When DreamWorks story artist Steve Macleod first started working on The Croods in 2007, his first child was born. Now she's old enough to see his work for herself.
"That's the shocking truth of how long it takes to make these," The Croods Co-Director Chris Sanders said. "If you have a child at the beginning, they will be going to the premier."
During a parenting blogger summit last month, I received not only a tour of DreamWorks Animation in Glendale, California, but we attended presentations that detailed the many aspects of creativity that go into creating The Croods,, due to be released on March 22.
The movie is the story of a cave family – Grug, Ugga, Eep, Thunk, Gran and baby Sandy – whose world is literally falling apart around them. Guy, a more advanced human, challenges the family to follow him because he knows, it's either they change or die. It's a fast-paced movie that should hold children's attention that's also filled with some very poignant moments and some incredible visuals and some terrific humor.
Before the trip, I had a rough idea of what might go into the creation of a movie like this but my rough idea turned out to be incredibly incomplete.
The presentations at the summit covered everything from the original idea, the first script, and how the changed, storyboarding scenes and concepts, character movement and voices, the 3D process, and the creation of the creatures and the world where the Crood family resides. There was also a guest appearance by DreamWorks Animation's CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg. It's so much information that I'm going to break the post into two parts and save the 3D process and the creature and world creation for another post.
Steve Maclead, a DreamWorks story artist, began the summit by taking us through story pitch presentations. As he explained, the story artists take the ideas in the script and try out concepts that may or may not work for either character or specific scenes. In this case, Maclead and the other artists worked from a script by Sanders and co-director Kirk De Micco.
"This is really critical in animation because as much writing and story development happens on these storyboards as does in the script or recording sessions or anything else, because the artists that do these, they're also changing the story as they go. So, they can change the dialogue, they can change the setup, they can add things, they can write things," Sanders said. "So, this is where the rubber meets the road in animation, as far as I'm concerned in the story process."
Macleod was in charge of character creation but was quick to point out that it's not him alone.
"Well, it's hugely collaborative. So, it actually happened simultaneously. Some people are developing the look of the characters, and then we'll try to use their drawing designs and incorporate them into the pitches."
It's at this point in the process that body types are decided on. For the Crood family, they really wanted them to look like cavemen, so they went with a more blocky body type, so they would look resilient and rugged, to match their world.
From the script, Maclead and his team developed storyboards and primitive animation sequences to pitch to the directors for inclusion into the movie. He showed us a clip of the Croods feasting after capturing a turkey fish that includes a after-dinner stories by Grug and Guy, the newcomer, told around the campfire. Each character was highlighted as they eat, and all the blocking needed for the scene is put in there, though it's only crude animation. The artists then show the sequence to the directors for approval.
"I'll pitch a rough draft, they'll give me notes, we'll see how close we are, and we'll do a couple more times. It's a vicious cycle until finally we feel like it's really close, we'll send it to editorial who starts putting all the dialogue and some temp music and scratch dialogue. It won't be the celebrities quite yet," Macleod said.
The scene then goes into production. However, some scenes are finished early on while others take longer, so parts of the movie end up being at much different points in the production process. Maclead noted storyboarding on scenes that were late additions was still going on for The Croods as late as last October.
"We'll have about, ideally, at least five story artists, and they're really the keepers of the story," De Micco said, adding that they're harder on the story than anyone else.
As the sequences decided on work is also being done to develop the characters. A three-dimensional model of each of them is created and these models are moved by computer "rigging" aka the modern-day equivalent of puppet strings.
"What the character does is directly related to that rigging. And you cannot rig a character to do everything because the rigging would be so extensive and gigantic, the character would in a sense get too heavy, and you can't even move them. So, the rigging is designed to work with a specific character for specific things," Sanders said.
"So, Eep's hair is a good example. When she gets wet, there's a whole crew that comes in and makes her hair look wet because she's not rigged to just suddenly look wet. We have to have special people do that. All that kind of happens at the same time. You're designing it based on your concept for the movie. You're casting it based on the concept for the movie. So, those two, the design and the voice, should meet up pretty well, but you want to keep that a little bit plastic so that it can influence each other."
The voice actors are chosen about this time and the way they portray the part can have a huge impact on their characters, especially if you're as expressive as Emma Stone. The other voice actors include Nicolas Cage as Grug, Catherine Keener as Ugga, Clark Duke as Thunk, and Cloris Leachman as Gran. Baby Sandy doesn't have lines in the movie, though she does do a lot of growling.
"One of the things we do, whenever we record them [the voice actors], we have a video camera that is recording them from two different angles. A lot of the time, we'll grab a take that they did, and we'll take the video as well as the voice, and we'll give that to the animator because there might be something kind of special that the actor did during that take," Sanders said.
"Emma Stone, I think we pulled more video on than any of the other actors because she is so animated. She could change expression in one frame of film. So, she'd be like happy and she’d suddenly have this cartoony upset face. And when we would go back and play it, it would be like one frame she's happy, one frame of transition, bam, she's unhappy. So, the speed at which she could change expressions was extreme. And she had a couple of other quirks.
She actually has this very interesting thing she does where, when she smiles, sometimes, she's frowning, and it's very hard to explain that. But, she was smiling, but the corners of her mouth were going down. So, we gave that specifically to the lead animator who did her animation and said, can you get this in there, because we were always going to our animation and asking, can you get this in there, can you get this in there. She goes, yes, she's always putting specific things in."
The animators definitely nailed Stone's facial expressions and movements for Eep.
The next step in the process was putting movie together frame by frame and adding in the crazy creatures and story world created for them.
I absolutely loved the creatures in this movie and I'm seriously bummed there isn't a plushie of the cat creature that the filmmakers called a Macarnivore. It's basically a multi-colored big-head version of the sabre tooth tiger and while he spends most of the movie being menacing, he's also adorable. But he's only one of many. I'll talk about them in the next post, along with some "crap in the air."
