Welcome to Sinbad, commentary track.
This is Tim Johnson, one of the directors, and sitting to my left is...
Patrick Gilmore, the other director.
I'm Mireille Soria, one of the producers of the movie.
We brought along a bunch of friends today.
We brought our production designer, our head of story,
our head of animation and our head of layout.
Hi, I'm Raymond Zibach, I'm the production designer.
I'm Jennifer Nelson, head of story.
I'm Kristof Serrand, the animation supervisor.
And last, but not least, Damon O'Beirne, the layout supervisor.
They do sing four-part harmony,
but they're gonna spare you that today, so...
We're starting our picture with a beautiful view of the constellations,
and Patrick and I pored over a book of constellations
to pick these ones for you.
Each of the characters in Eris' menagerie
are based on real constellations, whether it's Cetus the sea monster constellation,
or Draco the dragon, or what have you.
And this sequence went through many, many iterations
before we finally settled on this one.
Originally, Eris even had another god, Janus,
who served as her foil in all of this.
But in order to draw the conflict more sharply between Sinbad and the gods,
we chose just one villain here, Eris.
It's sort of an exposition scene, meaning a scene in which
we have to set up a lot of rules of our world.
And, boy, did we have exposition at one point.
Eris was practically reading an encyclopedia, at one point,
to tell us everything about the world.
But we found a way to cut to the quick and have Eris simply set up her scheme.
And visually, we had a lot of different passes of this as well,
because we even had a version where it wasn't Cetus the sea monster.
It was a fire-breathing bull that we threw into the water.
Yeah, we killed Taurus at one point.
Eris realized Taurus couldn't swim
and didn't make a very good villain in an ocean movie, so she had to reset.
Quick introductions of all of our crew.
We'll obviously spend more time with them as the movie unfolds,
but the challenge in opening a film
is you want to get to know these guys pretty fast.
So, we polished this one a bunch of different ways
and ultimately settled on this,
meeting them through action rather than dialogue.
"Let's get Sinbad into the thick of things."
Early on in the film, this is the first big technical challenge
that we had, as far as design with our CG environment,
with water, and getting these boats done.
So, these are fully 3-D painted boats
with reusable cameras that Damon could use.
Technically, the 3-D water to get a graphic look
was a very challenging and time-consuming way to go,
but beautiful, the way it turned out.
Damon and team had some fun with the camera throughout the action scenes.
We really set a sort of live-action standard
as what we wanted to do with the cinematography.
This opening sequence is great 'cause it's got a lot of cinematic energy.
For us, it was pretty complex, combining the 2-D and the 3-D,
making sure that we weren't creating too difficult a scene
for the animators to work with.
I just love this upcoming bit with Proteus fighting.
It's just the choreography on that is so cool.
That's real animation tour de force.
I mean, this is Rodolphe animating a fight.
That was always his dream, always scarier to animate this kind of thing.
If your DVD player has single frame ability,
we highly recommend you back up and single-frame through the conflict.
- See the flip, the weapon. - Yeah, that's great.
There's no live-action reference at all.
Pay attention to the performance when you hear Sinbad's voice,
for the first time in 10 years, too.
It's not just the physical part of that performance,
but also what's going on emotionally for Proteus.
The Book of Peace.
Our MacGuffin, we love it dearly and we had a million ways to explain it,
and ultimately let it be explained visually.
Raymond and his team came up with this
lovely "Clockwork of the Heavens" look for the Book of Peace.
The Book of Peace.
It's my job to bring it safely to Syracuse.
Really? See, now I just feel bad because you're gonna get fired.
You can't be serious. You disappear for 10 years, show up, and rob me?
I wish it wasn't you. I do. Really.
- But... - But it is me, Sinbad.
You know, our actors are actually never in the same room together.
This is a marvelous bit of dialogue between Brad Pitt and Joseph Fiennes.
Joseph was recorded in Germany, and Brad Pitt, here, in Los Angeles.
The two gentlemen didn't meet until the end of the picture.
It's one of the many fun things as a director,
is working with your talent and trying to help them connect
with somebody who's often recording remotely or on a totally different day.
This little bit coming up here,
where Sinbad and Proteus' conflict over the Book comes to a head,
was actually done many, many times.
We debated whether or not to have them actually draw their swords on one another,
but we figured the stakes were so high that we had to go this far.
The tone of the scene is more like
the relationship might have been 10 years ago,
sort of a friendly competition with smiles on their faces,
and almost a bluff and challenge sort of a thing,
that doesn't quite escalate to a real fight.
Yeah, they're more trying to disarm each other than actually cut.
Boy, is our sea monster cool or what?
We're so proud of this guy. He went through a few iterations.
He started out looking like Elmo.
I think we had a Muppet version of him.
A giant sock puppet sea monster.
But he had racing stripes.
But we went back to the books, and I think it was Richie Chavez
who contributed most heavily to his design
and came up with this crustacean, tentacled, lobster-squid guy.
I think, almost in one swipe,
he designed all the celestial creatures, and the sea monster to boot.
Probably one of the most complex, rigged 3-D characters, I think, done...
- In history, not just in this movie. - Yeah. Just amazing.
It drove the animators nuts 'cause every one of those tentacles...
And I think... How many of them are there? There's at least...
- Eight tentacles. - Eight tentacles.
So, each one of those has got a million joints in it
to have to bend and twist,
so you can make all those spaghetti shapes with the tentacles.
Simon Wells boarded this scene and did a fantastic job,
and it was his idea to give Sinbad a reason to help Proteus
by having his boat be destroyed.
So, Sinbad actually throws in with Proteus here,
not out of loyalty to his old friend,
but because he's really angry at the monster for ruining his ship.
It ends up reinforcing the bond these two guys had 10 years ago.
And everyone's favorite gag in the opening here.
There's nothing like visiting a sea monster's stomach,
and then coming violently back out on deck to make your morning.
Give that guy a raise.
Come on Sinbad, let's go!
Wait! Stand your ground!
What you see occasionally in the background here are guards fighting,
and those are almost exclusively 3-D animated characters,
and yet, Sinbad and Proteus are 2-D characters.
Throughout the picture, and we'll identify a few other moments,
we are combining drawn animation with CG animation,
and really trying to use whatever medium creates the best effect.
So, with the guard animation, for instance,
all of those battles could be reused in different shots.
If you had a good slash and stab motion with a guy with a sword,
you could use it again in another shot, if it was CG.
So, we did a lot of computer-generated guard animation.
Yeah, they did a great job of reusing and they had a whole strategy.
They animated a couple of guards and reused them,
different angles and stuff.
Damon's crew did some beautiful compositions against these sky layouts
for where to look, and keep nice, open areas around the characters
while there's still a lot of information on the screen.
Yeah, this was really a nice, organic, very big sequence for us to work on.
Robert Crawford and Mark and Pam did an extraordinary job staging it,
and making it feel real, and making the stakes feel...
Love that shot that Mark came up with.
Now, we used to kill this monster slightly more graphically.
If you watch the actual shot where he gets hit,
it cuts before the strike, right?
So, you don't really see the poor guy get impaled,
but, believe me, when you offer the opportunity
to kill a sea monster to storyboard artists, they go for it.
- You okay? - Yeah.
Thanks for sticking around.
We killed that sea monster in so many different ways, too.
In fact, we tied him up with string, and had him list over and sink.
We had him get knocked right through the head by the tip of the boat
to get a whole ramming pass on that thing.
So many different mechanical ways of how to kill a sea monster.
At one point, it wasn't a guard who got eaten.
It was Sinbad who ended up inside the sea monster.
