I'm John Dykstra.
I was the senior visual effects supervisor on Stuart Little.
I guess the simplest definition of my job...
...is to oversee all of the illusions that were created in the film...
...in the digital world.
My name is Jerome Chen...
...I was the visual effects supervisor for the film.
And my job was to, in conjunction with John...
...really help bring all these illusions to life.
One of the things that was most interesting to me about this movie...
...is when I was talked to by Rob and the people at Columbia...
...the challenges that they presented seemed pretty daunting.
We said immediately we could do all of that...
...because if you said you couldn't do that, you wouldn't get the job.
But as we worked on this character...
...we found that there were several things...
...that we were going to have to do...
...that we didn't know exactly how to do.
And... We saw actually five groups of challenges.
The first one would be of course the fur.
Then we had to worry about cloth...
...because Stuart is a walking, talking mouse who wears clothes.
Then you have the issue of his performance.
How do you make him convincing and engaging?
And then there's this whole aspect of integration.
He needed to feel real.
The Stuart Little from E.B. White's novel...
...was most charming and most imaginative...
...but he existed in the real world.
And that was the kind of standard that was set here. So he had to exist...
...in this reality here.
One of the things that impressed me was that from the onset...
...Rob decided that they were going to create a world...
...that wasn't exactly the real world, it was a stylized world...
...in which the conceit of a talking mouse would be totally acceptable.
The look of the sets, the look of the exteriors...
...the actors that were chosen, and even the costumes that they wore...
...all were selected with an eye to keeping...
...a defined reality.
One of the things I think is true...
...is that when we set about making this...
...we knew that the first time that the mouse was on-screen...
...you had to totally accept him.
If he didn't look real the first time you saw him...
...you were gonna spend the rest of the movie looking for flaws.
And that's why the focus on this first shot was so intense.
- And it took a long time to do. - This did take a long time.
The problem of doing this first shot is...
...it was the beginning of our production schedule...
...and it was during the time we were trying to find Stuart's look.
So you had to do some research and development...
...at the same time you had to make this...
This shot appear very convincing.
We got to continue to work on this shot for quite a while.
One of the things that's true...
...is that although he's composed of several different pieces:
The physique, which is the physical shape of his body...
...there's the fur that covers it, there's the clothing that goes onto it...
...and there's the technique that was used to animate him.
One of the things that happened was, as we improved each of those facets...
...we'd end up going back and redoing shots.
So each iteration of the mouse would include some new facet...
...and we had to make sure he remained consistent.
So the first shots that we did had to look like the last shots.
...100 yards faster than you can say, "Ready, set, go."
You certainly...
As we got further along into the production, actually...
...we went back and inserted more close-ups.
We found that after the first few rough cuts of the movie...
...you missed seeing Stuart, you wanted to be more intimate with him.
So there's a couple shots here...
...that, even after the first sequences were locked...
...in terms of their shots...
...we would go back in and actually throw in a close-up.
- Actually, this is one of them. - Yeah.
One of the things that's interesting is...
...because we used animators from a variety of backgrounds...
...some of whom had animated 3-D objects, like the Pillsbury Doughboy...
...and some who had worked in traditional two-dimensional animation...
...there had to be created an interface for them, with this Stuart character.
Perfect.
Mr. and Mrs. Little...
- Was is Maya, Jerome? - Yeah, we used Maya for this.
And we had to create a custom environment...
...that made it easy for an animator to learn a computer and animate...
...and not get caught up in all the technical stuff.
Because we really wanted performance.
That was the key to really making him believable.
The computer actually had too many options.
The animator would be frustrated by having to make so many choices...
...so it had to be winnowed down and given as a series of simpler decisions...
...with the ability, of course, to get into it at a more complex level.
The interesting thing is that the shot that's coming up...
...sort of establishes the quality of the Stuart Little world.
This is New York as seen through the eyes of the Littles.
And of course, it's not quite a period place...
...but it's not quite a contemporary place.
This was a great shot. This is...
This is a combination of matte paintings and live action...
...seen in the foreground.
And it's shot at the, what, Paramount backlot?
That street was Paramount backlot.
This is... The Illusion Arts people painted these clouds for us.
The world where the Littles live, the Littles' house...
...that's sandwiched between these skyscrapers.
The skyscrapers are all Illusion, big matte painting shot here.
Done in 3-D by Syd Dutton's people at Illusion Arts.
Well, Stuart, here we are...
Everything down here is actually a set. A Central Park set.
- It was on Stage 15. - Yeah, at the Culver lot.
Something inside.
Here Stuart comes home.
I think one of the keys to making Stuart look real...
...is that we had to keep all of the things that would appear in the real world...
...with a real mouse in real evidence.
In fact, we had to amplify some of them.
Reflections in the shiny floor.
The shadows that appear where his feet come into contact with the surface.
Consistency of the focus. Making sure that the mouse is the right focus...
...for the scene in which he's appearing.
We can talk about the focus issue.
Little depth of field and height of field.
Focus was a big issue in this, because he was so small.
It's hard for a cameraman too...
...because they're shooting with basically nothing there...
...and they have to overcome their instinct to focus on something they see.
What they're really doing is focusing on is something that's not there.
One of the things about the performance...
...the live actors, of course...
...didn't have a real mouse to look at when they were on set.
What they did was is they used a laser that was synchronized to the camera.
There was a small red dot that would appear...
...where the mouse was intended to be...
...to give them an eye line, or something to look at.
And that laser was phased. It was turned on and off...
...so it was in synchronization with the shutter.
So the actors could see the red light, but the red light didn't record on film.
So for the most part...
...you have the actors actually looking where Stuart is.
As opposed to what the cats did.
The cameraman had a problem focusing on things...
...where he couldn't see a specific reference.
We'd put a little wire or something in the frame for him to focus on.
We'd have to go back digitally and paint out that reference point.
...tired after school.
Again, it's those very, very small additions...
...that give the character his final sense of reality.
The mouse originally was designed...
...with the potential of having whites in his eyes and an iris...
...so he could look out of the corner of his eye.
When Rob looked at these designs...
...he decided that he didn't like the idea that there was an eyeball...
...or an iris in the eye.
And we ended up with real mouse eyes, which are just black.
So we used the reflections of the scene...
...as seen in the shiny surface of the eyeball...
...to help give direction to Stuart's looks.
Sure is roomy.
That he couldn't have whites in the eyes presented a challenge to the animators...
...because then you couldn't have him look askance at somebody.
He really had to convey where he was looking with a turn of his head or...
You know, it made animation much more difficult for them.
It also gives him a much more charming appearance...
...because his body language is used a lot more.
One of the things about the character's expressions...
...is not only the fact that he can be charming in the extreme...
...it's also that he can convey subtle emotion.
It's a simple transition from a look of surprise...
...or in this case, a look of welcome...
Excuse me, not a look of welcome, after all.
Maybe that was in an earlier version. But the mouse's expressions...
...have to change in a subtle fashion as well as a broad fashion...
...in order to give him the kind of range he needs as a lead actor.
That was... That was a challenge.
These talking-cat shots were done by Bill Westenhofer's group...
...at Rhythm & Hues.
They did a great job.
This really draws home Snowbell's character...
...and how he feels about Stuart here.
One of the things about cats is you can rely on them...
...to do exactly what they want to do.
And cats as actors...
...are no different than the cats that exist in people's homes.
And as a result, you'd go into a scene...
I had the good fortune to shoot the second unit material.
You'd go in with one idea of what the cat should do...
...and the cat had a different idea of what the scene was about.
And you'd end up spending a fairly large amount of time...
...trying to get the cat to do something simple.
Stuart, you too.
Okay, Mom.
This sequence here, actually...
...George and Stuart's first morning together...
