Hi, my name is Genndy Tartakovsky and I'm the director of Hotel Transylvania.
I'm Michelle Murdocca, producer, Hotel Transylvania.
And I'm Daniel Kramer and I'm the visual effects supervisor.
And we're gonna talk about the movie and what happened to it as we were making it.
This actually, for me, this beginning, when I first came on,
one of the first ideas that I had was to do this kind of fake out,
where we start with scary music and ominous setting
and then we come in to Dracula,
and we see him the way we've always seen Dracula
and as soon as he goes, "Peek-a-boo,"
that's when we change into the tone and what the movie was gonna be.
I remember, when I started, everybody's like, "No, we already did that."
Yeah. Well, we tried a couple of different ideas,
but I think we started and everybody didn't want it to be a scary movie
and we didn't want to make it feel scary up front.
We wanted everybody to know it was a comedy, so we did this.
Peek-a-boo!
No, no, no, no, no.
I know, Dan, it was real interesting with the baby because
we were limited to how many characters we were allowed to build, and stuff,
and so actually, they made the baby out of the real Mavis model. Is that right?
That's right.
Part of the challenge on this film was we had to create a lot of new characters quickly,
so we ended up repurposing some of our characters
and in this case, we refactored her, gave her new hair,
gave her a body that she didn't quite have
because we only ever see Mavis obviously with clothes on,
so we have to build all the body parts that live underneath those clothes
for a baby and so on and so...
But we did have to leverage quite a bit off existing models.
This guy's kind of funny.
Yeah, and Dr. Jekyll was... Or Mr. Hyde was also...
When I started, he was already one of the models that was kind of built,
but I wasn't super happy with his design and so in animation
we were really able to push his expressions,
we really made his jaw protrude a lot more forward than it was in the build.
And the animators did a really great job.
Do you want to talk a bit about the background of
why we had these characters that weren't exactly...
Yeah, I mean, this movie's been around for six years,
and four different storylines, if not more,
and the movie kept starting and stopping, starting and stopping,
so they would actually go through with the build
and then by the time I got on,
there was a partial world built for different stories
and backgrounds built for different stories.
Yeah, and it's funny, 'cause I was there for the whole time,
every time we did that, we would only work on characters
that we absolutely knew were gonna stay in the movie.
So for each different version, we had these characters
that were absolutely going to stay in the movie,
and the funny thing was,
you look at the Dracula design, and we already had a different Dracula built.
In fact, we had two different Draculas built, and then, when Genndy came on,
he wanted to redesign Dracula and Frankenstein...
No, I'm sorry, Dracula and Jonathan and a couple of the other characters,
but that's just part of the process of animation
when you're in production for so long, production and pre-production.
And also, the whole Dracula's manor was I think built out of...
I think we ended up in two walls or three walls?
We ended up with three walls, I believe.
Yeah, and this was a late add, actually.
So, we had this challenge where we had all these environments already built
and characters built, and then the story changed
and we had to build a bunch of new stuff quickly
'cause we only had about a year at that point
to build everything, get it rigged and lit and textured, and into the movie.
So, in this case, we had another environment called "The Tavern,"
which was hardly used in this movie. I think it's used in two shots.
- It's used in a flashback. - Yeah.
But it was fully fleshed out for a previous version of the film
and it had very similar architecture to this manor,
so we used a lot of those textures, we grabbed some walls
and we kind of refactored something just for this version of the script.
And it was an interesting note that the voice of Mr. Hyde
is James Williams, which is our layout supervisor.
He's English.
And he did such a funny, great voice, great job on the read for the scratch
that we were able to keep him.
Yeah, that happens sometimes also, where we have what we call temp love,
and somebody reads scratch
and then we have a really hard time replacing them,
so they end up in the movie.
So the prologue that we just watched was definitely one of the most volatile sequences,
where we did a lot of changes.
In the original version that we started working on,
we had the death of Martha, which I thought would be really dramatic
and really help you feel for Dracula and set up this whole story,
but then, as we went further on,
and the tone of the movie really became much more a broader comedy,
it might have been odd to start with
such a dramatic death of somebody in the beginning.
So we saved it till later.
Yeah, that was also part of making the movie really feel like a comedy up front,
and saving those dramatic moments for later.
Yeah, it's a mess back there.
Yeah, I think one of the big challenges for us
as we're heading into the lobby here was the lobby itself.
It was so vast and so huge, and wherever you have such a big space,
it's always hard to know what to do with it, and how to shoot it.
This is one of my favorite shots, just to stay really tracked on with Dracula
as he hands out all these monsters going in and out.
There's a bunch of custom characters that we built here
and the problem with such a vast environment is that
the lobby always looked really empty unless we had a lot of variety
and we made it really feel like there's all these various monsters coming in,
so as we were going through this lobby and it was built, it was basically monsterfied.
It's so huge that we had to build so many different variations to fill it up
and make it look interesting.
As well as just lighting it.
If you lit something like this practically,
there'd be lots of areas that would go very dark and so on,
but we wanted to keep it light,
we also wanted to keep it feeling inviting and light and bright.
So we put a lot of work into putting practical lights everywhere
and putting mysterious lights in different places
just to make it feel more inviting, that there was more to it.
Even when you look around corners and stuff,
you can see new light sources coming in indicating that there's more to it.
And this is also another really challenging sequence where
you want it to be everything, where it's the introduction of the characters,
introduction of the castle, introduction of Dracula as a hotel manager,
all these things, and it went through many, many versions.
This joke is funny. This was added really late in production,
and as we go through,
there's quite a few bits and pieces that were added after we did preview screenings
and felt like, "We need to add a joke here, a joke there."
And that sponge joke was one of them.
"Fire bad."
For me, I always looked at this sequence as almost like an old vaudeville act
where you've got those juggling plates, or spinning plates
and you keep trying to keep everything spinning,
to keep this energy alive at the hotel
and Dracula's got to manage everything and say hello to everybody.
'Cause then, after this, we go to a nice, slow piece,
but it's funny 'cause a lot of people either really love this sequence
or they're completely overtaken by it and it's too much,
so it was always riding that line.
Well, there's a lot going on.
It's the first time you've been in the hotel, you're meeting all of the characters
and you're getting really some of the backstory about Dracula and Mavis.
Hello, Murray!
And there was actually two million pieces of sand actually used in this shot.
I think a lot more than that, actually.
That was actually one of the more difficult effects shots there
that just flew by in a few seconds,
but we would lose a lot of sleep over something like that
and then, actual screen time is a couple of quick shots,
but doing a sand simulation like that is actually really difficult in our world.
In our CG world.
So what's up, Drac?
And this was one of my favorite stories that happened to me,
was when I first started working with Adam Sandier
and some of his writers, and some of his guys.
We would sit around, maybe doing some story discussions,
and they're all great SNL guys
and so I feel like they're professionally funny people
and I shouldn't really say anything, I should sit there.
And then they were talking about a joke.
And I had this idea for a joke, and then we started talking about a fart joke
and they came up with Frankenstein's legs just coming in
and then I thought, "I'm just gonna throw this joke out there.
"If I fail, I fail. It's not a big deal."
And I said, "What if a witch comes and sucks up the gas
"and then puts it in the...
"You know, make a fart fireball out of it?"
And they all laughed and it felt good
that it actually ended up in the movie.
I am so glad you are here to celebrate.
Another birthday for my sweet little Mavis...
Also, with Adam and his voice, I think, when we first started talking
I was really curious what he was gonna do
'cause I definitely wanted the cartoony, over-the-top Dracula
and I wasn't sure if he wanted to do it or if he was just gonna go straight,
his straight voice.
But then, he said that he kept practicing it in the shower,
it kind of sounded like Zohan, which I loved.
And so it just became a variation on that.
The fun starts in 30 minutes.
Right now, I have to see my little girl.
She's not so little anymore!
Yes, she is!
What's going on out there?
Are we at the hotel?
Frank, did you book us for a tandem...
When we first started storyboarding all these characters being separated,
I know there's a lot of questions, technically, "Are we gonna be able to do that?"
And for us, coming from a 2D background where
we can really do whatever we want to draw,
it seemed like there were so many limitations starting out,
but the guys, at the end of the...