And here's Eris again.
Dan Wagner was our lead animator for Eris,
and I think as much as any animator invented their main character,
Dan really invented Eris.
We had these ideas in our head of how she would move and flow,
and the hair would be gravity-less.
But it was Dan's first test shot,
and Patrick and I scraped our jaw off the ground and said,
"Yeah, that's Eris."
Here, the environment and the character, both, are using
both traditional animation 2-D effects and 2-D animation, and 3-D effects,
and 3-D effects animation on the character.
So, there's a lot of back and forth between departments
for a beautiful look in the end.
It's stunning.
Dan had to do Eris towards the end of the picture.
I mean, all of it in a few months.
So, it's amazing what he came up with.
From you?
Sinbad, you don't have a heart.
That's what I like about you.
So, I'm going to let you live.
But there's just one little thing you have to do.
Get the Book of Peace and bring it to me.
Right. Now, see, that's a problem for me.
Because I had my own plans for it. Ransom, get rich. You know, "me" stuff.
You're not thinking big enough, Sinbad.
Steal the Book for ransom,
and you'll be rich enough to lounge on an island beach.
Steal the Book for me, and you can buy the beach,
and the island and the world.
She's a real seductress with Sinbad,
but the way it plays with Michelle performing it,
it's seduction that's all about power for Eris, and control.
We gave Michelle that scarf in the recording studio.
With a flick of the scarf over her shoulder,
she suddenly found the character and began to find this powerful vamp.
I love watching her move.
She could, of course, walk from one place to another,
but if you can do what she can do, why would you rather do that?
Just disappear and reappear.
Where's the Goddess of Chaos come from? Patrick, you're sort of the...
Eris started the Trojan War in mythology.
She, in mythology, has an apple
that's inscribed with the words, "For the Fairest."
And she would drop it between the fastest of friends,
and then watch as they fought over who the gift was intended for,
and whole wars would break out
because Eris played these games with the human heart.
The funny thing is, with all the explorations we did with Eris,
we ended up back being truer to who she really was in mythology.
No, we don't really kill anybody in this film.
Even Cetus returns to his astrological origins when he bites it.
Cetus coming back is actually very important
because it's your first big clue
that Eris knows most of the events that are about to unfold.
She is thinking, really, all the way to the end of the movie.
She knows that Sinbad and Proteus are friends,
and has laid plans within plans.
So, the fact that Cetus doesn't die doesn't come as a surprise at all to Eris.
It's part of what she expects from her plans.
Goddess of Chaos? I'm writing that down.
So, that's it, then? No book? Now, what do we do?
Rat is voiced by Adriano...
- Adriano Giannini. - Giannini.
I'm going to mispronounce that.
But Adriano was a find for us.
He just came up with all sorts of amazing voices
and things to play with, with Rat.
- We want more Rat in the picture, but... - Yeah.
Steve Horrocks did a great job.
Yeah. Steve's animation, Rat flies and swoops,
and Rat is practically a sort of latter-day Tarzan.
Syracuse.
I think the art department wanted to spend a lot more time in Syracuse.
Some beautiful development and exploration of the city was done,
but for time, we couldn't show you half of what was done
with the beautiful loch mechanism,
to enter the city with beautiful causeways and bridges,
where the boats are actually floating more over the city
to enter and get to the palace.
And Seth Engstrom, one of Raymond's art directors,
is incapable of designing something that doesn't actually work.
He'd crack us up and be like, "Here's how the loch works,"
and, "I think the weight is proportionally correct."
And oh, my God.
It's not only beautiful, I think we could build this.
This scene was actually a late addition in terms of the story line.
We really wanted to have more fun
seeing and learning about the history between these once-old friends.
And so, this idea of a party,
a sort of dedication ceremony for the Book of Peace arriving
and Sinbad crashing it, was added late in the game.
When this set-up for this backstory that he knew her
blew me away in the screening when I saw this added sequence
that really started to pull everything together for me.
For the longest time, Marina was on the boat.
So, when Sinbad attacked Proteus, he not only met his old friend,
he came face-to-face with the woman
who sent him out to sea, 10 years previous.
And so, we figured it was just too much to meet two important characters,
bam-bam, right in a row, and we separated those introductions.
Face-to-fist.
Yeah, it was literally "bam-bam," two important characters,
'cause Marina's intro in the movie was decking Sinbad.
Jed, the weapons expert, had a bigger role at one point,
but he did survive to have this one really nice bit of business, a nice joke.
It's actually voiced by one of our story artists, Conrad Vernon,
who's now co-directing Shrek 2, so thank you, Conrad.
I mean, some animation was done in London
by the additional crew that we had over there,
and it was really fun to work over there, video conference, with those guys.
They did a great job.
And here we have Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Catherine, just an absolute pleasure to work with.
She was almost restless with how much she wanted to play with the character.
She was never satisfied with her own takes
and wanted to give you another version of it.
Thank goodness she did because her character,
it took a little while to discover
this kind of strong, female, non-princess that we wanted for the picture.
And Catherine really helped us probe, and find some smarts and some authority
to the role of Marina.
That scene with Spike eating all the desserts on the table
was the last sequence animated in the film.
It's very complex.
2-D-drawn effects scene, with all the desserts and jiggling Jell-O,
and the mess that Spike is making.
Yeah, that was a monster, for it to come in last.
God, yeah.
Everybody had to work in the same time on that scene.
We just blew past a moment where Dennis Haysbert, as Kale,
another really great performance, gives us a clue
that he has known Sinbad longer than anyone of the entire crew.
He's the only one who knows that Marina is an important person in Sinbad's life.
Kale was just a first mate, but it was with recording Dennis' voice.
And not only, of course, does he have a beautiful voice, but he has a...
There's something about him that's just so upright and honest and true,
and he really became Sinbad's conscience, and the one who tried to keep Sinbad...
Tried to encourage him to be a better man than he was willing to be
in the first half of the picture.
That was really just discovered by Dennis' performance.
We rewrote Kale's character after the first session with him.
- It's beautiful. - It is.
My father spent years preparing it for the Book.
There are guards on every level, and if you look up to the...
You were talking about the ocean, weren't you?
I only wish I'd seen more of it.
I used to imagine sailing far beyond the Twelve Cities,
discovering the world.
Oh, look at it, Proteus. There's so much wonder.
Marina...
Our marriage was arranged many years ago.
It's always been expected of us.
You know, John Logan wrote this beautiful script for us,
and no piece more beautiful, I think, than this section,
as Marina imagines a completely different life
and then Proteus asks
to take her hand in marriage for himself, rather than the arranged marriage.
It's just a lovely bit of dialogue.
It's very poetic and very real, at the same time.
John's... John's words were really inspirational to the actors.
- There's a missing scene. - The poor Manolians.
The Manolians.
We used to have this whole beat where the Manolians were in the party,
and they're trying to shake hands,
but their tradition was they wouldn't shake hands,
they would shake elbows.
So, Proteus was extremely embarrassed,
and Marina had saved his bacon.
Now, you may be asking yourself,
"Why is the most valuable object in the world guarded by only one man?"
Patrick will explain.
As Proteus explains in the previous scene, there are guards on every level.
So, this guy is a member of an exclusive brotherhood.
It is a privilege to be the guy
who actually guards the Book itself here in this room,
but he never sees any action because you gotta get through five floors.
- And he does have a glass jaw. - Yeah, he drops pretty fast.
He gets punched by a goddess.
Yeah. We'll cut him some slack.
Just the effects alone for Eris in here, you know, you...
