4/9/2023 0 Comments Mumble happy feet![]() ![]() Gary Miller’s "penguin school." Once onstage, however, Miller directed the action. To learn basic penguin behavior and postures, the dancers attended ornithologist Dr. The studio also captured dancers for the dramatic scenes and some action shots. At right, dark shadows dramatize a shot with Lovelace (Robin Williams). In addition, the motion-capture crew used software and a system from Giant Studios.Īt left, Mumble (Elijah Wood) steps out using mocap data topped with keyframeĪnimation. ![]() We wanted to avoid having the penguins look like people with their pants around their ankles."įor creating the dancing penguins and their environment, Animal Logic used Autodesk’s Maya and Softimage’s XSI for modeling, XSI for rigging and animation, Maya for effects and lighting, Pixar’s PR RenderMan for rendering, and the studio’s own MayaMan to move RIB files from Maya into the RenderMan pipeline. "It gave us more freedom in terms of the leg length and shinbone and thighbone ratios. "The King penguin is more athletic," says Gray. As for their legs, even though the film features Emperor, Adélie, and other penguin varieties, all are based on the anatomy of a King penguin. On land, they walk on their toes and have no real shoulders."Īll that had to change, but without losing the birds’ "penguin-ness." Mumble and his friends tap their heels on the ice and have fake shoulders but no sternum plate. They’re designed to form a torpedo shape underwater. They have a small thigh-to-shinbone ratio. "Penguins aren’t built in nature to dance at all," says Gray. They also looked at various types of penguins to find those most amenable to dancing. For inspiration, they referenced the BBC television series Life in the Freezer. We had to include a high level of realism and still cater to their dance behavior as well."Īlthough audiences seeing Happy Feet might think it reminds them of the 2005 documentary March of the Penguins, the character team began its work years earlier. "We huddled them together like you’d see in any documentary. "The director wanted to portray the characters in a natural state," says Damien Gray, supervising character technical director. But of all the challenges, being able to get the environments looking real took the longest time."īecause Miller wanted Happy Feet to be photoreal even though the penguins would burst into dance, Animal Logic had to tiptoe around penguin anatomy. We never had to do that many hairy, feathered creatures before. "Obviously, the dancing crowds of penguins were a challenge we had to meet," he says. At peak, the studio expanded to approximately 500 people for Happy Feet and its ongoing digital effects work.ĭigital supervisor Brett Feeney led the Animal Logic teams that designed the pipeline, the processes, and the tools for Happy Feet. At that time, around 60 employees crafted commercials and visual effects for such features as The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Moulin Rouge!, and the two Babe films. When they banish Mumble, he waddles away and begins an epic journey through Antarctica to prove them wrong.Īnimal Logic’s epic journey began four and a half years ago. Mumble’s mother (Nicole Kidman) is sympathetic, but not his father (Hugh Jackman) or the village elders, who blame poor little Mumble for disturbing the natural order of Emperor Penguin land and causing fish to disappear. The star of the film, a fuzzy young penguin named Mumble (Elijah Wood), can’t sing, which is a problem because penguins choose their soul mates with a "heart song." What Mumble can do, though, is dance, and that he does, to hip-hop, salsa, jazz, pop, rock-to any music he hears. Happy Feet blends a song-and-dance coming-of-age story with an epic adventure. The CG feature is the first animation directed by Australian filmmaker George Miller, who directed The Witches of Eastwick and wrote and directed three Mad Max films and Babe: Pig in the City. And dancing was but one tangle the studio had to rumble through to create Warner Bros.’ musical-adventure-comedy Happy Feet. In the penguin world, this isn’t a problem, but for the Sydney, Australia-based animation and visual effects studio Animal Logic, making digital penguins dance became a four-year obsession. Oh, those irresistible penguins! They can’t help but charm as they shuffle, toboggan, swim, fall, tumble, huddle together, and waddle across the ice, the adults all dressed up in their jazzy tuxedos and the children as fuzzy as a stuffed toy. ![]()
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