...this was a big push for us to complete very early on.
But the studio was able to look at this and really get a feel for Stuart.
And we got a huge reaction out of, you know...
...the possibilities here.
Because up until this point, nobody had really seen him.
We'd shot all this footage without any examples to show the crew...
...or even Geena and Hugh, what their costar looked like.
So for many months we just looked at dailies of empty plates and things.
When we completed this sequence...
...it really showed everybody what Stuart was gonna be like.
Actually, his teeth, if you notice, are modelled...
Stuart's teeth are modelled after our vice president of animation, Barry Weiss.
So Barry loaned them to us...
...and we made a duplicate.
Okay.
One of the things about Stuart...
...is along with making him look real as a mouse character...
...we had to make him work in all of the environments.
Which means that he has to deal with things like water.
Not only the fur, but the cloth also have to deal with moisture.
It was hard enough coming up with just a fur look and a look for the cloth...
...but now he had to, you know...
We had to deal with the wetness. What do clothes look like...
...when they're damp, when they're half wet?
We also had a problem of keeping Stuart looking cute, even when wet.
You've probably all seen what animals look like in water...
...and they're not as cute.
And so since he is a movie star, we had to work pretty hard...
...at making sure he still looked appealing...
...after he's been dunked in water.
Honey, shall we talk to George before you go?
- About what? - About Stuart.
He hasn't exactly embraced the situation.
Snowbell! Thank goodness you're here. I'm locked in the washer!
This is interesting, because we got a mix here of real water...
...that the clothes are in.
And then computer-generated water that is flung up onto the glass...
...and the distortions on the surface of the water...
...where the mouse is standing in it were also created on the computer.
...traffic, yawn, lick myself.
And believe me, that could take hours if you do it right. Ciao!
Are you sure that Stuart is happy here?
The shot of him against the glass...
...was added actually months after we finished the sequence.
Rob wanted to go back and add more peril to Stuart's situation.
He wanted to have the water almost up to his neck.
The thing that's interesting to me...
...coming from a background of conventional film effects...
...is that it's true that there's nothing that's impossible now.
Used to be that visual effects supervisors had to be the naysayers.
You'd read the script or you'd be on stage...
...or you'd be talking to people about what was possible to do...
...and you'd say, "We can't do that...
...because the shirt is blue, or you can't move the camera."
And in fact, with contemporary digital technology...
...there's virtually nothing that you can't do.
And as a result what we have...
...is a real focus on the quality of the product...
...as opposed to the process involved in the creation of the product.
So on set before, we used to say no all the time.
Now when we're asked if we can do that, we kind of shrug and go:
"Yeah, okay. Yeah, I guess we can. We'll give it a shot."
This is a shot where our character is an animatronic.
That's a little model of Stuart in the bed back there.
Actually, in this one you'll see Stuart in Geena's purse...
...and he's actually a little puppet.
Come on, George. This'll be fun.
- I don't wanna go shopping with Stuart. - George!
Maybe you should...
An animatronic is a character that is animated by mechanical means.
And he's really in the shot, as opposed to the character that we created in CGI.
CGI meaning, "computer generated imagery."
And that character, the Stuart that we created in the computer...
...was built from whole cloth, a pixel at a time.
Come on, George. You have a boat, a beautiful one.
It was hard to make an animatronic for this...
...because of how small you had to construct.
If you had a life-size Stuart, an animatronic at 4 inches tall...
...it's very difficult to make the mechanical components that small.
The miniaturization isn't sophisticated to handle that.
And it's difficult to get really lifelike movement out of it.
So to give us more flexibility...
...we started doing a lot of these shots digitally...
...once we found that we could accomplish almost any performance.
When we started the film, we started out with all options open.
We looked at doing motion-capture...
...meaning putting sensors on a human and having them act like a mouse...
...where we could capture their motion...
...and using that to actually animate Stuart.
At the same time we pursued conventional animation technique...
...which involved the creation of this specialised interface...
...for traditional animators working with a three-dimensional character.
And we also looked at this animatronic issue...
...the creation of a puppet that was mechanically operated off-screen...
...which would give us the motion of the mouse on camera.
The problem with the animatronic character...
...was he had to be a clockwork component.
He was only 4 inches tall, so his wrists had to turn...
...his fingers had to move, his head had to move.
He had to smile. His eyes had to move.
And it just became a far too difficult mechanical task.
What we ended up with was a little mouse who was 4 inches tall...
...who was on a rod, attached to a box about foot square...
...with about 100 feet of cable coming out of it.
And it wasn't too practical.
The 1 -foot square box that weighed 100 pounds wouldn't fit in Gina's purse.
So we used in that case a more static version of Stuart.
Not so much an animatronic as a puppet.
Our strategy for the puppet was basically a stunt double.
If he was in the distance, we would use him.
Now, Stuart was key-frame animated. He was animated...
...basically in a traditional manner in the computer.
He was not motion-captured.
Little hey, Little ho!
We come bearing gifts for young Stuart.
Yes, where is my new nephew?
One of the things about traditional animation is that for many years...
...traditional animation consisted of a series of still photographs...
...where the subject went through a progression of moves.
One of the things that the computer has allowed us do...
...is to take the animator's art of frame-by-frame...
...definition of the motion, and add motion-blur.
That's the blur that occurs when you move the subject during photography...
...which is the way real photography works.
That motion blur goes a long ways towards making...
...the animation of the character not have any steppiness to it...
...which is an important part of our character. He moves fast sometimes.
We'd like to introduce you to someone.
Obviously, the motion blur also helps the reality of Stuart.
It makes him appear more real, as if he was photographed in the scene.
The end goal here is the audience needs to feel like he was really there.
So... Which makes the integration of the character more difficult.
I mean, after we create the character in the computer-graphic world...
...we then have to apply him to this photography.
And we do that all in the digital composite.
Oh, Stuart, look.
Look at that.
Coming up, I think, is a shot here where we refer to...
...the character as a DOS, which is "dot on screen."
Climb on up here, son.
That's where he's so small...
...that you can't tell whether he's just a white speck...
...or whether he's an animated character.
The tough thing is, all these actors here, when we shot this...
...are looking at nothing.
So they're trying to be convincing in their appreciation of Stuart.
May I say something?
That's the most amazing laser dot I've ever seen.
...we used to tell fairy tales...
...of finding our families and having a party like this.
A party with cakes and presents...
Yeah, we had a comic actor named Jim Doughan who was on-set...
...and he would read Stuart's lines for everybody to interact with.
And he was very funny.
He often had the actors cracking up so much...
...they'd have to cut.
There was the dot on-screen.
...fairy tales are real.
These shots are very wide.
He's in a lot of these shots, he's just very small.
Because he's part of the action here...
...he has to belong in every shot.
The cats have some of the best lines in the movie.
The cat, in order to make him talk...
...they had to create an actual physical model of a cat's mouth...
...including its teeth and its tongue, and put them into a cat...
...whose facial expression was more that of a cat...
...which is generally sort of nonplussed.
The animators moved not only the mouth and the cheeks and the jaw...
...but they also moved, in some cases, the brows of the eyes and the ears.
...summer days playing catch?
Take your brother outside and toss around the old horsehide.
Yeah, what do you say, George? You ready?
Are you all nuts?
Bicycles and bowling balls?
The animation...
The animation for the cats was conventional only in the sense...
...that key frames were used to position the jaw...
...or the nose or the eye, in terms of where it was meant to go.
But because the cat's fur had to go...
...back over the model of the object that was being animated...
...this work was done also in a computer.
And the surfaces which you see are a mixture...
...of fur that was created in the computer and added to the surface...
...and what's called texture mapping...
...or basically a projection of the real cat's fur back onto the surface.