Everybody made a really great job, translating everything.
Yeah, and speaking of that, we also had a lot of interesting challenges
with animation and the style that we went for.
I think Genndy talked with James Crossley
and our animation leads about animation style,
and they were really excited about it, that we were gonna go big and broad,
and just have really big animation, then really small animation,
but they left the room scratching their heads
wondering how they were gonna accomplish it with the rigs that we have,
which are sometimes pretty limiting.
Yeah, we had built a bunch of character rigs already
for previous versions of the film
that had a little bit more of a naturalistic feel to the animation,
which meant that we couldn't really stretch our characters out
quite as far as what Genndy really wanted to do.
But we do have this extra level of control in our rigs
that allow the animator to grab almost any CV, any point on the character
and pull it however they want.
They're not restricted in that way, but it's just a lot more manual work to do it.
We definitely resorted to that level of tweaking
on this film more than we had on almost any other
because as the animation style evolved we were making the movie
before we really had everything 100% set up to where Genndy liked it.
So the animators were able to take the liberty of just
pushing things a lot further than we're used to
and I think, actually, they did a great job.
It took a little bit longer to get some of the animation done that way
'cause we didn't have such a set style.
But it also gave Genndy a ton of freedom.
I think it was really fortunate for us that I have no clue how CG worked,
I didn't have to limit myself, I just thought, "Whatever we needed to do,"
and then these guys made it happen, which was amazing.
He would just come up with some crazy idea, we would pretend not to be scared.
We wouldn't tell him that we couldn't do it.
And then all the phone calls will be flying later.
Exactly. Figure it out.
Another thing about this is that
actually a lot of the castle was built when we started this.
A lot of it was textured and lit, but again, it was textured for
another version of the movie.
And we never built our assets 100%
where you could shoot at any part of the castle at any time
because that would be an enormous amount of work,
to be able to have a close-up shot on any one wall within the castle.
So we look through the storyboards, we go,
"Okay, we're gonna have a really tight shot here, so we better make this wall perfect
"and make it really hold up for scrutiny."
And we had already done that for a previous version of the script,
so now we have a new one.
We started shooting it and as we were getting into shots,
we were realizing that parts of the castle just weren't ready.
So, this movie, more than others I had worked on,
while we're lighting the shots and we're in production,
we're also fixing the castle up
and adding extra layers of paint and extra layers of detail
more so than we have in the past.
So we just had to do it on the fly.
And what was interesting about that also is when I started, and the castle was built,
it's actually built for real. Each room existed in the space...
- Like a real castle. - Like a real castle.
That completely blew my mind because I'm like,
"Why can't we just have segmented rooms?" And it was just crazy.
We actually could have. I don't know if, in the previous versions,
there was a call for a big fly-through from room to room.
No, I think that it was just different.
- Somebody made that choice. - A different methodology of making the sets.
As a VFX sup, I'm supposed to know why all this stuff was done,
I was the third VFX sup brought on to the project.
So kind of like Genndy, it was like this digital excavation where we were like,
"What do we have? How are we gonna use it?"
I think it was a production design choice.
Yup, I don't know.
It really played with my head for a while that we're actually building a real space.
Yeah, 'cause normally we would build the two walls that you use,
and not build the other ones.
I guess they had a lot of time on their hands back then, I don't know.
Also, art direction-wise, it was challenging
where we're making a funny movie with monsters not really trying to be scary,
so there was a big mandate to have things be bright and not feel dark
even though our movie takes place pretty much at nighttime.
So, I remember loving Peter Pan and kind of looking back at the old Disney movies,
and they always really used this really bright blue for the night
and I thought that it would be a really great solution,
to have this really saturated nighttime blue
and it ended up working out pretty well.
Where it still feels dark, but it's brighter, the sky isn't black.
So this whole set, the Humanville set, as we called it
was repurposed from the village at the end of the movie where they go out.
- Except, everything was shrunken down. - Right.
Things were shrunken down and we did have to again do a ton of...
We had all these existing buildings from this town at the end of the movie.
Yeah, we shrunk them down, we rearranged them,
and then we had to build the sidewalk and the ground to fit all that together,
so we just took different components of what we had and refactored it,
did a little extra texture work to allow it to hold up.
Everything okay? My name is Mavis Dracula, and I...
Vampire.
- Burn clothes. - Burn my clothes?
This was another sequence where we had of, just tonally, how scary do you want to get it?
And then how funny you want to get it?
You're always juggling those two ideas in this movie a lot.
And like, I think every time we started storyboarding a joke,
there was some kind of decapitation involved.
So then we had to go back to the movie and take out 90% of it.
Just go "Okay, well this moment feels good, and this moment feels good."
Yeah, it's so easy to pull off limbs and make a joke out of it.
Like that scene with Dracula flying through was really great
'cause it was so extreme and so cartoony at the same time
and the control of Dracula's cape and his posing and stuff was great.
Dad was right.
And it's funny, as much as we have the crazy, whacky animation
a lot of the movie is really controlled and held to create that contrast.
So whenever we have really emotional moments
you could see that the characters really don't move a lot.
And then when it goes crazy and the big chases happen and stuff,
then it does get crazy.
But for me, that's the fun of it, it's not zany from start to finish,
it's actually very controlled.
Again, you will not imagine how much discussions went through with
being able to have a blanket interior of those houses.
Yeah. Well, just to also have the detachable walls that fell down.
- They weren't built as facades. - Right.
Quiet.
Speaking of animation, just the shrunken head on the door,
how much movement we had in that was a big point of discussion.
What? What's the matter?
Dad, you were right.
Humans are awful.
They were everything you said.
I think to go along with that animation style, if you watch the way Dracula's cape moves,
it always maintains a specific silhouette
that Genndy would have the animators put in the rigs,
so that we always knew the outline and the shape of his mass and so on.
But in the digital world, we tend to simulate things like that, like a cape,
and the simulations just do what they do
and since our animation was so snappy and crazy at times,
and then it would go to a held pose, our cape would be completely out of control.
So we had to do a lot of extra work on this film to wrangle the cape
and blend back to an original animation or let it simulate at times
and it was actually a big part of the film so that it wasn't distracting
and it felt like it was still belonged in the animation,
that style that the character was moving in.
So we're sort of wrangling simulations, which was a challenge on this one.
And it's funny, too,
'cause with this slightly more caricatured, exaggerated style with the cape,
the Foley artists, the people who put all the sound effects in,
they did a whole pass over the movie of Dracula's cape sounds.
And they covered every single time he moves.
They put a...
And then when we started mixing the movie, it was crazy.
- 'Cause a little goes a long way. - Yeah, that had to be scaled back a lot.
Every time he moved, they had a sound, and we really had to put it under control.
Yeah.
Vampire! Vampire!
So Jonathan was another character that you designed, right,
- specifically for this one? - Yeah.
'Cause before, the previous versions had a Jonathan that were very more milquetoast-y
and I really wanted to do an exaggerated character that has a romantic lead,
'cause I always believe
you fall in love not with what's on the surface but what's on the inside.
And I remember he was pretty goofy-looking in the beginning,
and we always talked about,
"Would Mavis really fall in love with somebody that looked like that?"
And that was the whole fun of it,
because you do fall in love with somebody who's quirky and funny.
And he ended up being very lovable, I think.
Yeah, he's also the only guy her age that she's ever met.
But, yeah, he was a really funny character, because he has this great hair
and big mouth that you can really have a lot of fun with.
This is all my fault.
You have to leave.
- Oh, no. - Excuse me.
One of your piranhas in the lake is very rude.
He ate my sister-in-law.
Be right with you.
Mr. Dracula, we asked for a room with a view of the pool.
- This was... No, no. - Go ahead. No, go ahead.
I was just gonna say this was a really fun sequence musically.
We really got to take advantage of a lot of different music cues
that we would never think would go together.
And it was a really fun one, this from beginning to end,
with the mariachis, and I think that's really fun.
Yeah, 'cause we played a little almost tango-type feel.
Wow!
This room's kind of small for a big castle.
And this was the first sequence that we worked on,
animated, and rendered, and everything.
And it was really interesting.