Directing a film, you just see everything so many times
that you frankly just get, sort of, dead to a lot of the picture,
but I have to say,
every time Eris donned the Sinbad suit here, my eyes were wide open.
- I just love some of these effects. - Yeah, it's a great scene.
It's funny because most of the people
who were looking at the pencil test on Eris thought she was blonde.
You look at the thing in color, it's, like, "Wow."
Yeah, the transformation's amazing.
Sinbad's dagger, of course, that Eris took from him underwater.
All the pieces are coming together.
They never really articulate what exactly the Book of Peace does,
but it's explained by its disappearance.
It's obviously protecting the city of Syracuse,
and once it disappears, these terrible black clouds
and an earthquake sends the city into darkness.
We imagined the city would be Dorian Gray.
It would age very, very quickly, but we never really got a chance
to flesh out that sort of story
'cause we didn't cut back to Syracuse very frequently.
- My favorite sound effect there. - We actually had this whole pass
where we're putting in shots of Syracuse progressively declining.
We had drawings of the ships listing out,
without water on the channels, and all that.
It just got a little bit too dark.
We even had a war going.
- Yes, that's right. - We had the invading armies.
We had black ink seeping through the whole city, too.
Volcanoes and comets.
This is one of the early animations of Sinbad,
that Jakob did on Sinbad, to define the character.
And he really found him right here.
He found the fun and theatricality and wit of Sinbad,
even as Sinbad's under the most terrible pressure.
I mean, facing a life sentence or worse here.
And you can still see the sparkle Jakob found in Sinbad's eyes.
He really nailed the look of Sinbad in that sequence.
The lighting of this sequence is a beautiful job
done by Steve Wood and his crew.
Just the feeling of being in the cell with the shaft of light
just dividing these two, and also helping to clue you in
and how the lighting actually switches places on the two characters
as they switch places almost story-wise, setting up for the sequences to come.
It was a great sequence to block in animatic
as we were working in a very small cell, and trying to make that interesting.
We have them cross a couple of times,
which changes the lighting, changes the emphasis.
Very well, then.
The delegation of the Twelve Cities finds you guilty of treason,
and we sentence you to die. Take him away.
Come on! This is a joke, right?
Are you people blind? I didn't do it!
Stop!
I demand the right of substitution. Take me in his place.
No!
Sinbad says that Eris took the Book...
Joseph Fiennes, I think, does an incredible job
with what would have been a very difficult scene,
if you imagine it just laying there on the page.
Proteus stepping forward to put his head in the noose, as it were,
and allow his friend to go prove his innocence.
It's a lot of information in a short amount of time.
Joseph Fiennes is such a classically trained actor.
I think he really knows how to take text
and let it flow, number one,
and also make the audience aware of all the subtext,
the stuff behind what Proteus is saying.
You can feel a lot of the challenge and friendship
in these short half-dozen lines or so that Proteus has.
Yeah, it's compelling, it's absolutely compelling.
Jim Cummings, wonderful voice actor, does this gentleman here
and gives him the moral authority
to sound like he really could put these guys in jail.
And also, the sympathy to know that
he may be condemning a noble prince to death
by allowing this decision to pass.
Release him.
The actor Tim West,
a wonderful British stage actor, did Dymas.
And once again, talking about authority, boy...
You would tell Tim, "Let's have Dymas sound a little sorry it's happening,"
and he would make you weep for the sorrow of it. Then you'd say,
"Wow, that got a little too much. Let's put a little authority in him."
And your hair would blow back with the authority of it.
Tim was capable of just a massive range of things
in the wonderful performance he gave to the king.
Fabio animated Dymas. He almost did everything himself.
- I think Fabio did almost every shot. - Every single shot.
There's a lovely consistency, as a result, to how strong Dymas is throughout.
This is one of my favorite little sequences,
a charming little sequence.
We always knew we wanted the voyage beginning moments,
but in most voyage movies,
it's characteristic that these are upbeat and exciting beginnings,
but this is a little bit more ominous.
Rat, here, swinging and lighting the lanterns
is just poetic, profound, and really beautiful,
with Wade Huntsman's color keys giving all this a really luminous quality.
The music does a great job of capturing what you were talking about, Patrick,
which is, it is a voyage, an exciting beginning,
and yet, there's a little melancholy edge to it.
It's conflicted, just like Sinbad is.
Harry Gregson-Williams was our composer who did absolutely marvelous music here.
It's both traditional action-adventure, but really classic.
That map of Fiji was right off a board.
Denise Koyama drew that little Fiji girl up there.
Backgrounds had a blast painting that stuff.
Yeah, it was the easiest assignment to give a layout artist.
"Here, draw a pretty girl."
But we had a lot of fun.
Seth did such an extraordinary job of designing the Chimera,
and we had such a good time.
It, kind of, composed itself.
Anywhere you placed a camera on the Chimera,
you got such a great composition.
And that sequence just shows off the best shots we could find.
Mick De Falco did the layout on that.
Okay, nobody pay attention that the sun is out now.
Yeah, the joy of filmmaking. You can ellipse time.
No, this can't be real.
It would be far too...
This is more like it.
Stolen from Venezia.
From Pompeii.
- And from a brothel in Syracuse. - Good guess.
What do you think you're doing here?
I'm here to make sure you get the Book of Peace,
or bring back your dead body if you fail.
Really? And how are you gonna pull that off?
By whatever means necessary.
- Did you bring a crew? - No.
- You know how to get to Tartarus? - No.
- Can you navigate on your own? - Yes!
Well, good! Then I'll dump your butt in a rowboat,
and you can paddle all the way back to Syracuse.
'Cause we're going to Fiji.
James Baxter did most of the Sinbad on this sequence.
Yeah, it's a lovely bit of animation on Sinbad
because he's hamming it up.
And James caught so much of Sinbad's double purpose here.
He's obviously flustered that the girl of his dreams
is right here in his cabin,
and yet, he's playing this power game at the same time.
You can see both levels.
I think the layout of this scene is phenomenal
as you watch Sinbad and Marina engaged in this verbal power struggle.
The characters are blocking around the scene
and literally fighting for screen space
in a way that echoes that same power struggle.
Much how Marina pushes Sinbad against the edge of the screen
when she takes control,
and then when Sinbad comes back, he does the same to her.
- Is it like a tango? - It's like a tango.
And the music is even a little bit like a tango, rhythmic and punchy.
We referenced Indiana Jones for that, the first time Indy meets Marion.
Of the many things Brad Pitt brought to the role,
the most amazing thing was the sense of fun.
So, even when Sinbad was furious,
there was that line, "I didn't ask for this."
He would come up with these explosive bits of anger
that were as fun as they were angry,
and it kept Sinbad from getting dark.
Simon Otto always coming up with something funny
for Jin and Li to do in the background.
Pickles, eggs and pickles.
There's a person missing from the commentary that ought to be here.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was partnered with Mireille in producing the picture
and runs our studio.
Just really fun to work with
because he's just really the world's greatest audience.
You can put together a sequence and check in with Jeffrey,
and he has the ability to put out of his mind, past versions of it,
and give you straight feedback and a reaction
of what he thinks works and doesn't work.
He had really great input throughout this, including getting Spike more involved.
Jeffrey really felt like Spike was a great matchmaker for the film,
the one who really wanted Sinbad and Marina to get together.
And so, we incorporated a lot of Jeffrey's ideas early on in this scene.
That created a lot of fun animation for the 2-D effects crew.
I think we had a lot of drool scenes that came that we weren't expecting,
that ended up being crowd pleasers.
Spike wasn't originally part of the movie.
He was added fairly, like, halfway through.