It's actually a very sophisticated technique, and it's very, very difficult.
Rhythm & Hues mastered it through the different Babe movies.
It really involves making an extremely accurate model...
...in the computer of every cat that talks...
...then making sure that the interior of the mouth...
...and the size of the teeth also look convincing.
So it's in many ways as difficult as a Stuart shot, in some sense.
I feel an empty space inside me...
One of the things that was tough about Stuart...
...was to make our white character have the right contour and shaping.
In order to see his expression, you have to see the shapes of his face.
In order to see the shapes of his face, you have to have a dark and light area.
What we found out, however, was that if you didn't make white surfaces...
...some place on the character's head, he looked like a grey mouse.
He was very difficult to light and to keep within the boundaries.
If you made his head too bright...
...you'd lose the detail in the highlight area.
If you made his head too dark, he'd go grey.
So it was a very tricky balance fitting him into each scene...
...making sure the light sources looked as though...
...they were the same light sources lighting the other subject matter...
...and keeping his white balance right...
...without him looking too bright or too dark.
You also had to make sure he looked furry enough.
Even though in the computer-graphic model...
...he actually has, you know, 600,000 hairs on his head...
...sometimes when Stuart was smaller in the frame, he looked...
We'd get comments that he looked too smooth.
And we'd have to go in and cheat.
Usually we'd brighten the rim light up...
...the light would basically brighten the hairs on the side of his head...
...and give the sense that he was furry...
...even though you actually couldn't see hairs.
One of the things we did, in some cases...
Well, Stuart had different levels of detail for different sizes.
In the extreme close-ups we had to treat his fur differently...
...than we treated his fur in the wide shots.
And in some cases, we'd made his fur more coarse when he was smaller...
...in order for him to... The fur to be more visible...
...along with the rim light issue.
...you and I got off on the wrong paw.
This shot here is the one where the mouse walks across the floor.
And my daughter looked at it and said, "He slides."
My 11 -year-old daughter, who doesn't do visual effects...
...as a avocation or otherwise...
...had that perception that all kids are graced with...
...and she intuitively saw a mismatch in our match move.
Let me in! I'm starving!
Match moving is something that played an important part...
...in making this movie successful.
The ability to move the camera without having to record the motion...
...as you do with conventional motion-control photography.
And to be able to extract that camera motion from the original photography...
...to use to photograph the CGI object that's going to be put into the scene...
...allowed the filmmaker to have that same...
...intuitive approach to making the movie.
If the actor wanted to move more rapidly on one take...
...or more slowly on another, you could do both of them...
...without having to slow the entire process down...
...to insert this mechanical monster of a motor-driven camera system.
Plus, shooting cats, cats move around a lot.
You always keep the camera wild and it kind of takes the curse off.
It used to be that effect shots were always locked-off cameras.
You could always spot an effects shot before it came on...
...because the frame would become still.
But here, if you watch the whole movie...
...most of the shots have the camera always doing some slight adjustment.
It keeps it... Gives it this much more realistic feel.
Do you know anybody? I'm not so happy with mine.
So all these cat shots here were done with this 3-D projection method.
And all it needed was creation of the 3-D mouths and actual whiskers.
The thing about it is you actually have to paint out the original whiskers...
...then after you animate, the whiskers gotta move how the cheeks move...
...so then 3-D whiskers are put back on top of it.
...forgot to thank you.
Hey.
There's even cases where the expressions in the face or the eyes...
...the eyes open too much...
...and you actually have to put CG, computer-graphic eyes in.
So these... The cats are a blend of all kinds of techniques.
Say, they're really putting some wild prizes in there, huh, Monty?
Oh, hello. You must be a friend of Snowbell's.
I'm Stuart.
- Aren't you gonna run? - Why?
Because you're a mouse.
I'm not just a mouse.
Stuart has several different costumes.
And each costume had to go through a procedure of testing...
...and then evaluation and then modification...
...till we came to our final decision.
I think that this sweater that the mouse is wearing here...
...probably took the longest of any article of clothing Stuart wears.
I don't know for sure, but I think it's something like six months?
This sweater, which looks pretty generic...
...but initially he had a V-neck sweater. A sweater that had a T-shirt underneath.
He had much more, I guess, a cowl neck sweater.
He had a cardigan at one point.
We also went through different colours. It was orange, it was tan.
- It was... - Big stripes, little stripes.
We finally arrived at this one here.
That had to hurt.
In case you didn't notice...
...the cat that's flying through the air is not a real cat.
No cats were hurt in the filming of this movie.
We actually had to put a real cat's face on a flying...
A little stuffy cat, basically, we threw at the camera.
A stuffy is a puppet-like rag version of the cat.
Actually, I think it was basically a cat doll...
...that someone found at a store.
Jerome very carefully threw the cat through the air at the camera.
And then subsequent to that, we added the face on.
Interesting about the cats...
...it's true that no cats were injured during filming...
...but cats do one thing, which is whatever they wanna do.
And it's not unusual to have a cat simply refuse to work any further.
And so there were duplicate cats, and if you watch carefully...
...you can actually see Snowbell change his facial features.
Because although the cats were very close matches...
...they're not exact matches. So when a cat basically got full...
...because that's how you motivate cats to work...
...you give them food.
And when a cat got tired of being hungry...
...he went in his cage and they'd bring a new one.
Sometimes they didn't look exactly the same.
What's it look like, picklehead?
Could we play with it? Please...
This was the basement set of the Littles' house. It's a great set.
I wish... I would've liked to feature it even more.
Somebody help me!
This is the longest tail you'll ever see a mouse have.
In this case, actually, we had to do something special...
...because his original tail wasn't built to be that long.
And they came up with a scene where his tail had to be 10 times longer.
So just like if you were building a real puppet...
...we had to go back in and design a new tail for him.
There's the famous red car.
Again, in terms of this 2 percent...
...that makes a difference between reality and a stylized character.
The reflections of the mouse in the car. His shadows on the surfaces.
The way his clothing interacts...
...with the surfaces that he comes into contact with...
...are all critical in terms of fooling my daughter.
The 11-year-old.
And the miniature car...
...was built to have a suspension system...
...and the door would actually open.
We put this little gag in where the car would actually...
...depress a little bit.
Oh, that.
That's the Wasp.
The shots where Stuart is in George's hand...
...or later on in Hugh's or Geena's hand...
...those were the hardest to do...
...because they're difficult to match-move, as John was talking about.
Match-moving is really rebuilding in the computer, the real camera.
And in this case also, you have to, in essence...
...animate the person's hands...
...to make sure that perspective and everything matches.
So when Stuart's sitting in the hand...
...he's reacting to the shift of people's... However he's being held.
That was Charlie's...
Charlie Clavadetscher was our match-move maven, wasn't he?
Yes, he was our lead. He's very good.
He has a... Basically, he has an instinctive understanding...
...of how to re-create a camera move.
Because there's no way...
Since we don't record the camera moves...
...since the gear is too cumbersome and it slows photography...
...we are, after the fact, trying to re-create it.
Charlie's always skulking around the stage, taking pictures.
They wonder who this guy is who's in the background.
Basically what he's doing is taking pictures...
...so that he can re-create the set in the computer in a very simple form...
...to give us surfaces upon which to put the character.
Or in the case of a hand, he has to create a model of the hand...
...and track the model of the hand to the hand of the real actor...
...so that Stuart has a place to stand when he's being animated.
- That would be great. - All of us together.
The whole family.
There were a lot of shots in this movie.
And one of the things we had to do was to keep track of all this information.
And I think that some of the information storage systems...
Not storage systems, but some of the information handling systems...
...that our producer, Michelle Murdocca, came up with...
...were critical in allowing us to complete this thing in time.