When we first started doing the more exaggerated animation,
I was very tentative about it,
because in features, it's not expected to be this cartoony,
and so I wanted to present it very gently.
And there's a scene coming up of Dracula screaming,
and that was the most exaggerated that we had at the time.
- This one. - This thing right here, right there.
And I held it back. We had it done really early on,
and I wouldn't show it, and I wouldn't show it.
And then once we got kind of a run of it, then we showed it,
'cause then it wouldn't stand out on its own as much.
And I remember Michelle Raimo, our executive,
she kind of turned to me, and she goes, "It's so broad."
But she was kind of happy with it,
'cause I think people were laughing in the room.
So it turned out being good.
So we were still really experimenting and finding our feet in this sequence,
'cause this was the first one we were doing.
This was another mandate where it was like we wanna keep the film bright and light,
and of course, the very first sequence that we're lighting is in a closet
with no light sources. Basically, just light coming out from under a door.
Characters are wearing black. And I'm being told, "Make sure it's not dark."
And I'm like, "How are we gonna do this?"
I think we found a good compromise.
Especially when you see it in context with the rest of the film,
- it's okay to be dark here and there. - Yeah.
It was just a little tough being the first one out the gate.
We should talk about your inspiration, Genndy, for his hair.
So I first kind of started sketching him,
and I wanted to do something funnier with the hair.
'Cause the whole thing is kind of a living, walking cartoon.
So I drew this kind of Bride-of-Frankenstein hair,
but then I realized he kind of looked like Kid 'n Play.
I'm not sure if it's Kid or Play. I always get confused.
I don't know either.
And I always thought that was kind of funny,
and so we went, "Make it longer and longer and make it more comedic."
And also Quasimodo we really pushed like crazy.
His original design, when I started,
he was much taller and much more controlled.
So in all my drawings that I did, we really squatted him down
and pushed his expressions and even shoved his face into his body.
What do you think you're doing?
She's real. You're real!
Most of this sequence coming up was animated by Jin.
He was an amazing animator
who really picked up the caricatured and exaggerated style
of Jonathan running around.
All this stuff was amazing.
And our biggest problem was the motion blur.
Where the motion blur kind of really eats up the drawings as we went along.
And we had to really start developing a new system
for how to treat the motion blur so you still saw those things.
Yeah, so we did this film at Sony Imageworks,
and most of our software is really designed to mimic the real world.
So we have a renderer that's called Arnold,
and it's basically trying to render scenes to look photo-real,
'cause we use the same renderer for our animated films
and our live action films like Spider-Man.
So it mimics what a real camera does.
So when you have a character or anything moving past camera at 100 miles an hour,
that just flies through within a frame, it's really gonna completely disappear
and almost become transparent during that frame.
And, Genndy, you're more used to drawing every frame exactly as you want it.
You wanna see a silhouette on this frame, and you draw it in there.
We don't really have that control necessarily very easily in the renderer,
so we had to kind of mix different passes. We would do very low-motion blur passes.
We would bias the motion blur towards the front of the character line.
We would do all sorts of different things and mix that together
to kind of get the silhouettes back that you were missing.
And so this joke coming up with Glen,
we probably did maybe seven or eight different sound passes to get a laugh.
Initially, it was just this guy going... Kind of freaking out.
And it never got a laugh,
and we finally tried the super-loud roar, and it got a good reaction.
And then later add the camera shake.
Human blood is so fatty, and you never know where it's been.
So, Dracula doesn't drink blood?
No, I use a blood substitute.
Either Near Blood or...
Something that was really fun, too, that we didn't hit on earlier is
that we recorded a lot of the actors at the same time.
I think it was Adam, and Kevin James,
Andy Samberg, Molly Shannon, and David Spade.
And we don't normally get to do that on an animated movie,
because of various production schedules, so that was really fun.
But something that was really interesting was
that Andy and Selena Gomez, who plays Mavis, had never met.
So we did the whole movie, and we recorded them,
and then when we were in Toronto at the Toronto Film Festival,
- they met for the first time. - That's funny.
Selena told me.
I saw her after they did their interview, and she was like,
"We tried to talk about the movie as much as we could,
"but we'd never met before, and we were having so much fun."
And the interview was actually really cute,
and you go to see that they actually had great chemistry.
And in the movie, they have great chemistry even though they had never met.
That's hilarious.
Okay, hop on my back. We're leaving.
Oh, man, you're a bat now.
I always wanted to fly. What's it like?
This is insane. Wait. Wait, I want to stay.
The jacket was challenging also,
where there's this huge, baggy jacket on Jonathan
that always had to fit the certain silhouettes that we've always wanted.
Everybody did such a great job,
really probably hand-crafting it a lot through frame by frame.
Yeah, absolutely. Similarly to the cape.
Just keeping all of the silhouettes that you wanted and everything.
A lot of times, like his shoulders right there.
The animators might have created that with this jacket,
but not necessarily pushed his shoulders up underneath the jacket to support that.
So in our world, we actually simulate stuff.
We kind of need that underneath structure to allow the jacket to drape and so on.
So we had to kind of come up with some new ideas
on how to blend back to these sort of exaggerated animated shapes
and still make it look like it was cloth and not rubbery.
- You're my age? - Sure.
Well, how old are you?
118.
One hundred and...
Yeah, I'm 121.
Really?
You see? Everything is very, very normal.
I'm throwing a party, and he's helping.
- Sir, there's an emergency. - Not now.
Can't you see we're in the middle of something very normal here?
Wait, what's going on here?
There's an emergency...
Yeah, really it's funny,
'cause when you do go through the different sequences,
and some stuff is very controlled and barely moving,
and then we push it further.
This always get a good laugh with them fighting in the background.
- Anything but that! - What?
I mean, because he needs time to plan.
And if you're keeping him company, then he's not planning.
We tried to create a really saturated look
where sometimes the background is more neutral,
and then the characters themselves are very saturated.
Yeah, we kind of render everything together, but then we would break it out into layers.
And we would either sometimes mist out the background,
de-focus it more than maybe you'd expect.
Anything we could do to just make the characters themselves pop off
a lot more than we might otherwise do.
Just to really highlight what we wanted to see.
And this is another fun situation where we did that closet sequence first,
and our second sequence was the labyrinth, which was also super dark.
So everybody was getting really nervous that we had a really dark movie on our hands,
because these were the first two sequences that were going to production.
But still it's super colorful, and the lighting turned out really fun in here.
Yeah, we just made sure that the characters were really bright.
Allow the background to go dark,
but as long as, I think, the characters are bright.
- It's really appealing. - It is.
And I think also this was another sequence
that really sold the studio on the animation style.
Because there are some really fun animation,
like Dracula's legs moving. They look like spider legs.
Right. Yeah.
And they loved that, so I think that really sold the potential.
And here there's an interesting story
where initially, the two little, tiny creatures were together the whole time.
And then I guess, in some of the test screenings,
people thought that there was actually
some funny business happening between the two creatures.
It could have been the sound effects that were happening on top of it.
So then we had to kind of separate them.
And I kind of miss it every time I see it, to be honest.
I know. I think of it.
And this is a favorite. The skeleton shot.
This is the shot I was referring to.
Yeah, and it was great. In animation review, whenever this shot came up,
it got a lot of great laughs.
That's always the first test for me, as we were doing it,
and there's maybe anywhere between 10 to 30 people in the room
watching the animation review. And whenever the shot comes up,
if nobody laughs, you kind of know that maybe there's something wrong.
And then when everybody laughs, you know you're going in the right direction.
And part of the system that we set up for Genndy was
during animation review, you had a tablet,
so you could stop the playback at any time and just draw right onto the frame
and tell the animator exactly what the silhouette
or what the shapes are that you wanted. That was great for us.
We don't always have a director that knows how to draw
or can conceptualize things in that way.
So it was a really direct way of giving us feedback
of exactly what we needed to achieve the shots.
And for me, it was a lifesaver, because I'm not very articulate.
And so driving to draw is my crutch,
and so it made everything so much easier.
- Wow. He really scared you. - I wasn't scared.
I was being polite, okay?
Hey. What are you doing here? I thought you were planning.
And this whole bar sequence also went through a lot of story changes.
