Reel FX stuffs its first animated feature film with all the right ingredients.
When Reel FX decided to cook up its first feature-length animated film, Free Birds, the studio was excited and focused, but didnt want to end up with a turkey on its hands. But, that was hard to avoid, at least in one sense of the word, seeing that the main characters in the film are just that, turkeys.
Free Birds tells the tale of Reggie, a free-range outcast from a family-owned farm who is saved from the ax with a presidential pardon and is rewarded with a life of luxury. Then, Jake, a factory-bred freedom fighter whose mission is to save fellow turkeys from becoming holiday dinner, kidnaps Reggie to help him achieve his lofty goal. The two steal a time machine and travel back to Plymouth Colony, where they meet the wild turkey Jenny, who is hiding with her flock in an attempt to avoid the Pilgrim roundup. Reggie flees when things go awry, but eventually returns to save Jenny and Jake, and his new feathered friends from Thanksgiving past - and present.
Its a buddy film, says Scott Peterson, co-digital supervisor on the project with Dave Esneault. We wanted to make something enjoyable and a lot of fun.
Free Birds is Reel FXs first foray into the realm of animated features as a creation studio, but the artists are no strangers to VFX and animation, having worked on a number of theatrical and direct-to-video movies, TV projects, and animated shorts as a service provider. In addition, the facility has retained its commercial department, with locations in Dallas and Santa Monica, California. In 2010, we decided to officially take Reel FX in a new direction, branching out from just being a service company into a creation company, says David Ross, president of Reel FX.
In order to make that happen, Reel FX signed on top industry talent from studios such as Blue Sky, Pixar, and Rhythm & Hues. This includes Director Jimmy Hayward from Blue Skys Horton Hears a Who! Jimmy is an animators director, says Executive Producer Aron Warner. He acts out the parts in great detail for the animators.
Tackling your own production also required the necessary infrastructure and production pipeline, which Reel FX had been building for its previous projects over time. Weve invested a lot of time and technology to find ways and systems that essentially think differently about how to approach the animation business, says Kyle Clark, COO of Reel FX.
The film had been in production a few years before Hayward came aboard; he recruited others with experience on larger pictures to help guide the Reel FX crew, which were new to a project of this scope. We were trying to get ideas from other studios and make those work as well as possible within the existing pipeline at Reel FX, and were coming up with new ways of doing things more efficiently, Esneault says. We didnt have the biggest budget or the most people, so we had work as efficiently as we could with what we had.
Simple but Complex To this end, Reel FX had to make some changes to its existing pipeline. For instance, the studio incorporated the Alembic cache format into its workflow. We knew we would have some large, complex sets and environments, so we made a proprietary assembly system, rather than creating and publishing large [singular] environments, says Peterson. It was basically a digital recipe of what the environment comprised, all its elements. We could affect them individually and then assemble them on the fly in a shot.
The goal was to do complex tasks but make the experience easy for the artists. For instance, TDs devised a new, artist-friendly feathering system, called Avian, which enabled the artists, rather than the programmers, to generate feathers of all sizes and shapes and then groom the turkeys. (See Birds of a Feather in the November/December issue of CGW.) The results could be viewed within the Autodesk Maya viewport in real time prior to rendering, thereby making the process even faster.
Monika Sawyer, feather and fur supervisor, oversaw the grooming process, and her department developed the look and style for most of the characters, particularly the turkeys Jake and Reggie, who appear in nearly every scene. Working with Sawyers department, surfacing supervisor Todd Harper took the surface details of the characters even further, determining how light reacted on the beak and feet, and where the plumage should be shiny and oily versus dull. Jimmy established that he wanted something that felt really gritty and real, yet could live within that cartoon world, says Harper. So we found this fine balance between detail and not too much detail.
Another efficiency involved a nonlinear approach to constructing a shot. As soon as layout was launched, we could start animating and lighting, so all three departments could work at the same time, which is unique, Peterson says. Each department fed the other one cache, but we also had to be careful so that we were in sync, because at any time there could have been an update to a texture, model topology, or UV and the data would change. And that would affect all the shot-centric departments. To help the group avoid those issues, Reel FX developed an asset state system, which alerted artists to any change in the assets and automatically delivered the new pieces and packaged them correctly.
Alas, the system proved efficient, possibly too efficient, generating terabytes and terabytes of data very quickly. Suddenly, we were running a hundred miles an hour and approving close to 80 shots a week, which is a ferocious pace, says Peterson. Then, we were told we were filling up the system too quickly. Working with the supervising technical director, they created a series of cleanup scripts and tools that would archive all but the last three versions of the rendered frames on an approved shot. This enabled the artists to aggressi
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Reel FX stuffs its first animated feature film with all the right ingredients. 