They're sort of the unsung heroes. They keep the train on the tracks...
...as we would want to go off the tracks, if ever there were an opportunity.
Exactly. I mean, talking about the work is one thing...
...but the process...
...the whole production machinery we had to create...
...to keep the quality of work level...
...at the same level, so that at the end we weren't rushing to finish...
...100 shots in the last three weeks, was an amazing task...
...supervised by our producers.
Mainly Michelle, and the digital producer, Lydia Bottegoni...
...and Debbie Denise.
We even have an equivalent of a digital production manager.
His name was Jody Echegaray, and he basically kept us all on track.
Tinker Bell! He called me Tinker Bell.
- You're a funny guy. - Yeah, whatever.
Jeez, house cats.
Just a side issue, one of the things about cats...
...is if you take two cats that aren't familiar with one another...
...and point them at each other...
...the last thing they want to do is look at each other.
So you'll see in all of the scenes where you see cats...
...they tend to look anywhere but at the other cats.
It takes an enormous amount of work to get these cats to look at each other.
This is the boat race. There's an interesting thing about this boat race.
There was a component... This was the live-action material...
...the thing that you're seeing here with the kids inspecting the boats.
And that was done on a stage at Columbia.
And in order to match this...
...we went into a tank at the Paramount lot.
It was... The tank was 125 by 100.
It had a huge backing behind it, and we had to cover it...
...because of the soft light that we used on this stage, with a silk.
And the silk is basically a big piece of rayon that's translucent...
...much like the sail you see here.
As light passes through it, it's diffused and soft.
We had one acre of silk in the air on cables...
...while we were photographing this sequence.
And there's a transition point where the set becomes the tank...
...once the boats go under the bridge.
We actually had to make sure these worlds matched.
I don't like that child.
All set to get under way.
This is interesting. This is another costume change for Stuart.
He now has a sailor outfit...
...which again, had to go through these various approval stages.
One of the things you're gonna see, Stuart interacts with a remote control.
Turns out, that in order to move a real remote control in the way...
...that the animated character would, didn't seem practical.
So in fact, the remote control that Stuart's carrying...
...was generated in the computer as well.
Actually, that was a general rule of thumb. If Stuart touched a prop...
...and had to interact with it, we'd always make that prop...
...a computer-graphic element, since we can control the animation.
So Stuart could have the weight and really feel like he was hefting it.
It added more problems for us...
...because in addition to having to make Stuart little...
...you'd have to make the prop little.
And it didn't help in this case that the actual remote control...
...the real one actually looks very synthetic. There's no detail.
It's all primary colours...
...and intrinsically would look somewhat artificial.
So it's hard for us to... You know, we matched the real one...
...but it ended up looking like a synthetic element.
So we did a lot of things to make it look dirtier.
...never stop trying. Okay?
Okay.
One of the things about the boats in this sequence...
...is that they didn't float on top of the water.
These boats were controlled from beneath the water on tracks.
Eric Allard did the mechanical effects on the movie.
The boats themselves were driven by cables...
...and they ran on tracks, so they would do exactly the same thing each time.
The foot that came down and broke the remote...
...was actually Rob Minkoff's foot.
He wanted to crush the remote himself.
- I couldn't grip it. - Nice going...
No pent-up hostility here.
There's Anton, someone that you'll come to hate.
All boats on the starting line immediately.
George, wait.
Oh, honey. Everything will be all right.
It's always funny when you put extras into scenes...
...you have to watch for the ones who look at the camera...
...or act in extreme ways, and you end up cutting the film around people...
...who are doing a little too much jumping and yelling.
Or stare straight into the lens.
There's some shots later where...
...some of the people in the background are doing some pretty funny things.
They're very enthusiastic for this race.
I'll be right back.
George, you know what?
Just because we can't be in the race...
...doesn't mean our family outing has to be ruined.
So we have a transition point coming up here.
Once the boats go under the bridge...
...they go into the tank world, which basically was the second unit material...
...that was shot by John.
It was interesting...
...because this is an opportunity to do a sequence as a director.
One of the things that we did...
...in order to make the sequence more practical to do...
...is we created the tank, and the boats and the tracks...
...in the computer in a very simple form.
Much like the grey mouse.
And we went through with the computer model...
...positioned the camera to determine where the boats were...
...where the camera was going to go...
...and what the backing would be.
And because we previewed the shots in a simple form...
...I was able to try lots and lots of different combinations...
...to get the sequence to work.
And because we knew before we arrived at the tank...
...what the shots were going to be...
...it was easy for the mechanical effects people...
...to set the boats up with the proper movement...
...the proper speed and proper position.
And for the grips, who are the guys who handle the camera equipment...
...to set the camera up in the proper place.
My guess is, we were about one quarter of the time...
...that it would've taken to do the work if we'd showed up...
...with the boats and camera and said, "What are we gonna do now?"
This whole sequence is very close to what was previs'd in the computer.
It's a matched blue screen shot, there's a matte painting behind them.
Central Park apartments.
The boats for the sequence are actually two different sizes.
The Wasp and the Womrath, which are the two featured boats...
...were built at one-to-one, which is basically a boat...
...that's about 4 feet long for the Womrath.
And then we built a version that was 8 feet for the close-up work...
...where we see wheels spinning, sails moving...
...or the two boats crashing into one another.
It was interesting because even though you know they're toy boats...
...the larger scale model is built so it would appear more realistic...
...even though it really only should be 4 feet long.
But you want all the additional detail.
The original... One of the earlier ideas for this boat sequence...
...is actually... Stuart...
Basically becomes... This was gonna be his vision of what the race would be.
Rather than the realistic representation, it became a more fantasy-like...
...battle with pirates and things like that.
The version here is a much more realistic...
...more perilous adventure.
One of the conceits was to stay at mouse level...
...for the material involving the boat...
...to sort of treat it as though it were a full-size race...
...and we were full-size cameramen.
Or that it was a mouse-size race and we were mouse-size cameramen.
However you wanna approach it.
But to stay down on the water to give scale to the boats.
And we also photographed the boats at a high camera rate...
...which results in what you consider to be slow motion.
But that slow motion gave the sense of scale to the boats.
So water moves more slowly, has a little more weight.
The sails move a little more slowly.
And that gave a little bit more sense of jeopardy to the things...
...that are happening to Stuart during the boat race.
One of the things you'll see in all the Stuart shots here...
...is that we applied a wind...
...that ripples through his clothing and on his fur.
We had to came up with some specialised software...
...to create this effect. It's very subtle, but it's something you'd miss...
...it if you didn't see the back of his flap moving in the wind...
...and the hair stirred by it.
You really see the wind here.
This is also a CG rope, the sheet line that he bites.
Following our policy that anything he touches...
...would become...
Or if he had to interact with it, becomes synthetic.
Even the wheel that he steers on the boats...
...whenever he's touching it, those are all...
We did those in CG.
It was pretty exciting shooting this boat race.
There were days... If the wind got above 15 miles per hour, we shut down...
...because this huge silk that we had also was a huge sail.
And it seemed somehow appropriate to be sitting on the deck...
...beneath all of this waving, white material...
...and shouting orders. It was great.
It was like being... It was like being Horatio Hornblower.
On a couple of days, we had winds that were in excess of 30 miles an hour...
...and we actually had cables break...
...and tore some of the silk, which was quite exciting.
Because as soon as the wind started to get above a certain height...
...they'd shout the alarm and everybody had to leave...
...and move out from underneath the sail.
When the sheet line snapped, it would whip across the pond...
...and if you were in the way you wouldn't happy.
Little high, Little low!
There's another costume for Stuart, the tuxedo.
This tuxedo was especially difficult...
...because it's white and it's pretty featureless...
