Bringing this blog back to something animation specific…
(this is Angie BTW…still trying to teach Jamie how to blog)

Tonight I was going through a bunch of old sketch books…and I found one I had while I worked on Stuart Little 2. The page scanned above is from this shot on SL2 where Stuart was stuck on the soccer ball after George kicks it and the ball flies straight into camera. The end frame ends up inside Stuart’s mouth and fades to black. This shot ended up being more difficult than I ever imagined it could be…when they first handed it off to me.

First of all, Rob Minkoff (director) had George literally kick the soccer ball so it would hit the camera square in the center. I cannot imagine how many cuts that took? Maybe the kid is related to Pele, but I doubt it…so I am guessing it took alot of takes.


Minkoff wanted this shot to be slower than the original take, 60 frames to be exact. It actually hit the camera POV within about 30 frames, in the plate. So, we had to replace the ball with a CG one and slow down the motion or the ball and retime the plate. I had to make sure the ball covered George and the original soccer ball in the plate as much as possible, as it arced – to keep the compositor and roto people’s job to a bare minimum. The plate also had very little play. Sometimes when a plate is shot, there is a little more room outside of the frame to pan or truck the camera and reframe the shot better for the CG elements. To create the least bit of parallax with the camera, I needed some motion pulling out from the plate as the ball approaches and this plate was really tight in frame.

As if this shot had not become complicated enough? The set up in Maya had the plate attached to the ball, so I spent two days fighting the rig until I figured out that the folks who set up the shot had the ball constrained to the camera move and I was trying to counter animate – argggg! So, I broke that constraint and was able to get the ball to move independently of the camera. Now, I needed to do several versions because when George kicked the real ball in the original take it was spinning like crazy!
I did one version that matched the spin in the take, and then one that was spinning a little less and one with only about a 15 degree rot on the ball. Rob liked door #3. He wanted the ball motion as simple as possible, so you could concentrate on Stuart and his performance. Also, everyone agreed if the ball was spinning that wildly, Stuart would most likely fly off.
So, I originally thought this shot would be a fairly simple performance. There is basically “one note” called for in the art direction – Stuart is stuck to the ball screaming for his life – and I thought “wow, simple, direct and clean shot here.” But, ‘man o man’ did this become a real technical nightmare. You can not predict how a shot is going to go down. Over all, it was a really fun shot to do and is one everyone seems to remember from the movie.

I welcome comments and stories from animators who have worked on shows that were limited by what the plate dictates. I personally like to view constraints to a shot as a way of forcing me to find a better way to make it work and tell the story and stick to what the intent behind the storyboard was. It’s that or pull your hair out over something you can’t change 🙂 In 100% CG movies, you can change the camera to be anywhere you like. In live action/CG mix movies you must work within your resources or the plate and the actors and the set.

We talk about this in the book and how best to go about breaking down technical aspects of a shot on mixed CG and live action shows: everything from the actor not looking at their mark to complicated camera moves like this one are covered. Your comments or stories are welcome and I hope this enlightened or inspired someone. For me it was cathartic to write this all out after looking at that old sketch again.
-Angie

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