At one point, it was, like, five times as long. It was one of the longest sequences.
I think, for us, it was always kind of a sticking point in the movie
where things started to slow down a little bit.
Yeah, 'cause there was a lot of introductions that needed to be happening.
And we really tried to work it out where it moves along,
but you still get all the information.
'Cause you wanna just get to the songs, 'cause that's the really entertaining part.
The songs were actually kind of funny, too,
because that day that we had Kevin in, and Andy, and David Spade,
- they all had to sing. - Right.
And they were kind of prepared to sing, but not really.
And Kevin actually sings quite a bit, and he was really concerned about it.
But it was fun, and it totally worked out great.
This was one of the more fleshed-out environments
that we had, actually, coming in.
So they had done a great job with all the effects of the bar and the walls,
and everything was beautiful when we got it.
It was great to shoot in this room. We could shoot almost anywhere.
And we actually repurposed this room for a couple of others.
There's the bingo sequence coming up and a library,
and both of those are brand new environments that we didn't have,
and we needed just something for a few shots.
So we basically stripped out the bar.
We repainted the floor, changed the palette a little bit.
But for the most part, we were able to reuse this room
and just shoot it in different ways
and get a lot more out of it for the movie than initially planned, which was great.
Yeah, well, initially, when this bar was built,
the Invisible Man lived at the hotel, and he was the bartender.
And a lot happened at the bar,
- so that's why it was so fleshed out. - Got it.
Yeah, it's a great environment.
I thought having a Mavis contemporary would be useful.
Yeah, he totally needed a fresher perspective.
Okay, Johnny, Mr. Tight Coffin over here
was planning to have these powdered lame-os play at the party.
And amazingly, all those three zombies were built from our generic zombie.
But they were so pushed and pulled to have these specific ones
with new hairstyles.
It was really impressive.
Yeah. I think we had a shorter, squatter zombie and a tall, skinny one.
And then from those two, just about every other zombie was created
just using animation controls to push, and pull, and change their facial features.
And then we had a few variations of costumes that could then be swapped in.
For those guys, we had to do a little bit more work to make them more special,
but, yeah, the base was the same.
I really feel like there is no limitations in CG,
- and I could really do a lot more. - Really? Interesting.
I see where this is going.
This song, actually, Andy Samberg wrote, recorded in the studio.
Vampire girl with the fangy fangs
Hair real cute with the bangy bangs
Yeah, at one point, we had a huge rap here.
Yeah, huge, like, two-minute rap song.
Where we were gonna break away
and basically do a Lonely Island type of music video.
Yeah.
Awesome.
I am so blown away right now.
I think my cuz is gonna make this the best party ever!
Yeah! Maybe he can find a way to get me some chicks.
We should do a dance contest!
We're not doing any of that.
We've got to stay on schedule, all right?
All right, Dad, all right.
- Johnny, you're coming, too. - I don't know.
- Is it cool with Dracula? - Johnny, come with us.
Bingo sequence. Bingo was great.
Again, real challenging getting... That's a generic gremlin model that we had,
and painting all the wrinkles and liver spots on her were great.
Really the whole joke became awesome,
because it's so visual with how funny this old gremlin looks.
- That blue hair. - Yeah.
And bingo and charades, the next sequence, were ones that were added a little bit later.
Do you know what doctor made me?
Yeah, this is one where we got a great drawing of what she looked like,
and we were able to take just our generic and push and pull,
and change the hair up, and I laugh every time I see that.
- The Throw Up. - No. That wasn't a clue.
It's always nice when you have a sequence,
and people are giggling in the audience throughout the sequence.
You know you're in a good place when that happens.
Same thing with the Hydra. One model, and then we pushed and pulled
to get all of the personalities of each of the separate heads.
And Craig Kellman, who did the design,
did a great job making sure that it's really organic.
The hair that's on the Hydra was originally scales, I believe,
in the original design.
And it was actually a fairly technical problem
to have scales that are rigid, and slide appropriately,
and don't look like they're stretching and so on.
And we started kind of going down that road, and Rod Ibanez, our hair supervisor,
had an idea that maybe it could all be achieved with hair.
It would have a different look, but might look really cool.
And he did a little test,
and that was one of those things that we just showed it to you,
- and you thought it was pretty cool. - Yeah.
It kind of worked out well.
And back.
And up. And twist.
And push.
No. Don't copy that.
The pool sequence was another thing that was kind of added late.
We kept adding things
and I kept thinking, "We don't have any more time to do this movie.
"We can't keep adding these new sequences."
But we always had the pool,
but we didn't have all of the elements that were in the pool sequence.
We didn't exactly have a pool fight, a chicken fight,
and that was obviously a little daunting for us to figure out how to do,
but it came out great.
Yeah, same thing. When I started, I had all these kind of limitations
and this cast of characters built,
but they weren't really built for the movie that I wanted to do.
And so even somebody like Esmeralda,
I wanted her to be like a little partner for Quasimodo.
And I wanted her to be super expressive.
'Cause originally, Esmeralda was designed as a pet for Eunice.
Totally different. She had a bow.
- She didn't do much. - She just looked like a rat.
And so we first redesigned her,
but then we realized it just wouldn't fit into our pipeline in the time.
So then we just stuck an eyeball on her, and hopefully, in the animation,
we were able to get her to be really expressive with the pantomime.
This is one of my favorite shots, they have this extreme, horizontal staging.
...how much whispering you're doing.
Just wrap it up.
This animator, Jorge, in our Vancouver part of Imageworks,
he really did a great job
where he really had, like, a personal style of the way he drew the characters.
And whenever his scenes came up, I could recognize it.
And that's kind of an old-school thing in animation where, if you're an animator,
you know the little, certain nuances of the other animators.
And I was always able to pick out his scenes and other people's scenes.
And I thought a really great, organic part of this movie
is that you could actually tell the individual animators apart
where any other movie, you really can't.
I'm talking over all the effects and amazing CG stuff...
Yeah, that water.
- This definitely kept Dan up at night. - ...that Dan's just sweating through.
It flies by.
I mean, we had done a lot of water at Imageworks before obviously.
I actually had worked on Surf's Up, and we developed lots of water technology,
but that was around 2007, something like that.
And things have advanced quite a bit since then.
Now we have much better fluid simulators
to be able to do our splashes, and foam, and so on.
So we brought everything to bear for this, and thought it came out great.
There was an interesting situation here.
Coming from TV, I hated focus groups, 'cause you put 12 kids,
and they watch the programming, and they judge it.
But doing test screenings, at first,
I was really nervous that a similar thing was gonna happen.
But actually, I was able to learn a lot about what we were doing
through the test screenings to watch it with an audience.
And we had the joke of Frankenstein falling down
then spreading up in parts.
And then we had the second joke of the Invisible Man getting pantsed.
And the first joke worked so well and got so many laughs
we never got a laugh at the second joke.
And then I realized, "Maybe the timing is just too tight there."
Yeah, it just was stepping on the second joke.
Yeah, and so I was able to add just a little bit of time
of the werewolf, Wayne, kind of sneaking over,
giving a chance for people to stop laughing and prepare them for the second laugh.
And it turned out great, so now usually, in most cases, we get two laughs there,
which is great.
This was another big one where it really takes place at night,
and we had to go with actually the characters darker over a brighter background,
rather than vice versa, which you would normally think of as night.
In an effort to keep the movie nice, light and bright.
It's cool.
But animation-wise, this is an amazing sequence.
I invented fun!
Boy, the wrong people get to be immortal.
Look at me.
You remember nothing of this encounter.
You have no memory of this...
My daughter still talks about this eyeball gag.
- She does? - Everyone loves this eyeball.
- Everybody loves it. - The eyeball gag.
That's the difficult part. You're working on a movie,
and then they're making all the advertising campaigns and marketing campaigns,
and they start using all the best jokes.
And you start to worry, "Oh, no, there's no more jokes left."
Yeah, you just hope that some people saw this group of commercials,
other people saw that group of commercials, and not one person saw all of them.
Fingers away from the eyeballs! Enough!
And here's another Jorge scene.
I always kind of recognize it 'cause he curls his lips on Dracula.
That made it just look really cool.