...and it can show actually all the problems you have in cloth...
...meaning, computer graphic cloth.
The simulator we use to create the cloth dynamics...
...actually can cause a lot of strange artefacts.
Little weird what we call noise, little pops in the cloth.
And usually when you had a plaid pattern or colour on it, it would hide it.
In this case, he had a white tuxedo.
Luckily, most of the shots are from a distance.
But these took...
Some of these took two months just to create cloth for.
What you have coming up actually is an introduction...
...of two more CG mice characters.
This is a great shot here.
The reveal of Stuart's fake parents.
We took everything we learned about creating Stuart by himself...
...and applied it toward these two characters...
...who are equally as difficult.
You'll notice her coat actually has fur trim on it.
So not only do you have to deal with the realistic fur of her head...
...you have her coat too...
...and the layers of cloth that interact with each other.
The Reginald character and the Camille character...
...were more caricature, I think, than Stuart.
They were a little bit broader, more cartoon-like.
And I think one of the challenges was to keep them...
...in our real world, and at the same time...
...keep the charm that was designed into their body shapes.
Of course, when you're animating some of these characters...
...the short arms and legs that Reginald has, present a problem.
If he wants to fold his fingers on his chest, his arms aren't long enough.
So in some cases, we actually took the character's arms...
...and stretched them during the shot. So as he'd reach forward...
...his arm would get longer inside the sleeve.
Of course the sleeve would have to go with it.
So in some cases the characters do change their shape during the move.
In traditional animation... Cell animation, 2-D animation...
...it's pretty common to adjust your character...
...to be able do some action.
And even though you can do that in the computer...
...it became our convention that Stuart and Reginald and Camille...
...all still had to follow some bounds of reality.
You really felt that they were real. There are some shots earlier on...
...where Stuart's face may squash and stretch...
...for performance enhancement.
We found it actually took you out of the movie.
So you'll find less and less of it...
...from here on out for the rest of the picture.
He continues to appear real.
You may not realise it, but I'm sure he does.
What's interesting here...
...is actually we had to go back and spend some time...
...making Camille's eyelashes appear the right way...
...so that when she bats them, they had the right effect.
We designed it first and then when we started doing the shots...
...Rob made a comment that he didn't like the eyelashes.
We had to go back and fix those.
But Stuart lives here.
George, come on...
This shot that's coming up...
...took, I think, almost a year to finish.
This is a three-shot of...
...first Stuart, and then Reginald will come in.
It was an incredible amount of integration and shadows...
...and things just to make them appear here.
The cloth simulation for this took many, many, many months to do.
Plus, you can see how long the shot was.
Hey, taxi!
What's a mouse have to do to get a cab in this city?
Any given shot, from the time it began to the time it completed, on average...
...would be some place from six to eight weeks, I believe.
And some of them were more difficult than others.
So they didn't all take a year.
It usually involves several people.
You have an animator...
Actually, first the match-mover, who created the camera.
Then the animator would do his work.
After the animation was finished...
...you'd have a cloth artist create the cloth.
Then you'd have a lighting artist, who then lights Stuart.
These shots coming... The hardest ones to do were anytime...
...where he's in the hand of an actor.
And they were especially difficult to make sure it felt like...
...he was actually sitting in the hand.
I love you too, Mom.
Those are the things that become distracting to a viewer.
Stuart's performing here and if you have artefacts...
...that distract you from the actual performance...
...then you have a problem.
It's why they make actors look great.
They don't have flyaways in their hair...
...they don't have smudges on their faces.
You expect everyone in the movies to look perfect...
...even if they're supposed to be dirty.
In this case, the suitcase in that shot was the real suitcase.
Since Stuart didn't touch it...
...we didn't wanna waste our time having to make it.
This one is CG...
...but we had to make sure it matched back to the real one...
...that was in the previous shot.
Let's just make them go away. We're bigger than they are.
We'll say, "Go, shoo."
In this sequence, originally they weren't supposed to carry Stuart.
The idea was, Stuart would climb down the steps by himself.
While blocking the motion, it turned out it would take too long...
...for Stuart to get down the stairs.
So we improvised right on the set and decided that:
"Why don't we just carry Stuart. Have Hugh carry Stuart in his hand."
And it makes the scene all the more touching...
...how they have to say goodbye to him.
One of the difficulties with the mouse...
...is he's very short and everybody else is tall.
So when you start composing scenes...
...you have to be very careful about where you put him.
If you leave him on the floor...
...and you start looking up passed him to the adults, they seem distorted.
There's also an issue of depth of field...
...which is, when you focus on something in the foreground...
...like a book or your hand, the things behind it go out of focus.
So if we focused the lens on Stuart, who is in the foreground...
...very small and very close, the things behind him tended to be soft.
And that was a difficult conceit to work with because the character...
...so often was separate and apart from the live actors.
Putting him in the hand was a means of bringing him closer to their faces...
...and allowing, well, more problems than just depth of field...
...but allowing us to keep them all in sharp focus...
...so we could watch performance from one to the other.
There's actually a thing we did later on, where we were shooting...
...plates that had a foreground. The ground...
...would be out of focus in the front and then be in sharp focus behind...
...and we wanted to put Stuart in foreground.
We came up with a thing called "height of field."
So we'd soften the focus of the character's feet...
...where they came into contact with the ground...
...and then we would sharpen him gradually...
...over his length to where his face was sharp...
...in the centre at the end of the shot.
If you notice the cat, there's a very small smile right here.
Now, you really had to point that out, don't you?
It's to really show that he is... Snowbell's behind this whole thing.
This is a great bridge shot.
I did this in New York as a second-unit piece from a helicopter...
...with a gyro-stabilised camera mount, which was pretty exciting.
We actually were landing the helicopter...
...where there was a police picnic going on.
The city had permitted the police and the helicopter for the same spot.
Two guesses who ended up keeping the spot.
We had to leave, obviously.
The police were very nice about it. They said, "Nope, you're leaving."
This is the Stout world set.
Originally blue screen and we put New York in.
If you look at that boat in the background, that's the party boat.
You'll see that boat in every one of these backgrounds.
It's always moving around. It became a joke.
Yeah, that's Jerome's party boat.
The set itself was built on a stage.
It was a small stage with a blue screen behind it.
And then the New York City components were added in...
...from plates we shot at the same time we were doing that helicopter shoot.
I love this kid!
Your new bedroom, Stuart.
This is a sequence that I also had the good fortune to be involved with.
And we built several different scales of the castle.
The interior of the room, as you see here...
...was built about four times larger...
...than it was when you saw it from the miniature from the outside.
That allows us to put all the details in the walls...
...the wire, the texture in the wood and the bed frame.
There goes the party boat. He's pointing the party boat out.
- It's a big pullback... - That was great shot.
...with a matte painting of the background. So this was on the stage.
The turret that Stuart's in and the building behind him...
...were on the stage. Then all of the city beyond that...
...was created as a matte painting.
Actually, Geena's gonna pick up this small sailor outfit.
If you were really careful in watching...
...you'll notice that this outfit doesn't have white stars on the back...
...like the one that Stuart wore for the actual boat race.
That's because she washed it.
We were constantly making modifications to the costumes...
...that Stuart wore...
...as we went along creating the shots. They had to be upgraded...
...to handle new capabilities.
For instance, the costume of the sailor suit had to have...
...more flexibility for adding wind...
...because we did the sequence on the boats...
...after we did the sequence...
...where Stuart was walking around the pond and talking to George.
And Jim Berney, who headed up not only the cloth contingent...
...the people responsible for making the cloth work...
...and continuing to modify it, he was also responsible...
...for supervising several of the composites...
...that were shots that were basically assigned...
...to his portion of the organisation.