- There was a different dog. - Yeah, there used to be an Akita.
- Yeah, he was too pretty-looking, though. - That's true.
They needed somebody a lot more earthy and a lot more drooly.
Talking about Dennis Haysbert's moral authority,
with one word here, he shows it.
Right.
Boy, you don't want to hear that.
"We know you're lying.
"You've been caught."
Kale actually happy to be going to Tartarus.
Kale loves action and adventure.
Originally, when Sinbad came up to Kale, he said, "We're going to Tartarus."
And Kale's attitude was, "Hey, I've already been to Fiji."
Tartarus was some place he'd never been before.
What do you think she drinks? Is it a martini? Maybe a cosmo?
- I think it's an ocean. - Salty.
I love our constellation monsters.
I wish we got a chance to see even more of them.
Of course, they play a role throughout the picture, and especially at the end,
but that level that Raymond's team came up with,
the wispy transparency, and the stars within them,
it really feels like you're watching a Uranometria,
the classic ancient map of the stars, come alive.
That was a fun challenge just to use 3-D lighting,
but not in such a conventional way.
You're just using it in a mysterious way, just to get a glimpse of these things
without really knowing what they're made of.
And there's Marina with her final hairstyle.
- That's right. - That hairstyle, yeah.
I don't know how many costumes she had throughout the movie. Like four?
We gave her a major haircut.
She had long black hair
and it was one of the first things we decided to do
in making sure we gave her some real strength.
She looked a little, frankly, traditional, like we'd seen this character before
from other animated pictures.
Once we gave her this smart style and short haircut,
I think she just gained a little weight in it.
- She grew up. - Yeah, she became an adult.
She grew up a little bit through the movie,
from the beginning of the concept.
That's funny, when you changed...
It's like having an uncle with a beard and you're a young kid,
and all of a sudden, he cuts his beard, and then, you need to get used to it.
David James did a lot of the design here of the dragon's teeth.
Steady as she goes.
I never get tired of watching this and remembering the history of every shot.
It was a huge sequence.
I think most of the department worked on it at some point.
Lorenzo and Nol doing the majority of it.
It was such a fun sequence.
It was longer. We cut two, three minutes out of it.
Twice as long, I think, at one point.
And then, we threw in women made out of water.
What were we thinking?
'Cause it wasn't complicated enough.
No. How much development time did we go through with those?
But the result was amazing, but how many iterations?
We did 10 or 20 iterations.
What is that sound?
Harry wrote the score for this
almost a year before the picture was finished
so that we could be influenced
and actually work with the score and the Siren's song.
But it was one of those Harry right-out-of-the-box nailed it.
Yeah, Harry not only wrote this first,
but he also nailed the tone of the picture with the music,
and so it was a really exciting discovery.
We're proud of our water women, and that little flash of teeth
shows that they're not all that fun to be around.
Unbelievable level of technical accomplishment.
A very big team worked for a long time
merely developing the look before we even got our hands on a single shot.
It was months of trying to find
what a woman looks like when she's made out of water.
Doug Ikeler's crew did an amazing job.
I mean, to rein it in and add the CG element,
character actually, have it work within the same space as a 2-D character
was the biggest challenge.
So, to minimalize the amount of detail in the character
without them looking like mercury.
- And then, they had a modesty pass. - Yeah, the modesty pass.
We did all the rendering. They are, in fact, nude in model,
and yet, you didn't want to be unnecessarily revealing.
So, there was a little bit of pain to work on these women after it was done
to make sure we weren't being a little too out-front with them.
Again, Simon Wells did a lot of the boards for this,
and he did a lot of the action tones for the whole movie.
But this was one of those boards that he did
that was really beautiful to look at, just as a board,
even though boards aren't really final, final artwork in any stretch.
It was just beautiful to look at.
Yeah, it was very explicit and very clear
what a lot of the very complex action was about,
and very well worked out.
It really helped us out in layout.
What this sequence is about, of course,
is Marina earning her stripes aboard the boat
having just been dismissed by Sinbad
and relegated to the back of the top deck where nobody can really do anything.
She ends up saving the entire crew, and very importantly, I think,
bonding with Sinbad's dog, Spike.
The two of them cooperate to save everybody
and develop her first strong bond on the boat.
Although, there were thoughts of putting a watery she-dog.
Yeah?
And the water is really one of DreamWorks' specialty.
I mean, we had waters in every movie we made, almost.
From the Prince of Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea.
So, people surely know how to do water.
Here, one of the biggest challenges was to get water to flow uphill
and down waterfalls,
and something that the boat could actually sail on
in real spaces within the computers.
Very challenging.
We beat the heck out of our hero in this scene, don't we?
He gets clobbered.
The dog steps on his head, he gets clocked with a block of wood. Poor Sinbad.
He's a nice hero, though. He's not invulnerable.
He's actually a human guy, though, and I think much more likable.
Yes, those were flying fish going by you in a mere two shots
for all of the development effort.
- Gone forever now. - Yeah, they are.
But the point was that Sinbad has now crossed a threshold.
He's passed through a place that nobody has ever passed through before
and reached a new land of fantasy and adventure
that nobody really knows any of the rules about.
So, those flying fish are our first clue
that we're now in a new world and anything can happen,
including men making out with fish.
- What happened? - Sinbad saved us.
Spike is so happy.
He's just so looking forward to the apology and thank you to come.
Poor naive dog.
He's got to learn a lot about human nature, Spike.
Redid that shot because originally, we had framed Sinbad's bottom
into the shot, and of course we can't see that yet.
Again, this is where Brad Pitt really excels
where this could have been too aggressive.
And we want him to be a jerk,
but you sort of want to follow the jerk and not give up on him.
This is a pretty nasty little speech,
and Brad does it with such desperation
that you never really believe he's that angry.
He just sounds sort of desperate and he really nailed this for us.
Brad was great. He just wanted to play, and we would come up with alternate lines.
He would come up with alternate lines.
The studio sessions with him were always about discovery,
and that's the way he wanted it.
He was completely open to playing with the character,
so, we really were always uncovering new ideas and new ways
to be fun and clear with Sinbad
whenever we got Brad into the recording studio.
We do about 10 sessions or so with our main stars.
We did about 10, maybe 11, with Brad.
Each one's only two or three hours.
And they're spread out over the course of about two years.
So, imagine you're an actor, and over the course of two years,
you're doing little bits and pieces of the movie.
I like this one with the dog, this is one of my favorites.
We did a couple of scenes really cheap, it's like, one, two drawings.
Get a lot of laughs out of him.
Anybody touch the dog but Serguei? I think he did every shot.
He was the only one to draw the dog.
This scene here was originally scripted as,
"Thank you. You're welcome."
And the interchange between Sinbad and Marina
came out as a big ad-lib.
- No problem! - Don't worry about it!
- I won't! - Good!
- Goodbye! - Bye to you!
In that little moment, both of them trying to get the last word in.
Lots of animators in those scenes with the whole crew.
We try in an animated film to let a lead animator and their team
stick to one character so that there's a consistency.
So, sometimes, when you see a shot like one of these last ones
with 10 people in it, there might be 10 animators involved.
The moon-to-moon dissolve, my favorite.
- Proteus, come quickly. - What?
There's a ship waiting in the harbor.
A crew of my most trusted officers will take you far from Syracuse.
This is a really important scene between Dymas and Proteus.
And it gives us some sense of the history between
the king, who we really tried to play as much as possible as a father,
and his son.
The king here willing to subvert his royal power
and sneak his son out of the world
simply because he doesn't trust Sinbad.
