MPC 3D Creative Director on their Iconic Creatures

What were your animation icons growing up?

My background is photography, but funnily enough the things growing up that were big influences were stop frame - Aardman, Morph and all that lot. That's what drew me in. Also, I was always and I still am blown away by feature animation, Pixar and the work that they do. But the thing that drew me in to the industry was more picture rather than motion as such, the rendering and lighting side of it as opposed to animation.

What was the first creature that you remember ever creating in CGI?

The first I remember was a BBC ident thing I did at Framestore with hippos swimming around in a circle.

It stands the test of time – it’s not bad considering how long ago it was. We only had a very primitive thing in there, we did a bit of wrinkling but none of the sophistication you see in some of these creatures today. Plus rendering has come on a lot since - then it felt relatively photoreal but our sophistication and tech has evolved a lot.

How has the process changed since then?

There’s always new things emerging. Traditionally we've always rendered on big render farms using CPUs whereas now there's graphics cards, GPUs. We just throw so much at it now, with things like fur – we produce hundreds of furry creature now, and the PCs would have just melted back then. My mantra is always to get to the point where the computer's about to crash - that's the sweet spot. Otherwise you're not working it hard enough!

"My mantra is always to get to the point where the computer's about to crash - that's the sweet spot."

How have client and audience expectations changed as CGI capabilities increase? Do they ask more of you, and are they less overawed by CGI?

I think that's happened in films. You look at these huge flagship visual effects movie and audiences are like “meh, it's pretty good” even when it's wall-to-wall CGI. The first John Lewis I did at MPC was Monty, a tough penguin spot with 45 visual effects shots and feathers. Then 2 years later there’s 7 of them on a trampoline. Clients and so forth don't bat an eyelid.

What it comes down to is story; your CG's not just there for the hell of it, it’s there to make a story that couldn’t have been achieved without CG. That’s what gets me going.

"Your CG's not just there for the hell of it, its there to make a story."

Do you find that the story-based approach is missing in a lot of CGI that you see?

For me certainly. In films there is a bit of a tendency for CG for CG’s sake. To my taste a lot of big CGI movies aren’t the movies that most excite me, with a few exceptions. Whereas in advertising when there is a lot of CGI generally I love it - when they make the effort to put the CG in it has led to some of my favourite commercials.

What is the last ad that you saw that you wished you were part of?

One of my favourite ads was done by people I used to know back at Framestore a few years. It was for Shell I think and it had this this weird shapeshifting oily monster that chased a car. I thought that really stood out – it really wasn’t the kind of thing you see in an advert. I saw the script at some point probably, and I'd love to have done it.

Are you finding that now that you've had these big successes with creature stuff on The Jungle Book and the John Lewis ads that clients or potential clients are seeing you as the creature people?

In this industry, it ebbs and flows. Just as you’re fully creature-out it’ll be some kind of weird abstract effects thing. Just as I’m reaching saturation and “I'm like don't show me another fox or badger” I’ll do something totally different. It keeps you nimble.

You have really nailed the foxes and badgers though! For a long time, the rendering of fur was the Holy Grail of CG. When did you crack it?

I’d put fur and feathers together. The way we built feathers is as strands of fur. So I think Monty was the moment. I look at it and saw a realism there that I hadn’t achieved in any of my other jobs.

But we're our own harshest critics. Even jobs that might go out and be called great work I’ll still sit at home wishing I’d done this or that extra thing. Also, you look at stuff that feels bang on now and know in a year’s time I'll look at it and see what wrong with it.

Does it always take a year?

Usually. A big breakthrough happened in the last couple of years where renders that we would have only used for physically very realistic hard surface stuff, buildings, architectural stuff we can now use for fur and feathers. Previously, for fur and feathers you had to use renders that used a lot of tricks and hacks to get there, it looked good but it wasn’t real. That has been a big change. But unless something like that happens it’s about a year. It may just be that the way that we simulate fur moving has become more realist, might be the rigs underneath, might be the fur itself, there so many things that can move forward.

Previously you said the future of CGI is ‘closer and slower’ – microscopic levels of detail that work even at slow motion – does this mean the changes we’ll see in CGI will get smaller and smaller?

Already we’re at a stage where most people are saying it looks completely real, so perhaps. But it’s also a question of scale. No one had ever done this audacious thing like The Jungle Book with all those animals and a CG environment. So you’ll see CG coming closer, microscopic detail, slow motion, or you can go wide “my frame is filled with 400 animals…render that!”

“My frame is filled with 400 animals…render that!”

And in The Jungle Book that attitude really paid off. When I heard that they were going to do a CGI jungle I was like “CGI jungle?! Good luck with that…” And I look now and think “smart move, smart move.”

A big part of the success of that film was not given them human expressions.

Exactly. It’s tough to do talking animals. I was chatting with the supervisor there. They applied the same approach we do actually - still look for facial expressions in the animals that were close to the shape that you might make when you're making that sound, so it's the same principle - look to nature.

So there’s a little of Buster the Bulldog in Shere Khan?

Not literally of course, the two department have completely different tools and process. But it’s very much a united front in terms of taking on the challenge of creativity, so conceptually perhaps.