Jim was constantly having to either add texture or soften the cloth...
...or change the colour or figure out a new way to attach the white stars...
...so that everything remained together.
Oh, how horrible!
Cream of mushroom soup. Two-for-one sale.
That's a very heavy soup.
More shots of the cat.
Well, he doesn't know.
Is that Prince? Is that the real cat?
Yeah, I think that is.
...won't he wonder where they went?
In the beginning it was hard.
It was very difficult for me to tell the cats...
...but after seeing them for a year...
...instantly, you can tell which ones were which.
Stuart's parents died...
...in a tragic cream-mushroom-soup incident years ago.
I just told you.
Dear, we have to take this up with the police.
This is where they realise Stuart's been kidnapped.
There was a great shot that was in this sequence...
...that's no longer in this sequence, which was the mouse line-up.
Police line-up.
We had to take all of the mice that we created for the movie...
...and change their sizes and characters, and put them in a line-up...
...for the Littles to look at.
This sequence here...
...we used... Centropolis Effects worked on these cat shots...
...using the same technique as Rhythm & Hues.
Basically re-creating 3-D geometry for the cats.
I'm not a street cat. I'm a house cat.
They were done at different places.
We had to make sure the size of the teeth matched...
...from one facility to the other, so that the C-Effects shots...
...and the Rhythm & Hues shots all matched together.
Usually you don't like to split characters between facilities...
...but we wanted to make sure the work was interspersed in a way...
...that we could finish it on time.
A little risky, but John and I had to basically go from facility to facility...
...to make sure that the visual continuity matched.
This is where the mouse line-up was.
Yeah, the Littles went down to view a collection of other mice...
...that were basically presented to them as possibilities.
They were wearing orange prison outfits. It was pretty funny.
We basically took Reginald's model and Stuart's model...
...and just stretched them and made them fatter...
...and put them all in orange prison outfits.
It didn't make it in the movie.
There's probably 20, 25 shots...
...that didn't make it into the movie...
...that'll end up in a collection somewhere.
Kicks.
Exactly.
It's my guess these two sickos...
One of the things that happened...
...is we were changing the physiquing of Stuart...
...and the man in charge of physiquing the characters...
...Scott Stokdyk, was called on, on a regular basis...
...to make adjustments to the character to meet the animator's needs.
Sometimes he'd have to lengthen the arm or shorten the leg.
And in this case he had to stretch the character...
...to make the tall character... Already tall character much taller...
...and make the short character have longer arms.
And make the female character into a male character.
- There's Camille in all her glory. - These were great night shots of them.
Now this is the Stout-world sequence.
And this sequence is where Stuart is...
It's revealed to Stuart that in fact these are not his real parents.
And one of the things I think that's interesting about this...
...is that we have three animated characters on-screen at the same time.
All of which are continuously interacting.
One of the things that's interesting is the performances of the characters...
...even the ones that aren't featured, are continuous.
So you get the sense of life of all three characters.
Often, when you have three characters in animation...
...the two characters that aren't speaking or being featured...
...will kind of fall dormant.
And I don't think that that happens ever in this sequence.
Which is, to me...
It's a great show of Rob's art.
Yeah, this shot's good.
There's a lot disposition shown in that shot.
Just having them off camera with the dialogue.
Here we get to feature the bedroom again.
One of the things you have to do, as you do with characters in a real movie...
...is create some contrasts.
If you do nothing but close-ups or nothing but three-shots...
...or you have the characters on-screen all the time, they lose their lustre.
And I think that by integrating shots...
...where you're sort of left wanting more, and then showing more...
...you give the audience a little bit more bang for their buck.
This sequence was particularly hard to light in the computer.
We had to make sure we have enough yellow light...
...that was to the side of the castle...
...then have the feeling of the blue light from the moon...
...and from the skyline was affecting the characters.
These are all blue-screen shots of the miniature set...
...that John shot.
The big pan shot that's in there, we actually went to New York...
...and we shot individual plates looking up, across, and down the river.
And those were "stitched together," quote-unquote, in the computer.
And we made the pan that matched the foreground...
...where the camera went around Stuart...
...on the background plate after the fact.
We didn't shoot the pan...
...when we were doing the photography in New York.
Bye, fake father!
In all these cases, the car... Stuart's car is real.
We would have to match it and then place Stuart into the car.
Phil Notaro and the people...
...at Imageworks Model Shop put together that car.
It was really a beautiful car.
There were several versions of the car. Some that went fast...
...some that went very slowly.
Some that had articulate steering and others were made for stunt work...
...where they got crashed and bashed.
There was a couple of versions that didn't drive at all...
...that included an opening and closing door...
...and one which had the collapsing suspension...
...that we used to show Stuart getting in and out of the car.
We actually considered making the car a computer graphic at one point...
...but it actually became too expensive an endeavour.
Which was a good thing...
...because luckily we only had an estimate...
...for a certain number of shots for the car.
And then that number went up, and since we had the car available...
...it was much easier just to shoot it.
Because there's no picture. We need a picture of Stuart.
The family photo.
This is a case of the animatronic inside the car...
- ...or maybe that was the stuffy? - I think that was a stuffy.
That was in New York at 3:00 in the morning as the sun was coming up.
This is an interesting shot.
We have the shadows of the cats talking on this garage door.
This proved to be extremely difficult to get these nuances of animation.
This was impossible to do with a real cat...
...so we basically shot blue screen profiles of cats...
...and then morphed and cut and pasted in the computer...
...and did all kinds of things to get the performance of them talking.
The other approach would've been to create them...
...just as a cell-animated technique and then composite them...
...but we had a more realistic feeling from them...
...doing them as a blue screen element.
Now we're coming to Central Park.
One of the things that's interesting about the cats was...
Again, this is a sequence that I got to direct.
And I sat down with Rob, went through the sequence...
...and storyboarded everything we wanted and how to do it.
Then we got on-stage and started working with the cats.
And not that the cats didn't want to do what you wanted...
...but often times their "interpretation," in quotes...
...was better than what you had planned.
And I think there are sort of some happy mistakes...
...that occurred in the cats' performances...
...both here and in the end sequence in the film...
...where their expressions have more emotion to them...
...than what you could possibly have designed.
The stuff here where the cats discover Stuart...
...which you'll see in a minute, is funny.
The looks on their faces and the way they move.
There's also some great lighting on the CG Stuart in front of the car.
We had to make the feeling...
...that the headlights were behind him.
And the interaction between cat and Stuart here really works well.
So, you know, for integration purposes we also had to add...
...reflections of Stuart in the doors. These are things that really help you...
...feel that Stuart's there.
You must be Stuart.
Actually, I must...
When he goes behind the windshield, there's a distortion effect.
You have to match whenever the camera changes focus...
...if it off Stuart to something else...
...we then, in the computer, have to match.
Basically, we blur him and animate the blur, so it's timed correctly.
In order to make the cats in this car look like they're going down a hill...
...which we weren't able to photograph...
...we built the trees at an angle, on a much flatter hill.
And you don't notice the fact that the hill is only...
...at about a 5 degree tilt as opposed to a 15 degree tilt.
It's an old trick, but in fact it's great.
It's real movie magic from a historical perspective.
The cats landing in this next shot were shot at a separate time...
...from the car departing and then composited together.
So no, we weren't able to get the car to leave...
...and the cats to land at the same time.
The cats landed on one piece of film, the car departed on another...
...and the two were match-moved together...
...and synch-lapped, basically cross-dissolved...
...so it appeared that the cats landed much closer to the car than they were.
We travelled from... We go, let's see...
One, we go from one stage...
...to another stage, to yet a third stage...
...to a parking lot and back to the first stage again, in this sequence.