One of the things Raymond and team worked on
is the sense of not just colors that flow through the film,
but the light and dark of the film.
We really were bold compared, I think, to a lot of animation
in letting some scenes get aggressive with the light and dark
like this scene is.
Yeah, the way Dymas' shadow crept up Proteus to challenge him,
and then, here, Proteus walking away.
Then in contrast, we go to this bright tropical island.
So, we're really trying to tell the story by using that sense of light and dark.
That's not an island.
The more upset that Sinbad gets, the more I think you like him.
- The more he falls apart. - Yeah, losing control.
The crew doesn't help him out at all.
Yeah, look at them, they're spying here in the background.
Yeah, just trying to listen to Mom and Dad fight.
Where do you think you're going?
And Sinbad knows he's lost it
when he's got his whole crew on her side, here.
The voices of Jin and Li, our Southeast Asian seamen,
were actually voiced by a pair of animators
who've worked on films like Shrek and Antz.
Chung Chan and Raman Hui were both incredible discoveries for us
to voice these guys who are making bets at every opportunity throughout the picture.
Bruce Ferriz who animated Kale,
our lead animator of Kale in that previous shot,
loved to give Kale little props to make him seem big.
So, that little tiny kid's beach bucket that Kale carries down the steps
really helps to reinforce that he's the biggest guy on the crew.
You know, you really ought to be a little more courteous.
Great.
They used to animate teeth flying out of Rat's head,
and I'll admit, I thought that I was the one who said,
"Gosh, now I feel bad for Rat."
We pulled the teeth out of the air and let Rat recover quickly here.
This was a really fun scene to board, too,
because it actually went very, very quickly.
It was one of the fewest passes we did of any of the boards in the movie.
We gave you the pages, Jen, and you did these sharpie drawings
which you swore were just to explain some ideas,
and they ended up sticking in as the final storyboard.
Oh, no.
Five on Marina.
You egotistical...
- You spoiled - disrespectful, pretentious
- deluded - pompous, self-centered
- high-and-mighty... - ungrateful, impossible, insufferable...
Another location design by David James.
From the giant long shots of the fish to detailed pages on this.
Lots of beautiful design.
Second big clue that this is not an island.
All the plants, like deep sea anemones, pull into themselves.
I know Mireille's going to make you explain the lure.
- Yes, it's an anglerfish. - What is a...
- It's a giant glowing lure. - It's got its own sun.
And, of course, the eye does actually reverse-dilate as light hits it.
I love that detail that they put in the effects.
Yes, have the dog lick the eye goo. There's an idea.
The fish is as panicked to have these little creatures on it
as they are to be on this island that turns out to be a fish.
So, it's beating a hasty retreat.
I wouldn't want Sinbad running up my shoulder.
The challenge for Damon's team was getting the scale,
getting the size of this thing.
There's a great little sequence coming up
which was all about developing it in layout,
and Matt Aspbury did it.
Just the Chimera getting towed behind the fish.
And it was a pretty complex thing to work out,
but definitely added a lot of scale and tension, too.
- Veer off, Kale! - The star!
This great wakeboarding sequence was Jeffrey's idea.
He didn't want the fish just to go underwater,
he wanted Sinbad to hitch on it for a ride
and not merely get towed
but actually ride behind this enormous 200-foot wake
like you would behind a ski boat or a wakeboarding boat.
Huge, huge scale shots.
I think they all pretty much worked back-to-back.
Take that 3-D water and then try lo light it from underneath...
There was such a magical look in the end,
but you're sitting there trying to do a rough concept on this,
something like, "What does that look like?"
I just thought it was cruel in a movie
that's probably full of little kids drinking soft drinks
that we have so much water in it.
Did anybody make it through this movie
without a quick dash to the restroom at some point?
Of course, how many times do you make the hero of your picture
actually get sick to his stomach?
Is that a James Baxter shot?
I think it was, of Sinbad bouncing nauseated on the rim of his ship.
It was a great example of how squash and stretch works in animation.
Yeah, and the rocking of the boat was done first in 3-D,
and then you followed the movement of the boat
as Sinbad reacts to it.
The 2-D effects addition, the snot bubble.
Always a crowd pleaser.
Yes, and if you want to know who came up with the carrots line,
- sitting to my left, Mr. Patrick Gilmore. - Don't say that.
One of those things he said, and we all laughed and said,
"Of course, we can't put that in the movie,"
and Patrick said, "Well, why not?"
And we said, "Gee, okay."
And there it is, the carrots line.
William's animation throughout on Marina,
as the lead animator for Marina,
just some beautiful, sensitive, thoughtful work on Marina.
Sometimes, the hardest things to do with a character are not,
of course, the action, but the quiet, thinking moments.
And none better than what Marina's doing throughout the picture.
She was kind of challenging to draw as all the heroines
because she's a beautiful woman and you don't have a lot of...
She's not caricatured obviously, so you had to be very subtle.
Pickles and eggs!
Well, you get the idea.
And then, suddenly there was a fourth blade.
It was Proteus.
Again, this set we're about to go into and freeze up,
beautiful hints of the Granite Gates that we're seeing.
A little bit of Stonehenge and a little bit of the Tower of Babylon here.
It's just gigantic in scale.
Trying to get scale throughout the picture
was the job of the designers and the cinematography.
Sam Michlap originally conceived this set with...
We first had snow on it, then we had to peel the snow off
'cause we wanted Eris to throw things into motion.
But in setting up for an adventure to come,
the tower was actually a fun design piece to work on.
Was it Bibo who thought Eris should be taking a bath here?
Bibo Bergeron thought Eris should be a lady of leisure.
The Goddess of Chaos enjoying a nice, calm, warm soak in...
In a galaxy-sized bathtub.
We keep the celestial theme with her going.
A little hint of the roc there, of course.
She's taken another constellation and summoned it.
That's great.
A lot of those Spike shots were late additions.
That one came from a pass where we'd looked at opportunities
to have some more fun in the picture, add a few jokes,
and that little shot of freezing drool was a late addition.
It looks like a simple effect, but adding snow is a nightmare.
It's got to be consistent across all the shots,
it's got to cut from one to another.
We actually saw most of the sequence without snow
and then added it afterwards to keep it consistent.
All at once to do it chronologically so that it all matched in.
Chuck Campbell, our sound designer, what lovely stuff here.
Was that an animator dying in the background coming up right here?
That's probably one of my favorite shots of revealing the monsters in this
where the roc is just tiny in the distance.
A lot of these boards were based on the original passes Serguei did.
Not only did he animate Spike, he actually did a lot of boards.
And so, this was a lot of his, later done, with a bit of work by Christian Lignan.
The animation of the roc was done by Fabrice Joubert.
He did a great job.
He actually redesigned the whole thing at one point when he came over.
He comes from a 2-D background.
He was originally a 2-D animator, and now he's working for 3-D,
but he was ambidextrous and was able to redesign the thing and remodel.
Armen Melkonian laid this out...
I was going to say, this was our first big action sequence
and the first time we really got to shoot coverage and shoot new ideas,
and I love the one...
It's kind of a huge crane shot
as the roc comes up and hits the foreground rock.
Nol and Armen working on that did a beautiful job.
Brilliant job with a tough story sequence.
Jed falling in the water, of course, is the red herring.
He's the one who, hopefully, makes you forget what the roc is here to do
so that, out of your concern for him, hopefully,
you don't notice the jeopardy that Marina's in until Sinbad does.
Did that, cinematically, very well.
- And to scale. - The roc's really great there.
It became like a tent pole for us as a marker for the...
What, were there six big action sequences?
So, it was a good one to get right in the beginning.
