RenderMan for rendering, outputting the
scenes in numerous layers, which were composited in Apple’s Shake.

“With this fi lm, we had a wonderful opportunity to work
with an existing, stable pipeline rather than the latest, greatest

stuff,” says Polson. “I’m becoming a real advocate for that in the
studio.” —Barbara Robertson
Australian animator Anthony Lucas of
3-D Films turned 2D cutouts, stop-
motion animation, and 3D backgrounds
into a 28-minute Gothic horror/mystery/
adventure that has taken the festivals by
storm. It’s a science-fi ction fi lm set in
the past and fi lled with Victorian Rube
Goldberg machines—steam-powered
computers and iron airships.
“It’s a ‘steampunk adventure,’” says
Lucas. “William Gibson did a steam-
punk book set within an alternate uni-
verse in Victorian times. It doesn’t come
from that, but having fi nished the fi lm,
I fi nd myself in that genre.” Instead,
Lucas was inspired by writers Edgar
Allan Poe and Jules Verne.
Although Lucas typically works with
stop-motion characters, the stars of this
fi lm are silhouettes: 2D cutouts. “The
adventure takes place in an alternate uni-
verse where light doesn’t refl ect,” Lucas
explains. “That’s why the characters are
silhouettes. Also, I like the look of it. I
guess I worked out a reason for why this
world is like it is.”
The fi lm is set in the clouds; there is
The Mysterious Geographic Explorations

of Jasper Morello
The “One Man Band” musicians Treble (at left) and Bass (at right) were modeled after directors
Andy Jimenez and Mark Andrews, respectively. Each character required several hundred shaders.
© 2006 Pixar.
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14

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Computer Graphics World
FEBRUARY 2006

www.cgw.com
. . . .

Animation
no ground. The star, Jasper Morello, is an
aerial navigator who embarks on a dan-
gerous voyage and, along the way, must
take desperate measures to save his wife.
Lucas started with a script and story-
boards—600 drawings by storyboard
artist David Cook. From those, the crew
created animatics. Then, they redid the
storyboards. “We photographed bits of
junk, like car engines and hubcaps, and
made the backgrounds out of that in
[Adobe’s] Photoshop,” says Lucas. “Then
we put proxies of our characters over these
backgrounds to create new storyboards.
As the scenes came up, I’d print the pages
and throw them in front of the animators.”
The animators used those poses—cre-

ated for about every 12 frames—to com-
plete the animation. Animators worked
with CelAction’s CelAction2D software
to create the characters, animating them
on white backgrounds as if they were live-
action actors on greenscreen stages. “You
make a fi gure as a 2D object, and hinge
it like a puppet,” explains Lucas. “It’s
classic cutout animation. We give it a 3D
spin—they look 3D when they turn their
heads, but they’re not.”
Because the characters are always sil-
houetted, they’re always jet-black, although
the fl at planes have a bit of texture to cre-
ate such detail as buttons. The posed sil-
houettes are output as Photoshop fi les. “We
slide the Photoshop fi les on top of each
other to make it look like the characters
turn around,” explains Lucas.
To create the iron fl yingships that fl oat
through the sky, the crew used Autodesk
Media and Entertainment’s 3ds Max; to
create the clouds, they used (Autodesk)
Maya particles. Compositors then com-
bined all these images in Autodesk’s
Discreet Combustion, and added glows
and color tints to the scene. “We put a tint
throughout the fi lm, and the tint changes,”
says Lucas. “Because this is an alternate
universe that echoes Victorian times, or

maybe even longer ago because there’s
still a plague, we wanted a sepia look all
the way through. But, we changed the tint
to echo locations.” Jungles are green, for
example; ice is cool blue.
The characters, however, are always
black. “I didn’t want the characters to look
like normal CG things,” Lucas says. “I
adore Pixar fi lms. As a short fi lmmaker, I
loved ‘Boundin’.’ My kid loved ‘Boundin’.’
Anything with hope in that abundance
should be promoted. But we aren’t Pixar.
This is an independent fi lm. We were
going for a graphic style. If you do cheap,
low-level 3D, it’s not very sexy.”
At 28 minutes, Lucas’s short anima-
tion is rather long, yet its cinematic quality
has caused reviewers to ask for more. And,
Lucas has begun working on ways to con-
tinue the story—with more half-hour seg-
ments and, perhaps, as a feature.
It certainly sounds like hope has
found its way to this animation studio in
Australia, too. —Barbara Robertson
For “Jasper Morello,” director Anthony Lucas
created an environment using photographs
and 3D clouds, made 3D machines, and then
placed animated 2D “cutout” characters into
the environment.
The Moon and the Son

Film historian, author, teacher, animator, and director of the
animation program at New York University’s Tisch School of
the Arts, John Canemaker created a 28-minute animated imagi-
nary conversation with his father that recently won the Fabrizio
Bellocchio Prize for Best Social Content at the I Castelli Animati
animation festival in Genzano, Italy. Film historian Leonard
Maltin calls the animation, titled “The Moon and the Son,”
Canemaker’s “most personal work ever—and his most brilliant.”
Canemaker writes, “I made this fi lm to resolve long-stand-
ing emotional issues I have with my late father. I wanted to fi nd
answers to our diffi cult relationship, to understand the reasons
he was always a feared fi gure in my childhood, why he was
always angry and defensive, verbally and physically abusive,
and often in trouble with the law.”
“The Moon and the Son,” which features the voices of actors
Eli Wallach and John Turturro as father and son, respectively,
was traditionally drawn.
Even so, the fi lm was cut and sound effects were added
with an Avid system; the composure used Apple’s Logic Pro
to compose, print, and mix the music, and Adobe’s Photoshop
to scan and edit three of the scenes. Apple’s Final Cut Pro
helped the team put it all together. —Barbara Robertson
Animator John
Canemaker uses
drawings to per-
sonify emotions
on the screen and
make what’s in
the mind become
alive in his fi lm.

© 2004 3D Films / AFC / S BSi / Film Victoria.
Images courtesy John Canemaker.
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