So the cut you've just seen...
...from the point at which Stuart enters the park...
...to the point at which he splashes in the water...
...was done in five different places...
...that were meant to look as though it was one scene.
These are all our shots of Stuart in the water.
We had to contend now with what is more fur, basically.
How does fur look when he's wet? We did something called clumping.
If you look at how animals get wet, their fur strands sticks together...
...and in this case, we applied this to Stuart's fur...
...and we had to take some time to make sure he still looked appealing.
Didn't look too spiky with his clumped fur.
So it was a balance of he had to appear wet...
...and then also still look good.
The suitcase in these shots are a real suitcase.
Though some of them, they're also CG.
Here he leaps to his safety. That's a great shot.
That's one of my favourite shots of the wet Stuart right there.
...Tina, Uncle Stretch...
Yeah, all the tunnel ones basically...
...were a great challenge...
...in making sure that the lighting on him felt realistic.
And actually they were one of the better sequences in the film.
Yeah, Jay Redd, who was responsible for creating Stuart's fur...
...and overseeing the fur... Maintaining the fur...
...during the course of the movie...
...worked long and hard on getting the clumping to work...
...so that the fur looked wet.
And then, of course, added to that were the specular highlights...
...the reflectivity off the fur to give it that sort of shiny feel...
...that you get from wet fur.
I made it.
We split up the responsibilities of different aspects...
...of developing Stuart among different departments...
...so a certain person, Jay Redd, would be in charge of fur...
...as John mentioned, there's effects animation...
...there's physiquing, there's cloth...
...and that way you can have somebody really focus...
...on a particular part of Stuart.
Because he was extremely complicated to create...
...because his realism really lays in all the level of details that you notice.
But you don't want to be fixated on them.
We went to the details of painting veins in the flesh of his ears...
...and having a bump on his nose, and just the right degree...
...of skin coming through his muzzle...
...to make him appear like a mouse, but not too much flesh...
...so that he appeared unappealing.
We studied a lot of mice.
We looked at what features made them cute.
If you look closely a mouse, they're not that cute.
Their tails don't have any hair on them, their ears are bare...
...so, we made Stuart's ears furry, you know, kind of like a rabbit.
And even you'll notice Snowbell here...
...how his ears are fuzzier.
So you notice the tail, we actually put fur on it.
His hands... Stuart's hands look like a small boy's hands.
And he's proportioned as if he was a small boy.
So even though he has the overall feeling of a mouse...
...if you examine all his components, you can see he's a hybrid...
...of a lot of different... From a lot of different sources.
This shot is mystifying because everyone wonders how Stuart...
...was able to climb up onto the tabletop here.
And we're not telling.
That's nice lighting.
Some things that always were important on the mouse.
One of them was rim light. We used movie-star lighting.
We had a little back-cross to give him a white line around his outside.
It helped separated him from the background...
...and also made his fur look very clean.
And the whiskers were no mean feat.
To give the whiskers the right size and right level of reflectivity...
...in each of these scenes...
...was a critical component of making the character have life...
...as were the reflections in the eyes.
These shots are interesting.
The picture that you see of the family in the frame...
...initially when we shot this, there was not a cutout of Stuart.
Then they changed the story line...
...and later we had to run a couple shots...
...and add the hole that was cut out by the family...
...when they were looking for a picture for the posters.
And here comes everybody's favourite shot.
This is a good example of the height of field. The foreground...
...was out of focus, and we had to place him in that area.
So we had to blur the bottom half of his body.
And this is the famous tear shot.
Bye, Snowbell.
It's famous internally. We'll see how famous it becomes...
There was a debate about whether you should make Stuart cry or not.
The rule of thumb is if you want sympathy for your character...
...you don't actually make him cry...
...you make him a little wet-eyed. But in this case...
...the effect of his tear humanized him so much...
...Rob decided to go for it. We had two versions originally.
We broke with tradition.
This picture always kills us...
...because it's an airbrushed picture of Stuart...
...that we had to make for a prop on the set...
...months before we had Stuart finished.
So it always looks different than the real Stuart...
...and we wanted to go back and add the real Stuart on top of that...
...but never got around to it.
This is a good example of how we had to cheat the focus.
When we photographed this, the area that Stuart's walking to...
...is completely out of focus. But if we followed the plate...
...Stuart would be totally blurry. We cheated his bottom half blurry...
...and kept his face sharp so you could still see it...
...and it still works.
Coming up is a sequence where we spend a lot of time in Central Park.
And it's a very, very dark sequence...
...inasmuch as it's at night.
During the course of production, Kodak came out with a new film stock.
And we had shot the first half of our work, or not half...
...maybe 30 percent of our work, on an old print stock.
And that stock was lower contrast than the new stock.
And we ended up having to switch from one type of stock...
...low contrast, to another type, high contrast...
...in the middle of the production.
And as a result we had to adjust all our colour and contrast correction...
...in the scenes that we had finished at the beginning of the film...
...which was no mean feat.
It involved a huge amount of time, and if you watch this sequence...
...you'll see there's a fair amount of detail in the blacks...
...in the dark shadow areas.
And we had to go back in and make adjustments to those shadow areas...
...from the original photography so they'd show up in our new print.
Who knows CPR?
Yeah, this is a new sequence, a new ending for the film...
...that was devised and had a much more dramatic ending...
...but involved having to figure out...
...how to get these cats up into the trees, basically.
So the tree was designed with certain little footrests...
...and areas that would enable the cats to be allowed to run up...
...as they rose higher and higher into the tree.
The tree is composed of two separate sections.
We have a lower part of the tree that stops, then once we get higher up...
...we'll find the upper half of the tree. And then we...
John shot lots of blue-screen elements of leaves and stuff...
...that we could layer into the frame to appear that we were in the trees...
...looking through a canopy of foliage...
...to basically make us feel we were within the tree.
What are you doing up there?
The talking cats in this sequence were done by Rhythm & Hues.
In some cases we'd add highlights in the eyes of the cats...
...to give them a little more life, give them a little more spark.
Nice going, house cat.
Just for that, when we carve up the mouse, you get the big half.
Big half?
There's a convention that, in terms of lighting...
Rob wanted it darker in the lower part of the tree...
...and as you got higher into the tree, it would get brighter.
And also the idea that through the leaves of the trees...
...you'd be able to see parts of Central Park around us...
...and, actually, that didn't show up as much.
You still feel like you're up in the tree itself.
I'll break his fall with my mouth!
These shots were hard, having Stuart inside the mouth, trying to integrate...
...the fact that he was really hanging. In certain cases that was a stuffy.
We had to take the stuffy out and put in the CGI Stuart.
Go! Go!
Snowbell. Watch it. Where are you going?
These cats are landing on specific little areas...
...that were built into the design of the tree...
...that could allow them to climb.
You saved me?
Yeah, yeah.
Look, let's get one thing straight.
It's one of the hardest things, something we struggled with for the entire film...
...was making sure lighting continuity matched...
...in terms of the direction of light on the cat.
That it was the same on Stuart and from shot to shot.
It had to feel like they were all lit together.
And this is some of the most expressive of the cat stuff.
The cat's called on to respond emotionally...
...and in large quantity too...
...because it's all played with the cats and Stuart. They're all doing...
They're acting here.
So this was a pretty intense sequence...
...for the people doing the animation from Rhythm & Hues...
...who did the animation of these cats.
And I think it's sort of a tour de force...
...of making cats have personality...
...as far as the combination...
...of their body language...
...and the animation of their expressions.
Getting the cat's body language was really an issue...
...of finding a means to put a camera...
...where the cat would do what you wanted, as opposed to...
...having the cat come to the camera. Often the camera had to go the cat.
But as a result, we ended up with head moves...