Marina here is dressed in an outfit that, in the context of the film,
is simply the base layer of her winter outfit.
But it used to be her main outfit.
- That used to be her main costume. - When she had long hair, yeah.
Actually, I think, a little bit into it,
and we finally took a deep breath and said,
"You know, she looks a little dowdy. A little..."
- House. - A little housecoatish, yeah,
and had a redesign of her costume
to give her something... A little more action and lighter.
Jeff Snow...
I'm sorry. Jeff Snow storyboarded this,
and when he first pitched the idea
that he was going to tie Sinbad to the harpoon,
I don't know if anybody bought it
and he just said, "I think I can pull it off."
And he gave us this bit with Sinbad.
- And then it was... - We're not allowed to beat up Sinbad.
I remember in his pitch, he used to whistle
this kind of James Bond tune, and it really helped sell it.
Then Seth Engstrom had to figure out where to put a harpoon gun on this boat.
Then that led to throwing every kind of contraption
we could throw into the thing.
The Chimera has always been sort of a Swiss Army knife, hasn't it...
Sinbad's ship.
So, we imagined all sorts of other
alternate folded weapons and toys within it
that never quite saw the light of day.
Just don't mention the sails to me. I still twitch.
How far were we when we decided we would re-rig the entire ship?
I think we were nearly done, weren't we?
It had a more traditional square sheet
until we decided it didn't look exotic enough and changed it.
- Yeah, to the junk sails. - Yeah.
But I love the way it turned out.
I think it gave it an exotic quality to the boat.
It's beautiful.
Rodolphe Guenoden, and the lead animator of Proteus,
storyboarded the first version of this scene
and came up with this great relationship
where Sinbad and Marina can't help but debate and squabble
over how they're gonna get out of a place
even when there's a giant 12-ton bird stomping around looking for them.
That's a really fun bit of business between the two of them.
We scaled up our bird, but we didn't scale up his brain much luckily,
so he's still got a bird brain.
Great. He can pick his teeth when he's done with us.
There was a reanimate.
We used to have her be so angry at him there,
but it was a little off-putting.
It looked like she was about to throw him out to be fed to the bird.
She used to start punching him, didn't she?
She just started to slug him right there.
Here's a transition. Those are 2-D characters,
and as we pass up, now they're 3-D.
Several shots like that in which we hand off from drawn to CG,
based on what the shot requires.
- They look easy, don't they? - Yeah, when they're done.
This next sequence is a tour de force in layout, I think.
We referenced everything from the Olympic downhill to BMW commercials
to anything you could imagine involving speed or snow.
There's a lot of back-and-forth between the hand-drawn animation
and CG animation in there.
I think we lost him!
There's always a struggle with Sinbad. He's unbelievably capable.
Anybody who launches himself off a cliff
and wonders how he's going to survive the fall
is obviously pretty brave.
And yet, we didn't want to make him...
Unafraid and invulnerable,
and so, here he is trying desperately to steer this thing,
and he's just barely in control.
We had a lot of fun trying to find that balance
between superhero and vulnerability.
Part of the fun of this sequence is that it starts out in real chaos
with Sinbad and Marina really not working together at all,
but then, from this point onward, they find a rhythm together.
It's about... Part of the purpose of this sequence
is that Sinbad and Marina cooperate together, really, for the first time.
Our little ode to snowboarding there.
Yeah, it was tough watching all those snowboarding videos.
I think Dave had a good time.
Lots of great design from David throughout this.
The drawings he did were just so clear for such an elaborate space.
The rhythm of this sequence is great.
I don't know how much editing you guys had to do, but it's kind of...
Well, you know, for all of the work that we do in layout and story,
it really does come down to cutting it together
with a live-action feel.
Tom Finan, our editor,
was very aggressive in the way he would, both, cut things
and then ask for shots, actually request ways
in which he could keep the energy feeling
like it was real, like it was a live-action approach to it.
Yeah, he did a lot of crosscutting, which is unusual for animation,
but it definitely gives the movie a lot of energy.
This shot took forever, the whole family.
Seven characters, so you have to imagine
as many as seven different people working on one shot.
Exactly. So, that kind of scene can be in production for months.
- Beautiful effects animation. - Yeah.
Always a challenge to get scale throughout the picture.
There are visual challenges, animation challenges,
lighting challenges
to hint at the size of the world we're trying to depict.
We had to redo the costumes in these scenes.
They were all clothed with the wrong costume.
I think we'd forgotten to get them ready for winter.
Man.
So, it's significant that this next scene takes place
in the exact same location
where Sinbad first attempted to thank Marina for saving his life.
It is now her going back
looking at the railing that was broken in the Sirens sequence,
and it's now her turn to thank him.
This scene was storyboarded by Sharon Bridgeman,
and the boards were so full of emotion.
They were really, really tender.
That was one of the first sequences that William animated for Marina.
This is where he... This scene, particularly
and a couple of scenes also,
that he redefined the character, the look of her.
Sharon, when she pitches this, has that thick Irish accent,
"This life suits you."
Her pitch is so soft and so beautifully done,
I think many people welled up as they were watching it
in this fluorescent room where we were doing the story review.
The aurora was actually leftover
from revealing another location and sequence
which was cut from the film early on. The Medusa sequence.
Yet another monster on the cutting room floor.
But her skeleton is in his cabin.
We have so many different styles of ocean,
this, perhaps, being the most simple and beautiful.
All of the work on the water in the film,
whether it's the raging rapids of the Siren sequence
and the Sirens themselves, or this very placid, calm ocean,
it was a huge vocabulary of water to develop for the picture.
Really, the development started two-and-a-half years or more
before the release of the picture, just to get the water alone.
This is some of John Logan's best writing for us in the movie,
this confession that Sinbad makes.
He created this for us about halfway through production,
and invented the whole backstory between Sinbad and Marina.
The fact that he knew her long, long ago
and ended up that she was the reason he had originally left Syracuse.
We only had to watch it one time like this
to realize how much weight and emotion it brought to this relationship.
It's one of the longest acting scenes...
I think Simon Otto, working closely with the lead, Jakob...
Simon did a lot, if not all, of the Sinbad work here.
Simon also was the lead on Jin and Li, the Southeast Asian sailors.
But he really came in as a heavy hitter to help out
with this really lovely piece of acting.
Proteus met you at the dock.
Balancing our quick cuts in a scene like the escape from the roc,
we tried to do these long shots where we would let the acting play out.
It's a sort of a risk you get a little nervous about,
but I think we found a sensibility to the characters
that helped balance all the action.
Of course, we've been sailing for a destination for half the picture now,
and finally, we get there.
Boy, it drove our editor nuts not to have this shot be longer.
Poor Tom was like, "Can't it be just four frames longer, six frames?"
We all wished, but...
The entrance into Tartarus was the subject
of much, much debate through the course of the film.
Originally, there was a giant mangrove-like swamp
that was inhabited by a Medusa who guarded the gateway.
And then we had doppelgängers there,
versions of Sinbad and Marina who protected the gateway.
The doppelgängers was actually beautifully storyboarded by Rodolphe,
and there was this whole fight scene
where they're trying to beat the same versions of themselves,
the mirror-image versions of themselves, and they couldn't do it,
so they had to double-team on two of their opposites.
So, Sinbad would get on to the Marina,
and Marina would get on to the other Sinbad.
It was quite an epic battle, but unfortunately...
Then we just opted for the edge of the world.
We took the easy way out. "We'll just create the edge of the world."
Those of you who are really good observers will wonder
why Eris pointed to a globe at the beginning of the film,
and yet, it's flat here.