...track you down and suck every ounce of blood
from your body until you look like a deflated whoopee cushion!
It's one of those things where you'll be watching this on 2D at home,
but in 3D, something as simple as Dracula's hands
in that last scene,
they're coming out, and when you watch it in 3D,
all of a sudden you start to focus on Dracula's hands.
And so you have to limit some of the depth to make sure it still works.
Oh, my God. Count Dracula. Please don't kill me. I'm leaving, I'm leaving.
I know the jacket was super challenging in that scene where...
Jonathan was changing volume so much and moving so quickly
that, again, our simulators were trying to track something
that's physical, and this is so nonphysical. A lot of handwork going into that.
He's not gonna see me, is he?
And as far as stereo, like you were talking about,
a lot of times we would compose these things,
we would get them great and then we would look at them in stereo.
Yeah, you would be focusing in on something completely different.
We would have to go back in and de-emphasize something
or adjust the depth of field.
Whatever it would take to get us back to what we were thinking.
What we wanted to see, what we were seeing in 2D.
You mean Hawaii. Yeah, that place is a knockout.
I just went to a music festival there.
A human music festival?
I believe so.
So, did they all bite your toes and shove garlic bread in your face?
No. Well, one dude took a bigger bite out of my energy bar...
You see a lot of level of detail stuff as far as foreground and background
that goes throughout the movie and this is maybe a good sequence for it,
but allowing mountains and details and things like that to really fade away,
to mist out, to lose detail and to get very graphic in the distance
and try to keep all the detail that we do have up close.
So it was something that was always intentionally pushed throughout the film
to try to keep the focus.
It was funny. It was really funny for me that I started to realize that
when I first started looking at these shots all rendered out,
it's very unusual for me, 'cause I'm used to looking at drawings
and everything really two-dimensional.
And initially, I was really kind of tentative to approve stuff because I just wasn't sure.
'Cause, never having done this, you just don't know
if I'm doing it right and if I'm looking at the right things.
So then I would look at a rendered shot and in my head, I would think of it as 2D.
Like, I'd watch it in 2D in my head and then decide if it's working in CG.
It's like I speak Russian and English,
but I used to think in Russian and then translate into English.
But now I think in English and speak English.
- You'll start to think in 3D soon. - Right.
But it really helped me to get control of the situation
and kind of look at the right things, because there's so much more to look at
with all the details and textures and stuff.
But it was really funny in my head, I saw it as a 2D movie.
All the sweat here has turned out great.
Another thing, when we said, "Yeah, I think they should be sweating."
Everybody started looking around the room.
Even these guys not wearing shirts, because they weren't built that way.
Yeah, we had to figure out what does Dracula look like shirtless,
and all the characters. Yeah, it had to be built.
And he's got his 500-year-old belly flab.
Yeah.
I think you described him as a 40-year-old fit guy or something.
That's right, yeah, it's like those old Charles Atlas...
This was a weird cheat where she had to kind of be seeing the sunrise but kind of not.
She's obviously not supposed to be in the sunlight, but somehow seeing it.
So that was sort of a cheat.
It's funny, so far nobody's mentioned it.
I was expecting a big, "What? She can't look in the..."
- She's in the shade. - Yes, she is.
Another Jorge scene here, you can see the curled lips.
This is another set that was designed for a previous version
and I think it was half the size.
Yeah, this is a double-length ballroom, that's true.
When we get into the sequence, and they're flying around the room,
- we needed a lot of room. - We needed twice the amount of length.
And even with the extra length that we had, we did a lot of double cuts where we would
start out the scene and they would fly all the way across the room,
we'd do a quick close-up and then we would start them back at the beginning of the room
and keep going to make it feel a lot longer, so, yeah, there's a lot of that stuff.
A lot of cheating.
And these tables were kind of interesting as well.
We kind of wanted to do that haunted house feel where you have a projected face
onto something to make it feel like an ethereal ghost face.
So rather than building the face into the cloth itself,
we sort of did this completely separate face rig.
And rendered it separately, and then projected it on as a texture map
that we could slide around and we gave the animators control to slide them around,
and make them feel a little bit more loose.
And that allowed it to follow the cloth sim as well, really well.
It was kind of a fun rig to do.
I guess what that meant, though, was that the face you saw in animation
changed a little bit once we got it mapped onto the wrinkles and everything.
- It changed a lot. - Yeah.
31 to 19.
24 up!
Seven to 25. 14 to 30.
And this one, sound effects-wise, was really challenging,
where we wanted to have a really cool sound design
for the tables so it feels kind of ghostly
and almost like a little banshee scream and not too electrical.
So you want it to be really kind of ethereal and we went through
a lot of variations until we settled on this really cool...
And in the theater it sounded really great.
'Cause you get a lot of nice low end and then...
I think this was a favorite of the sound guys, this sequence.
Yeah, for sure.
Yes. Keep smelling.
You catch the human, and then I will make human...
It's funny, for Quasimodo,
it seems like every scene he had a different stubble.
And I know it was the same one, but because the way the light affected it,
sometimes he looked too hairy and sometimes he looked not hairy enough.
Yeah, we had to find that balance.
We had to create special maps just to control the stubble
for you to try to get it consistent throughout, so yeah, it did, it looked differently.
Like, lights in our world,
if we make a very big light, like you have in the real world,
it casts very soft shadows, and if you have a really small light,
it casts these really hard shadows. So depending on where he was,
the actual stubble was casting shadows across his face.
That almost made it look darker than it was and I think that was the issue.
Did you see that?
Who is that guy, Sir Breaks-a-lot?
Doing the animation on this movie was so much fun for me because,
just to have to push people and to go more extreme
without actually myself having to animate it, was great.
And I think everybody really enjoyed it.
I remember, in the beginning, when we started
trying to push and push to do crazier and crazier.
And then they start to get a hold of it, but then you'd have
a really simple dialogue scene between Mavis and Dracula,
and then it would be really crazy and extreme and I'd have to, kind of,
"No, no, no, we want to just calm them down here."
No. Come on, Dad. He's so weird and awkward.
It's like, are you an idiot or do you know you're adorable?
Hold that.
- Do you have a location on Quasimodo? - Yes, sir.
I think most of the animators were begging to get on this project, actually,
'cause it allowed them to do things that we don't normally get to do in CG.
A lot of them were working on live action films where it has to just look photo real
and naturalistic.
And then even some of our animated features just aren't pushed this far,
so most of the animators have a similar background to you,
they grew up, they love cartoons and that's fun for them.
I think this movie never suffered from lack of animation
desire to work on the film, because Dracula, Frankenstein, werewolf, mummy,
just being able to animate those characters was always really exciting to the animators.
Dad, at some point, I'm going to get married.
This is that same bar location, just stripping out the bar,
repainting the floor, kind of moving and adding some tables in there,
making it look like a library.
A good use of repurposing an environment.
Yeah, I think Mark Mothersbaugh, who did the music for the film,
we wanted this kind of French twisted accordion
for Quasimodo's theme.
And it was fun to see him do the different versions.
The color palette of this lobby turned out really nice from the...
'Cause it's kind of daylight outside, right now,
so we had much more coolness come in, which I thought really looked nice.
Versus the more nighttime torch glow.
There's so much of the film that is that warm, just torch glow
kind of look that I was worried that it would get monotonous,
but I think, like, this sequence here, and the sequence before.
It's a nice break, it really helps bring some variety.
What do I pay you for?
I'm sorry, honey. I have to go.
He doesn't pay me.
Before you kill me...
And the kitchen, I think, was another environment
that was really fully fleshed out.
Yeah, we didn't touch much at all. Just a couple of these close-ups
I think we touched up the metal and so on in some of those tight shots.
And this must have been a major, major story point previously
'cause they spent a lot of time on all these pots and pans and all this stuff
that unfortunately was limited in use.
We actually even have a little bedroom alcove for Quasimodo that we didn't get to use,
but it's there.
You feel it.
And Adam Sandier and us, we really worked on this joke a lot,
'cause he saw it a certain way and we kept messing it up,
we couldn't get the timing the way he wanted it, for some reason.
And then, finally we just held on the rat longer and it seemed to work better that way.
Esmeralda, help me.