...body moves and body language...
...that seemed to fit the emotion of the scene.
It was really an interesting thing to figure out...
...thinking on your feet while shooting these cats.
Because what you had to do was redesign the scene in some cases...
...dependent upon the cat's performance.
So if it called for a single or a two-shot...
...at the beginning of the sequence...
...and you happen to get a three-shot or a good profile of the cat...
...then you had to go through and redesign the sequence on the fly...
...while you were shooting to incorporate that good shot you got.
Because the shots of the cats performing emotionally...
...were few and far between.
Here we have Stuart making his escape.
That's actually a real...
It's a practical cat collar that he's sliding down.
We actually attached Stuart onto it.
A lot of the cat stuff, you turn the camera on and let the magazine...
...roll through it.
Thousands of feet of it. Credit the editor, Tom Finn...
...with finding the little pieces of performance...
...to really make the body action work.
Then Rhythm & Hues would then make the mouth talk...
...and do the facial animation.
But just finding that small moment that worked...
...was a really challenging job for the editor.
Here are some cases where we add blue-screen leaves...
...over the tops of certain shots to make it feel like the canopy.
Coming up is one of the cat's most favourite moments in the picture...
...where they ended up going into the drink.
And it turns out, obviously...
...that although the cats were in the water and swam out...
...they didn't do the fall.
And what we had was, we had stuffed cats...
...which were quite rigid as they fell...
...and we went back and took their legs and added animation to the legs...
...to bring life to the cats that were falling away from camera...
...which you'll see here in a minute.
Take what?
It's a short shot...
...but we actually had to go and give them some movement.
Not your old buddy.
Don't worry, buddy. I'm sure you'll land...
- ...on your... - Snow, what are you doing?
This was cool, getting the cat to step on this branch that would give away.
There are those stuffy cats. No cats were hurt.
No cats were even offended in the making of this film.
Except perhaps that cat.
They didn't like the water much. They were willing to do it.
In fact, most of them did it more than once without too much complaint.
...all we've meant to each other?
I mean, I love that guy!
Hey, you guys! Wait up for me!
Pack up the pineapple, Stuart. This luau's over.
Thanks, Snowbell. You were great.
Well, it must have been...
What's coming up here is there will be a shot of Stuart holding a branch.
And we had to go in and create...
...a computer-graphic branch for him to hold.
The branch that hits Smokey in the face is a blue-screen branch.
We shot a puff of air at the cat to make it look like he was hit...
...in the face...
...but the branch didn't hit him. It was a digital composite.
His name is Snowbell.
This is a cat dropped into blue screen, basically.
And then we had to composite him into a plate that John shot...
...where they dropped weights into the water to make the splash.
Look how little he gets when he gets wet.
That's not the same cat though, is it?
No, it's not, but still, he was a fluffy cat to start out with.
Both of them got... They didn't have much body mass.
They were mostly fur.
Little hey, Little ho.
This next shot is pretty tough. This is Stuart actually riding the cat.
The harder shots are when he goes through many different light changes...
...because you have to animate values of light.
This is interesting. This is a blue-screen shot.
The cat and the mouse were shot on a blue screen...
...and they put into a plate of the house that had no cat or mouse in it.
Yeah, they wanted to save money and not do any Stuart shots...
...so they tied a puppet to the cat and then we shot it.
Here we have Stuart arriving at home.
These digital composites are blue screen, basically.
The area behind Stuart in Central Park was one plate.
The foreground window was another. We had to go back...
...and put what we call "schmutz" on the window...
...all the dirt on the window over Stuart to make it appear...
...that there is still glass between us and Stuart.
And subtle reflection of the room, from the inside on the glass.
Stuart!
Lighting this was fun because we wanted to play up...
...the warm firelight that came in from the inside of the living room onto him...
...so we'd have a warm, happy ending.
And Snowbell.
I just couldn't have done it without him.
Really?
These close-ups of Stuart are quite nice.
You can really feel the fur on his face.
At the end of a fairy tale.
Yeah.
Exactly.
And then this last shot, another Stuart-in-the-hand shot.
This sequence ended up...
Before, we had a version of this where we rose up above the house...
...and went out over the city of New York, and it got simplified.
To this. Which I think probably is appropriate...
...because the picture is now over.
Seems to make sense.
The film was, for me, a great experience.
I had a lot of fun.
I came into a facility that was already existent...
...and Jerome and the people who were there...
...had been working as a team and they welcomed me and I appreciated that.
It could have been a much less happy experience.
And the challenges of the movie, I thought, were significant.
Probably as substantial as the challenges that we saw...
...when we were doing the first Star Wars.
And yet, as with that film...
...I think that we were successful on 99 percent of the stuff.
Which, you know, there's a lot of talent involved...
...but I think there's a lot of luck involved.
And coming out of this, I count it as one of my happiest experiences...
...doing visual effects and the second-unit directing.
It was a great treat as well.
I share John's sentiment that this was a really good experience.
Rob would let us create a lot of aspects of this film.
We were really involved in creating the main character.
And the greatest satisfaction I have...
...is the fact that we were able to accomplish this...
...because initially we really didn't have any idea how we were gonna do it.
We were asked to do a talking mouse...
...and none of us could have expected to have really created...
...not just this visual effect, but I really feel like we have...
We have manufactured and really created a new personality here.
He's something that film will remember as another character.
This project was an enormous creative and technical challenge.
And the success is a result of a collaborative effort.
I want to recognise some key individuals...
...who were instrumental to providing the management structure...
...and resource framework which allowed us to create Stuart.
The production management was top-notch...
...due to senior visual effects producer Michelle Murdocca...
...executive visual effects producer Debbie Denise...
...digital producer Lydia Bottegoni...
...associate producer Audrea Topps Harjo...
...and digital production manager Jody Echegaray.
Handling vender production was Jacquie Barnbrook...
...marketing venues were produced by John Clinton.
Our digital artist crews were led by four computer graphic supervisors...
...Jim Berney, Bart Giovanetti, Jay Redd and Scott Stokdyk.
A special recognition to Mike Travers, who led our digital cloth team...
...and Rob Bredow, our one-man animation effects genius.
Of course, Clint Hanson and Armin Bruderlin, who gave Stuart his fur.
And Bob Winter and John McGee, who gave Stuart his fine grooming.
The digital artists and character animators are too many to name...
...but their efforts are what truly gave Stuart his heart and soul.
For this, they could never be properly recognised.
I will mention lead animators Eric Armstrong, Anthony LaMolinara...
...and John Clark Matthews.
Plus Kevin Hudson and his modelling crew who built the digital Stuart.
We're very thankful to the various departments at Imageworks...
...which provided invaluable services and support to the production.
Marty Kline, visual effects art director...
...head of Imageworks Art Department.
Our digital colour timer was John Nicolard.
With scanning and filming coordinating provided by Dennis Webb.
Our Visual Effects Editorial Department was supervised by Michael Moore.
Our Software Department was supervised by Amit Agrawal.
And our software lead on the show was Evan Smith.
Our Training and Artist Development Department was led by Sande Scoredos.
Systems and support was supervised by Alberto Velez...
...with technical assistant supervision by Mary Borlik.
And facility operations was provided by Tom Hershey and Mary Bailly.
Special thanks to Ian Kelly, who was our on-set video assist operator...
...who was there to remember what we forgot to do.
David Stump, our visual effect plates supervisor...
...who was there for endless hours to get us our visual effects plates.
Lastly, John, Henry and myself are deeply appreciative to Don Levy...
...who helped the world recognise Stuart for the accomplishment he was.
We're grateful for the support...
...given by the executive management at Imageworks...
...Ken Ralston, Tim Sarnoff, Ken Williams and Jenny Fulle.