So, we are accepting essays explaining that.
It is all an illusion. That's what it is.
Men, all hands to your posts! Free all sheets! Wait for my command!
These poor baffled sailors.
What on Earth is the captain talking about?
How will we pull this off?
Just trust me.
Pres was our animator in charge of the rest of the crew,
and so, in scenes like this where the crew are scrambling and running
and there's quick shots of them tying, it kept Pres busy for weeks.
- Slack to all sheets! - Aye, aye, Captain.
Cut the fore and main trusses! Move!
There's a great place for us to develop some ideas and lay out just...
I remember sending a whole lot of coverage down to Tom
and encouraging him to choose the best bits
and then seeing the final cut. I think he used everything of it.
Fine-tuning in the editing here works really great.
The edge-of-the-world effect was one of the first big CG effects
that was developed by our 3-D effects department,
and the big challenge was
not just to convey water going off the edge of the world
from the distant perspective of Sinbad and his boat as they approach,
but also to convey the spectacular updraft
which is going to carry the boat across to the gateway afterwards.
And they developed this really beautiful sort of veil
of wind-whipped water that...
We looked at the Bridalveil Fall from Yosemite
which pushes so much air down
that the falls actually flow upward for part of it.
That's a beautiful sail animation just when the sails are slack
of these things being whipped around by the wind
and then to rig them in a configuration that would actually fly,
was Seth Engstrom's design.
Come on!
Of course, all their legs would be broken if that really happened.
Luckily, it's animation and our characters survived.
And Sinbad's lost his hat till the end of the movie, right?
Boy, that was a debate. His hat was on every scene for a while,
and then we realized we weren't doing our main character justice,
and so, the hat's off.
Several key points throughout the picture.
He just looks a lot more manly without the hat.
- Yeah. Well, he's kind of handsome. - Manly, yes, but I liked it.
Great 3-D lighting of the boat through here,
these next couple of shots.
Light through the sails.
That was a great shot.
Didn't you add that in the layout, Damon? The shot with the mast shaking?
Yeah, we spent ages animating it to try and solve it
'cause it had to have weight and also had to be intense.
Again, one of those group shots in which seven animators all cooperate
on something that's only on-screen for two seconds.
Spike, who's about to show up here
for his moment with Sinbad before they leap over the edge,
was a bit of a late addition, and if you're watching closely,
you might wonder how Sinbad's able to kneel down and pat Spike
when he's tied so closely to Marina.
It's a lovely little goodbye that we felt was worth adding.
It takes a lot of work to do something bright white in animation,
so that gateway and how the light chews into their silhouette
leaving them soft-edged,
that's actually harder to do than leaving them crisp.
But it mimics what happens in the real world
with bright white light on film.
The following bit with the sweeping oceans of sand
almost didn't make it into the movie.
We were late in the production and were looking at how complex this was
and how difficult it was going to be to produce.
But Damon and his crew sold it in animatic form
and Jeffrey loved it so much that he broke down obstacles for us
and made it possible for us to put this in the movie.
Denise added that right there.
Denise Koyama came up with a lot of the ideas for Tartarus,
the visuals for this part.
Pretty intricate 3-D set going on here
with sand blowing across the surface
and having that interact with the actual buildings
and have monsters walk on it.
Pretty incredible for how late this idea came into the film.
The reason it came in late...
We were still struggling with what makes it the world of chaos.
Tim, you came up with that whole...
Yeah. I think we were playing with all sorts of different ideas for Tartarus
including the more Alice In Wonderland set of things where gravity worked wrong
and what was down was up,
and it always seemed like we could never go far enough with that.
It always seemed a little comic rather than mysterious.
Ronnie Del Carmen came up with some incredible ideas
with a surreal pass of Tartarus.
They are playing with all these visual...
- Almost Daliesque. - Yeah, Daliesque.
The sand, for me, is this great hourglass, ocean symbolism,
and works very well with Eris, I think,
as her trophy case with fallen armies and ruined cities
and wrecked battleships.
She's having a good time, isn't she? And so is Michelle actually,
doing a scene like this where you get to gloat as the villainess of the picture.
She really nailed a lot of the stuff.
I think in some ways, we found Eris and the tone of her character
from this scene late in the picture,
and sort of worked backwards to have this much fun with her earlier.
So, you often record things out of order with your actors,
and when we discovered this with Michelle,
we thought we'd really found the power and fun of Eris.
By this point, Dan Wagner, Eris' lead animator had a lot of help.
We were late in the game with a lot of Eris' stuff,
so a lot of the other leads helped out in this scene, jumped on board.
Everybody had a frustrating but fun time with Eris,
having to learn a new character late in the game.
We used to animate Eris without hair, and put the hair in a couple of drawings
and then go back and forth with the effects crew.
It was a little tough to give her the power she has here.
If you imagine her bald, she'd look like she had a shower cap on.
A lot more powerful with the flow here.
Yeah, and Dan really wanted to make the hair as part of the whole character.
That's Rodolphe's animation here.
She doesn't have to move by walking.
I always get reminded that Eris is powerful and god-like.
We're not afraid of destroying our set multiple times.
We went from the ocean of sand to a little island,
and now we're down to just a runway here for Sinbad.
By the end of the scene, even that has disappeared.
We're simplifying and throwing away throughout the sequence.
It was always fun trying to talk the crew through that,
"No, there's only a bit of it left now.
"We'll break up more of it later."
She asks one question here, but for a very long time,
it was a series of questions.
And rather than a runway to the Book, it was steps.
Sinbad was allowed to advance a step for every question she asked.
While it was successful in terms of telling the story
it not only took a lot of time, it turned Eris into Barbara Walters or something.
She was suddenly a game show host.
So we simplified it.
One simple question now and that seals his fate.
I think we made the right decision. It just gets right to the point of it.
And in the phrasing, that one simple question ends up echoing
Marina's very first question of Sinbad when she first meets him.
"Are you a thief or a hero?"
When Eris succeeds, and I think in moments like this, she's so gentle.
We've experimented with her shouting at Sinbad and saying,
"Don't interrupt me", and things in previous versions.
The more we tried that, the less powerful she became.
So, with Michelle's performance,
her most dramatic moments are sometimes those that are the most casual.
It makes her more powerful.
Sinbad doesn't know the right answer here.
All he knows is who he wants to be, he doesn't know the truth.
So the platform breaks
because at this moment in the movie, he really is lying.
Here's our classic villain moment. The scheming villainess.
The transition to this next world,
at one point, we just cut to it and it was just hard to understand,
and yet, we include this simple shot
and it feels connected to the way
they landed in Tartarus in the first place,
and we understand they've been kicked out.
We had many transitions here, and ultimately the simplest was the best.
The quiet and probably the longest dissolve in the picture
tells us a little time has passed as these two are stunned
at what appears to be their failure.
I think it takes a lot of courage
when you're painting backgrounds for an animated movie
to do something unbelievably austere and simple,
which is what this sequence is all about.
Desmond Downes and Kevin who did a lot of the backgrounds here
did a great job of conveying the emptiness
and stillness and austerity of this moment of failure.
We recorded Catherine in Majorca, off the coast of Spain.
She and her family enjoy a home there, and she was vacationing
and nice enough to actually interrupt her vacation,
and the studio was nice enough to send us to her.
So, you have to imagine this very emotional scene
done in one of the most beautiful places on Earth
with the ocean rolling out the window, and dappled sunlight,
a very Mediterranean setting,
and here, Catherine was moved to genuine tears by this scene
and delivered a marvelous performance.
This sequence was boarded by Lorna Cook who was a director on Spirit.