This one consistently gets a big laugh every time.
It does, and it was one of those jokes that was added later.
Hey, thanks for saving me back there. That guy's crazy! Trying to eat me.
And the shrine sequence coming up here where we find out
about the history of Dracula's wife also had its challenges where tonally,
you're really playing around with how dark you want it,
how real, and at the same time,
again, it's another dark environment that we were concerned about,
but this one we wanted to be dramatic so we really fought for it to be a little darker.
And again, we couldn't build a brand-new room, so really repurposing what we had
in a creative way.
Brian Andrews, who did the storyboard for this,
really had some really nice lighting ideas that I really liked,
that we wanted just to make it feel atmospheric,
with this kind of moonlight coming in and everything else kind of
washes away in the back.
...by chance, and they say that no two souls
were ever more meant for each other.
Eventually, they settled down at Castle Lubov and had a child.
So, in one of the original versions, actually, that we did with you, Genndy,
this was up front.
- That's right. Yeah. - This was the prologue.
And at one point we decided to save it, to save the emotional part
for this time as a flashback.
But we definitely worked on this for a really long time
and there was a lot of back and forth about how much to reveal here,
how much not to reveal, do we make it emotional,
how emotional do we make it?
It definitely would have been interesting to see it the way we originally did it
with the death of the wife and Dracula,
you really feel for him.
But then maybe you couldn't recover comedy-wise,
might have had to be backed up.
This is one of my favorite lighting that we did,
with Dracula as a silhouette, just feels really...
A really strong statement.
And I think I probably asked you five times, "Are you sure you wanna go that black?
"We're not gonna be able to bring anything back."
But it was definitely one of the only parts of the movie where we could go that dark.
Because it really supported the emotional content.
I built this place for my love, to protect her child.
Here, the animation is so controlled, and it's really great, it's great to have this scene,
and then one of the scenes with Jonathan running around in the same movie,
it gives it such great point of view.
What?
I just...
- Awesome. - It's all right.
You are a good one.
It was nice to have Adam sometimes not be zany and really bring it down and controlled.
It was fun to see him get more emotional
and same with Andy. 'Cause they're both always so funny,
it's always funny to see them get more serious.
I'll go for good this time.
You can just say I had some emergency,
or the gremlin lady ate me or something.
No, no, no, no, no.
I don't want to ruin her birthday party.
You can sneak out after it's all done.
So much more to think about in a CG film where, like, just the reflections in the eyes,
it was something that I didn't know how prepared I had to be
and I had to do a lot more research,
I had to look at live action movies and start seeing,
"Okay, how much reflection are they putting in the eyes?"
'Cause it's not part of my language, so I had to do research.
And I left a lot of things up to Dan and the way he looked at things
and if he kind of believed in it then I could kind of see it.
I really liked it in this particular sequence
to always feel the presence of that candelabra,
and I loved the way that the lighting just kind of worked out
as a single source like that, or at least felt like a single source.
And I think, to me, the highlights helped the emotion in that particular one.
Every screening that I've seen, this gets a huge laugh, which is great.
And it's great that it's all just really visceral and visual.
I didn't order a wake-up call.
It's funny, I was never at one time in the same room with Steve Buscemi.
- That's a... - Really?
'Cause I wasn't here when he actually was here.
- Really? - Yeah.
Where were you?
I was in Vancouver, I think, at the time.
- 'Cause it was like a couple pick-up lines. - Okay, yeah, yeah, he came to LA one time.
And then otherwise we recorded him from afar,
because he was always in New York, recording.
- Or doing a show. - But he heard my voice.
He did.
And so the sequence coming up here, the party, which is one of my favorites,
definitely the stuff that I've always done, I always love
to animate characters dancing, and I think it's always super amusing
to have dancing in the animation, in animated movies or TV shows.
It's some of my favorite things.
This was a fun one for everyone. They studied lots of different dance styles.
And each character has their own little dance style.
Yeah, and after, again, one of the screenings, I really felt like we were gypped
of the amount of dancing that we got,
so we were able to reuse some of the dance cycles, and create a few more scenes
and it really felt better after that, it opened up.
And I love those single shots of the monsters coming up.
They always get a good laugh, too.
This is a huge challenge, technically to get this kind of 2D/3D effect
of the fireflies creating these images.
It was really difficult to get them to actually read the graphic images,
still know that they're fireflies, get the color right, the forming,
all that stuff, took us a lot of iterations to figure that out.
And this environment was again, another repurpose of the ballroom.
But you could barely tell 'cause we fogged it out and lit it so differently.
This is one of the most fun sequences to light.
These are those shots that I was referring to.
Just going super graphic, almost everything in the background
goes down to a pure silhouette.
Even in the foreground, everything's a silhouette
and then the characters themselves are in full color,
and it was so much fun to figure this one out.
- And you gotta have a little slow mo. - Yeah, of course.
This is one of my favorites. Dracula dancing, it's hilarious.
I'm crazily scared right now.
You can see the tentacle in the background, that was really funny.
I remember asking you about, this scene kind of goes from a happy dance
and then it gets really serious and they're having this conversation and I thought,
"We're gonna shut all the lights, all the flashing down
"and we're gonna subdue it so that they can have this moment."
And you're like, "No, I want to keep all the flashing going throughout."
And it worked great, just wasn't my first thought.
There was a lot of worry about that when we first did it.
'Cause especially when the monsters are running around,
and everybody thought that was gonna be distracting,
and we definitely downplayed them a little bit more,
but that was the whole idea, that once they get into this really dramatic conversation,
that all that's gonna go away and you're just gonna feel
the emptiness of it and the seriousness of the situation.
And you won't focus on what's really happening in the background.
I did what I had to do.
What was it?
What exactly did you have to do?
I felt the same thing initially when I was thinking about this,
that the lights were gonna go on.
But then, just everything was gonna be lit, like the flying table sequence
and it didn't feel right, it'd feel like it was overly lit.
- Too bright. - Yeah.
And I thought this would be a lot more fun that the lights are still going
even though all the sound is sucked out.
Yeah, it's kinda eerie, I like it.
Yeah.
Keeping me here forever when you knew my dream was to go.
It was always one of my favorite things on Samurai Jack,
to create these kind of contradictions.
Where you're having a dramatic moment, but the lighting's something else
and so you're kind of playing, juxtapositioning the two different ideas.
He says, "Dracula has brought a human into the hotel."
- A human? - Stay close, pookie!
He says, "There is ze human."
He has a French accent.
Johnny's not a human. He's my right arm's cousin.
- He's lying. - Yeah.
And why is he picking his nose?
He says, "It's a long story."
Hey, wait, no!
Chris Parnell did a great, really dry read for the fly, the human fly.
He says, "Behold ze human."
I don't believe it.
This is where everything gets crazy, but the shapes are so subdued.
- Fogged them out. - Just these subtle cutouts and fogged out.
You know, there's tons of animation back there, but we just cover it up.
And we faded all the sound effects away, so it's just the music, it's very surreal.
This is one of my favorite shots. With just him.
It's these kind of stylized things which I feel like artistically is
more fun in animated movies
and also in live action movies, you wanna have statements.
If everything's kinda straightforward, it becomes kinda boring.
Goodbye.
Please don't hurt me!
This is all your fault!
We actually had a lot more jokes here as the people are walking out.
And start complaining about different things.
And again, it's one of those things that tonally and emotionally,
you don't wanna step on every emotional moment, at the same time,
sometimes it's nice to release the tension.
And it's always that balance of where you have an emotional moment
and you throw in a joke, or you take it back.
So we were always juggling that a lot through this movie.
Mavis, honey, are you in there?
Mavis? Mavis?
I liked the way the colors turned out in this sequence.
Where it kind of became more gray-blue.
It's almost monochromatic.
It's nice. All these compositions are real pushed.
I remember there being a lot of conversation about this shot,
"Do you want him to slide or do you want him to walk?"
And it's hard, 'cause again in 2D, I wouldn't hesitate twice
about having him slide down,
because it feels like a real space and a more real weight.
You start to question those things, but then when he slides and it's totally great
and there's no question about it.
There's too much I want you to remember.
You were right, Dad. The humans hate us.
