Find out how how Bait Studio wields NUKE to bring Winnie the Poohs watercolour world to life in Disneys Tales of Friendship. Taking the beautiful watercolour paintings of the Hundred Acre Wood and transforming them into a living, breathing 3D world for Disney Junior's live action Tales of Friendship TV series was a complex task requiring powerful tools. Without the help of NUKE, the marvelously charming trek to Winnie The Poohs favorite stomping grounds might have turned out very differently.
Comprised of 18 short episodes that ran on Disney Jr., the English version of Tales of Friendship with Winnie The Pooh features actor and comedian Robert Webb reading and acting out adventures starring the iconic bear and his pals while the storybooks settings spring to life around him. The multi-lingual series was also filmed with different actors in German, Italian and Spanish using the same backdrop. Rather than building a gigantic, costly, and inflexible set, Boom Pictures called in the folks at Bait Studio to complete the illusion seamlessly using VFX.
For Bait Studio Managing Director, Jon Rennie, getting his start in the video game industry working alongside God-game visionary Peter Molyneux on classics like Dungeon Keeper and Populous: The Beginning taught him a great deal about the technology side of the creative industries. This served him well when he later transitioned to the visual effects realm, where he built up an extensive resume over the last decade before joining the Bait Studio team to work on a range of advertising and broadcast projects. Rennie is no stranger to kid-centric programming either, having previously worked on 3,000 shots for Ha! Ha! Hairies and tackled 1,500 VFX shots per series for Grandpa In My Pocket on CBeebies.
Tales of Friendships director Dirk Campbell wanted to give the show that classic multiplane animation look and feel that Disney pioneered, while also drawing on the wealth of original watercolour artwork found throughout the Winnie the Pooh series. NUKEs 3D environment proved essential for compositing all of the shots with as much flexibility as possible. While each five minute episode only contains between 10 and 15 shots, the camera moves freely around the world in each scene and the team used minimal cuts. This resulted in some shots being over a minute long, making it all the more crucial to piece the puzzle together carefully.
More power with NUKE
We put a lot of effort into breaking down all the book illustrations and separating the various trees and landscape elements so that we could construct a fully 3D world inside NUKE that felt like a living watercolour painting, Rennie explains. It was important for us that the audience never saw the join, and people are often very surprised when they realise how little scenery we actually had.
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Without a budget for a live preview on set, having the flexibility to make adjustments in post was key. Each shot was art directed to allow artists to move trees, grass, bushes, and other elements of the digital environment around to suit the frame. Taking 3D objects modeled in Maya, like the fence and pots in Rabbits garden, and importing them into NUKE to be rendered alongside the rest of the landscape made making changes on the fly a much quicker process.
Compositing in NUKE allowed the team to bring a feature film level of quality to a broadcast series, which is something Rennie always strives for, even when working on a childrens series. Our previous work was limited in a number of ways by the software, but NUKE gave us the tools to put all those concerns aside and do the best possible work on a tight schedule.
Some of Bait Studios previous projects utilised Adobe After Effects heavily, but lately the team has switched over to NUKE for the smaller jobs that need detailed attention. Our biggest reason for the switch was After Effects' lack of a proper 3D interface and predictable handling of RED footage, Rennie says. We needed to be able to see all the details of the world in high resolution without a performance hit, and that's where NUKE definitely has the edge.
Beyond having the power to handle a large number of complex textures, another big appeal of using NUKE for Tales of Friendship was how easily it allowed the team to make changes to the 3D environment. I don't think we would have been able to achieve the series in any other piece of software because it would have required more time to make small adjustments in 3D software, which would have to be rendered before being composited, he says. With NUKE, we had the whole world at our fingertips and changes could be made without the render farm grinding to a halt.
This helped the team tackle its biggest challenge: matching the storybook world to the live action blocking. Constructing in NUKE let them take moving cameras into a fully 3D composited environment to see where instances of foliage and tree placement might obscure the actors. The ability to gain the quick and detailed feedback needed to get client approval for shots without long delays proved invaluable for the project.
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A Foundry-filled future
Rennie is looking forward to putting NUKE through its paces on future projects too, and he says the studio plans to integrate more of The Foundrys award-winning products into its VFX pipeline.
Bait Studio is already in development on the next series of Grandpa In My Pocket, which will begin shooting in July. This time around, all of the assets and pipelines for the series are being rebuilt and will employ NUKE for the first time. MARI is being used to make a new CG stunt double of James Bolams character, and HIERO will also be used to compile the edits and integrate with the Shotgun database to automatically create NUKE scripts using templates.
Beyond this, our pipeline will be expanded to work on featur