She was good enough to do some beautiful acting
in the storyboards to help sell this scene and to sell the emotion involved
'cause it's a pivotal moment for Sinbad.
It's the moment of his change and so it had to be really, really sold.
Jakob and William did the animation.
The clean-up did a great job to follow up,
especially on these kinds of animations, it's really subtle.
The acting is subtle.
To do a great job with the clean-up.
A lot of discussion went into whether Sinbad should actually say,
"Could you love a man who'd run away?" Because at that point, the audience knows
that he is going to remain true to his friend.
The important thing for us was that
Sinbad's emotional change play on-screen, not off-screen.
If he was to come back and save Proteus without us ever seeing that change,
we'd have been deprived of seeing his deepest realization of who he really was.
As a result, we cut heavily into this sequence.
We used to have Proteus make a very long walk,
but because we signaled to our audience
that Sinbad's going to make the right choice,
we cut it down to this moment where there's some tension,
but we didn't go as far as milking it,
since the decision to come back has been made.
Another... Really, one of my favorite performances of Brad's
is this whole set of lines here
in which he's both triumphant, but then ultimately so sad and vulnerable.
Very tough scene in which, in a short number of lines,
he goes from saving his friend to confessing failure.
Again, reminding people that in spite of what we think we created here,
which is great intimacy, these actors were never in the same room.
Everything was cut together in the editing suite
to create the actual moment.
- Marina took the stairs, by the way. - The elevator.
Well, the dog could hardly climb up the grappling hooks.
They did a nice job in compositing.
I think Steve Childers worked on this sequence,
tried to figure out all the crowd continuity.
Yeah.
God.
Because there's two executions back-to-back,
we did try to shoot them in different ways
and Damon's team came up with a different visual language
for Sinbad's walk to the block than Proteus'.
We tried to find something... A shot with slightly longer lenses
and much more personal to him
compared to a much more public execution for Proteus.
Shots like his hand releasing
indicating Sinbad coming to a place
where he's ready and has accepted his fate.
Very different manner in which we shot with Proteus.
There's such wonderful music here and it builds to this crescendo.
And then Harry uses some of the most lush chords
I've heard from an orchestra here
to indicate this turmoil.
Originally, Sinbad was whisked back to Tartarus,
and this whole thing was actually an artificial test.
Ultimately, we thought it was much more powerful
for Eris to have to come to Sinbad
to basically eat crow in front of the entire assembled city
where Sinbad would be redeemed in everyone's eyes.
We call it our "Godzilla in the harbor" moment.
Get Eris into the city.
And Michelle with this quaver in her voice
is pulling off some amazing acting work.
She's a goddess, she can't be killed, she can't be destroyed, she's immortal,
and yet, the stakes for her are so high here
that she really is vulnerable and really is losing to Sinbad here.
This is one of the main reasons, I think,
we had to change from the two-gods structure,
'cause when we had the two gods, we had the two of them at the end
with Janus, the good god, showing up and essentially saying,
"Well, Eris, you did give your word. You gotta give the Book back."
And it just wasn't as satisfying as having
a one-on-one face-off between the two of them.
It made our leads passive.
It was always a struggle, though, because how do you defeat a goddess?
The traditional way to defeat a villain, frankly, is to kill them.
- They die at the end of the picture. - They fall from a high place.
Yeah, that's the animated tradition.
So we worked very hard
and had all sorts of permutations here of how to defeat Eris.
We even had moments where Sinbad would open the Book of Peace
and the light of the Book of Peace burned Eris and physically defeated her.
And yet, it became more satisfying to have her admit defeat here
and do it in her own sort of style.
So, I think we've achieved a sort of rarity
where the villainess is defeated and yet survives,
goes her own way.
And leaves room for the Book coming back to be the big climax here,
which went through a lot of design ideas,
going from electrical bolts of lightning scouring the city
and darkness peeling away from the edges.
We opted for light rays to come in, in a more gentle reveal.
Big, very difficult camera move.
Anybody who's tried to draw an animation knows that
doing that 360 degrees around a character is difficult.
We had a computer reference, but it ended up being all-drawn animation.
Actually, I think the beginning is still a CG
and there's a takeover.
Yeah, it's a takeover.
- This is what remains of the Manoli. - The Manoli.
He's still there.
It's nice to allow Sinbad to be Sinbad here.
So, in spite of his victory, he can't help but be the jokester.
Brad Pitt loved stuff like this.
He would take great delight in the ways that Sinbad was devilish
and then really milk it and have fun with the performance.
We get little glimpses of Syracuse.
As Raymond indicated earlier,
the full design of the city with its lochs and waterways
and multiple levels was something we maybe will share on the DVD
with some of the artwork, as not all of it made it into the picture,
and was quite elaborate.
It really made you wanna live in Syracuse.
I was always picking out where my apartment would be.
This is an important moment for Sinbad.
Ten years ago, he had left Syracuse
because he didn't want to come between Proteus and Marina.
And here, he's doing the noble thing yet again.
Choosing to leave without the woman he loves.
Bob Logan gave us that line, one of the storyboard artists.
Funny send-off for Proteus.
This is a scene that in spite of quite a few permutations of the film,
this scene always stayed the same.
Even as we were redefining relationships in the picture,
I think this was one of the least touched scenes
for the last couple of years of the story development. It really...
Except when a woman came from behind after she left and said,
- "Oh, Proteus," - When there were two gods, yes.
That's how we leave the consolation prize for Proteus
where he saw this pretty lady behind the bushes or something.
Somebody's mopping the floor...
He was moving on really quickly after Marina takes off.
He certainly deserves a girl, doesn't he? He's such a trouper, our Proteus.
There was one late-to-the-game change here.
We actually showed the picture in pretty much finished form
to Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey's partner in running DreamWorks,
and he had a very simple idea.
The very end of the scene actually concluded
not just with Marina saying, "Oh, Proteus,"
but with her adding, "Thank you."
Steven said, "'Thank you' doesn't work. It makes Proteus weak.
"It actually diminishes."
And so, she used to say, "Thank you," as she turned her head,
and it was a very simple thing to remove, that lip sync.
Done very late in the game,
but it was an example of how Steven can contribute
with such a simple comment and really strengthen a scene.
There's the dog again.
You see a little more of Syracuse.
I'll show you my apartment next time we cut back.
It's off and to the left. It's got a fantastic view of the water.
Beautiful paintings of the palace by Richard Daskas,
and other scenes in here by Tianyi Han.
That's where they would have gone off the lochs.
Yeah, off the edge of the world...
Notice it just sort of ends out there.
That's because there are giant 16-story lochs
that hoist massive flagships up into the city.
Very tough stuff with the animation.
We ended up adding one second, a mere 24 frames,
to the head of Sinbad's realization
just to give him a little more time to catch his breath.
All those kind of ideas come in at the last minute
as part of the fine-tuning.
We used to have a very long, extended, rather racy kiss here at the end
that went all the way into the sunset,
but the matchmaker of the film did turn out to be Spike,
so we decided it was appropriate to let him join the fun here,
and so, Spike goes to his dogapult.
What a great exit line for Marina, "I'll protect you."
Perfectly characterizes their relationship, I think.
It's bowling for Sinbad.
Strike!
How many dogs did we record for Spike?
I think we had nine or so different dogs in the studio
barking into microphones for us.
Thank you, guys, so much for taking the ride with us,
if anybody's made it through this far.
Hope we've told you a little bit about the film that wasn't obvious,
given you a little background on it.
- Hope you enjoyed it. Thank you very much. - Thanks, everybody.