Sweetheart, there are so many eligible monsters out there.
You're so young to...
And so with the book, we also went back and forth a little bit,
where initially we thought maybe
it could be more emotional if we show an actual flashback
of how they met.
'Cause initially in the prologue, we actually used to have that,
where we see
Martha and Dracula as bats and they crash into each other
and then they get up and we see them zing.
We were actually researching, preparing to build the whole beach environment,
Hawaii, the environment for that.
I still have hesitations about that where I'm not sure if the book still works the best.
I think it still works, but I think in my gut I feel like
the flashback could have been really neat here, too.
It's for the director's cut.
That's right, so we can do it, Michelle?
Yeah, musically, Mark really did a great job with all the emotional stuff.
We were real fortunate, we get a chance to go to Abbey Road Studios
where The Beatles recorded a lot of their music.
And have a 93-piece orchestra record all the stuff,
and nothing comes alive more.
There's nothing like being in that room.
Yeah, it's really incredible.
Honey, the kids threw the minibar out the window.
- And that's our fault? - Well...
Excuse me!
This is another technically challenging sequence.
Because the table is super small.
And so we had to fit these giant boxes of Frankenstein and Eunice on there
and then in actuality, this would all be covered with the boxes.
So then we had to cheat each shot and take the boxes off and on,
it couldn't be really shot for real.
Because the lobby was designed so small, not the lobby, but the little checkout place.
Yeah, this is really set in.
Set in and so small, nobody could really fit there.
So we had to cheat, all these shots are very cheated.
The truth is, I don't even know if humans are bad anymore.
It's like, one of the unfortunate things is, actually it's a really fun space also,
because there's keys going up for like five stories up.
And we used to have a spider go up and grab a key.
It's left over from one of the old movie ideas that I really liked.
And get the key down, and just unfortunately it never made it.
...cousin or no. He told fun stories.
I think they Zinged.
They Zinged?
But I got in the way.
You only Zing once in your life.
- Oy, now you're short-circuiting. - I don't care!
I always miss out, we used to have "I don't care, I have an emotional head."
And we cut that line, but I always hear it, I always miss it there.
Yeah!
We should have honeymooned at your parents!
Again, just the challenge of how fast the car is actually going in real space.
Okay, okay, where am I going?
And really, even the way the guys fit into the car,
'cause in actuality they really wouldn't fit.
We had to squish them in there.
I mean, if you think about how big Frankenstein and the mummy's bodies are,
they would never fit.
We just had to hide all the collisions, where you couldn't see all that stuff happening.
Yes, I knew something would fall out of that backpack.
That stinks!
Work your magic.
Wait, you want me to track the smell?
No. My sniffing tracking days are way behind me.
When I first started, Wayne always used to have a hat.
He'd always have a little business hat on, or whatever it was.
And it really bugged me 'cause I felt like it was too humanistic to have this hat.
For the way we were telling this version of the movie.
So we took off the hat, but then his groom on his head
was kind of flattened out for the hat.
- So he always has this kind of flat top. - Flat head.
But actually it worked fine.
Not me, the shirt! The shirt!
Probably the person who designed the hat on him,
"Why did you take the hat off?"
- He's pissed. - Yeah.
And this is Adam's daughter who did the voice.
- I love this voice. She did great. - Yeah, she did a really good job.
He got into a car. A '86 Fiat.
It needs a little transmission work, but otherwise okay.
It drove through town to the airport. Flight 497.
It was fun to watch Adam working with his daughter, it was very cute.
'Cause he actually wants to be very pro,
"If she gets it wrong, we're just gonna change it. Don't worry about it."
Which is really funny because he actually made her do it a couple of times.
- Yeah, totally. - Yeah, he was definitely...
Made her be a professional.
This is one of the things that I had to, not sacrifice, but negotiate, in a way,
where we wanted sheep, but again our time and our schedule
didn't allow for it and so I was like,
"What if we do sheep, but we don't have to rig it,
"we rig just the mouth and the face and that's it?"
And they turned out great.
- And that joke gets a huge laugh. - Yeah.
...there's no sheep in the road. Let's go.
That was pretty sick, man.
You eat lamb chops, it's the same thing.
We don't have time for this. Come on, let's move it!
It was really nice actually, after being in the dark for so long,
to now get out into more naturalistic lighting was really fun.
That was trippy.
Monster Festival?
A lot of these buildings had been built, but not fully textured.
And we didn't exactly know how the street was gonna go,
so basically once, I guess in layout with James,
you would block out what you wanted, the path you wanted the car to take.
He would do some very rough version of that
and then we would send that off to the modelers
to figure out and dress the whole thing up and place the buildings.
Yeah, 'cause when we first started looking at the sequence, the whole town was built.
And it was actually built after a town in Transylvania.
We did a location scout and went to this little town called Sighisoara
and kind of modeled it after that.
Excuse me? Do you know the best way to the airport?
Yes, fellow Dracula. There's only one way. Bleh, bleh-bleh.
But it's all blocked. We'll never make it in time.
You should have left an hour earlier. Bleh, bleh-bleh.
It's a lot of work to get all these different character variations going
and make it feel like there's enough unique costumes and enough unique looks
and I think it worked out well.
Yeah, I think it all feels pretty organic and...
Drac, this'll protect you.
Imagine if that guy knew he was talking to...
And you never hear anybody balk at that,
that he's sort of walking out here in the daylight with a hat.
Everybody accepts it.
I think you might wanna thank Twilight for that.
I think everybody's more used to
vampires in the daytime without really questioning it as much as they used to.
And this is really a challenge to push Frankenstein's animation
to go as far as we took it.
It's amazing how effortless it all looks, but how hard it was getting it there.
I'm trying to scare you!
All the little wind turned out really nice, all the little extra details.
Can you sign my torch?
Listen, before anything else, down there's the real...
At one point there was a whole carnival, wasn't there?
Yeah. Yeah, actually, this story beat changed a lot.
'Cause initially, it was always designed to... "All right, well, Dracula lied,
"so this is gonna be the gauntlet he goes through to get punished."
Because it was a human monster festival, they had garlic and holy water,
and he really got punished through it. But then it always felt wrong,
because it's almost like the humans are now punishing him.
- Yeah, he got destroyed. - Yeah, even though
the humans should be helping him, and he should get the gauntlet somewhere else.
And then when we did the Dracula flying trying to catch up to the plane,
the next sequence,
we realized, "That's his gauntlet. That's where he's gonna get punished."
But his own self-sacrifice rather than from the humans,
and then that informed this sequence
to be more about the humans accepting him and helping him.
- Go, Drac! - Go, Drac!
Go, Drac!
Go get 'em!
Go, Drac, go!
We love you, Dracula!
I think one of the strengths of this movie is
that I feel we have a really fun last three or four sequences.
We have a strong ending, and a lot of times in movies...
For me, the endings are always the hardest thing.
You could always have an ending battle or whatever,
but especially in comedies, it's hard to finish off
in an entertaining way and on an up note.
And so these last few sequences always worked really nice,
and I feel like when you walk out of the movie, you have a good feeling.
Just the bat burning had numerous discussions
of how much we really wanted it to be on fire.
- How much did we wanna bang him up? - Yeah.
I think there was a fear
that some of the red embers and stuff were looking like blood.
- Yeah, it might look too scary. - Too gory.
I think it seems to work now.
I think this was, like, the third or fourth sequence into production,
- so it was really early on. - This was pretty early.
And I was always very happy the way Jonathan turned out in the sequence,
his expressions.
And here's a situation
where that's almost completely all 2D, just a painting.
I think we modeled something rough and then just painted on it.
We took a couple of our generic characters and, like we did with the zombies,
kind of pushed and pulled them into some sort of a shape,
and just based that off a drawing you gave us.
And then just did a really quick and dirty render of that, which wasn't much.
But then we gave that to a matte paint artist, who went over it.
All we did was animate the mouth itself. Everything else is static.
So it's very Clutch Cargo if anybody knows what that means watching.
Pardon me. Sorry, excuse me.
Whoa! Excuse me.
There's one frame in there that's really funny. So you should try to find it and still-frame it.
'Cause we actually had a really nice impact frame
of Dracula's eyes going all crazy.
I remember you being very insistent that we turn off motion blur
- on that particular frame. - That's right.
But you feel it. You totally feel it.
There was a lot of conversation also
about whether or not the pilot should have an accent.
- That's right. Yes. - Or no accent.
Should he talk in Dracula's voice while he's being hypnotized,
or should it be his own voice?
But it's always clear. Nobody seems like they're confused afterwards.
Yeah, but it's funny. There's so much work that goes into every frame,
'cause you've got the texture of this.
I remember seeing the first textures of the actual seats,
and you could see the stitching and the weaving,
- and it's really amazing. - It's very detailed.
It was a fun one to build.
Yeah, and then Jonathan's hair really did turn out great.
It was difficult.
I love the warmth of Dracula here on the close-up.
We really feel his emotions.
Okay, folks, we're going to make a quick turnaround to refuel,
and then we'll be back on our way.
Quit your whining! I'm burning up out here!
Lighting-wise, I think especially, it turned out really nice.
And I really liked the single shots of Mavis by the window.
It felt really good.
It's, again, kind of like the lobby with Quasi running around.
Now, you have natural light coming through the window,
which is such a nice departure from the rest of the movie
where you have all these practical flames everywhere lighting everything up.
So it just really has a different feel.
Then again, you just sort of have to accept that they're in enough shadow.
We're not breaking the rules.
Mommy already gave you her birthday present.
Can I now give you mine?
As I think back on this,
I think it would have been fun to somehow create a stronger light behind him,
but then have them in shadow more, but then I don't know if it looks...
It looks good, again, as a drawing version of the movie,
but as rendered out, I'm not sure that always will look as good.
'Cause you want it to feel bright and happy.
But you told me you hate monsters.
Yeah, well, I was afraid your dad was gonna
suck all the blood out of my body if I didn't say that.
I wouldn't have...
No, he's right, I would have done that.
- Dad. - I was wrong, Devil-chops.
This movie was really a great learning experience for me
just about everything really.
I mean, from telling jokes to the actual process of CG animation.
I was very fortunate to have such a great team supporting me.
All the horror stories that I heard getting into it were,
"All the CG guys always say no.
"They don't ever wanna do what we wanna do."
And I was all so ready to fight.
And then actually, I don't think we really had any kind of turmoil at all.
- No. - It was a great team.
Yeah, with the shortest production schedule, I think, that we've ever had on a CG picture.
- It was a race. - Yeah.
And then I met a girl and felt a different thing
It's like you're hit in the ring Like you're pulled by a string
This was a fun song.
Really funny when everybody had to record their own parts for the song.
I gotta be honest. I was kind of skeptical
when I first heard that Dracula was gonna be rapping,
and I thought, "Oh, no, this is not gonna be good."
And I love this sequence.
Yeah, I know. They wrote it one night in a hotel room,
and then we had to record it the next day.
It's a real time for celebrating
'Cause you're my Zing
For me, I was actually excited about it,
because I used to love Adam's old albums where he would sing goofy songs,
and this definitely felt like...
- A throwback? Yeah. - Yeah.
Yeah, I remember we were researching Beastie Boy videos and other things
for how to deal with the camera work and their motions.
And this was so fast and furious.
They recorded, and then I boarded it overnight.
Really. It happened in minutes.
Zinging in the air
Now I don't have a care
I'm winging from the Zing that we shared
Lighting-wise, it was really successful, I thought, with the concert feel,
and all the really organic lights always moving around.
It was really fun to see it.
Gonna knock you right out of that ring, y'all
You need to see Eunice's dance in this. So rewind it and watch it again.
And initially, I actually didn't wanna do a 2D end sequence,
'cause I know a lot of the movies did it.
But then we were kind of running short on time
where we couldn't do anything in CG.
So I thought it'd be great to do the exact opposite of the movie,
which is super iconic and void of detail as far as the background and everything.
So I wanted to do this really cool, organic,
Harvey Kurtzman, MAD magazine type look to it.
So I boarded it, and Stephen DeStefano, who I worked with before, helped realize it.
Rough Draft, Korea did a lot of the animation.
We got this song from...
It's Dr. Luke and Becky G.
So she's an upcoming music artist.
And we heard it. It was not called I'm a Monster.
It was I'm a Problem. And we liked the song,
but the lyric "I'm a problem" just didn't feel right to end the movie on.
So they agreed to change it to "I'm a monster."
And it works out really well, and it's got Will.I.Am on it.
So it's a really fun song
to go with a great sequence that everyone seems to have a lot of fun with.
And it's funny, 'cause Will.I.Am did the main theme to Samurai Jack.
- Oh, yeah? - Will.I.Am is a big animation fan.
- So there's a big six degrees of separation. - There you go.
I've seen this movie obviously a few times, in 3D and in 2D,
and I had originally pretty much mostly seen this in 3D.
And I recently saw the film again with my kids,
and I saw it in 2D that time.
And I actually kind of missed the 3D in the end sequence.
- Really? - It's not fun.
I thought it worked really well, even though they're so simple.
It was kind of fun to see these cutouts floating in space, I thought.
And then for the end credits,
again, on a movie that's existed for six years plus,
there's so much artwork.
And we thought it'd be fun to have some of the inspirational paintings
and production paintings of the different environments
as the backdrop for the end credits.
Yeah, it's really beautiful.
While we were animating this, while they were animating this in Korea,
Genndy got the bug to do a 2D animated short as a DVD extra,
and I was like, "Are you crazy?"
Because we were desperately trying to finish the movie.
We were actually mixing it.
So he went ahead and boarded a little short.
It's, like, a two-minute short. Two-and-a-half minute short?
- Three minutes. - Three-minute short.
And we're actually still in production on it. So that'll be a fun thing.
- We're finishing it next week. - Yeah.
- But then after you're done, you can watch it. - Yeah.
- 'Cause that'll be on here. - It'll be done for the DVD.
Hopefully, it'll be on here. If it's not on here...
I was gonna say. Now, you have to finish it.
Yeah, it's funny, after all this, going from TV, where it's always so fast-paced,
and I can barely finish a drawing before it airs.
Going to a feature, where I thought I would have unlimited amount of time,
it ended up being exactly almost the same thing,
where it was so fast and furious.
This is a lot of the great, old production art and pre-production art.
A lot of this is by a guy named Neil Ross,
who did a lot of the inspirational artwork for a different version of the movie.
However, that's the artwork that we used for the inspiration for the movie
when we were building all the environments, and that stuck.
It's kind of wacky. Because when I first started,
I came in, and I got a presentation of the visual language of the film.
- The look of picture. - The look of picture.
And I knew the Neil Ross stuff from before, 'cause I was a fan of his.
And so they're, like, all this black silhouettes and amazing Gothic stuff.
And I was like, "Great."
And then my next meeting was with the head of the studio,
and he goes, "No darkness, no blacks. We want it to be pretty light."
- It is a comedy. - It is a comedy. Yes.
That's also just an indicator of how many iterations the movie went through,
and how we had to sort of be as flexible as possible
to try and get that style to fit in with what we ended up with,
which was a comedy definitely with emotional undertones,
- but first and foremost, a comedy. - A comedy. Absolutely.
And we had a huge amount of animators on this movie just to get the speed through.
- I don't know what we ended up with. - I wanna say it was around 90.
- Yeah. - I think it was 90.
I think the bulk of the art animators were in Vancouver.
We were able to split between a couple of different locations
in Culver City and Vancouver.
Most of them were in Vancouver.
And then our lighting team, we probably had about 65, 70 lighters probably
at our height maybe.
Maybe more like 65, but, yeah, a pretty big team.
I think this piece of music was made by Mark. I think he wrote it for a sequence that...
- Got to get shortened. - ...got cut out of the movie.
Yeah, like some of the art in here, too, later on, is the shadow sequence,
which existed in the very first trailers that came out.
Of the monsters going from the shadows and traveling to the hotel.
And we ended up lifting it from the movie.
But the artwork is still there, and the music is this music.
I think that's all for me. I hope you guys enjoyed the movie
and watch the short if it's on here.
Thanks for watching and listening.
- Yep, thank you. - Thanks.