"In that moment, I knew we didn't have to be afraid to use digital puppies," says Lima.įortunately, TSL was prepared to have the digital puppy substitute for the real puppy in closer shots. "He spotted the digital puppy when it blinked," says De Leeuw, who explains that since the real puppies never blinked at the right time, Lima knew the blinking puppy couldn't be real. "Usually, they never ask if anything is wrong because they want me to OK scenes." "I knew something was up because they kept asking me if everything was OK," remembers Lima. He watched the shots and didn't say anything, so we showed them to him again, and then again and asked him if he saw anything funny." We matched the action, lit the scene, rendered it and then had the director come in to look at spot removal shots. "On our own, we put the CG puppy into the scene. "We could see that we were getting a bit of magic happening with our CG puppy. Her spots were digitally removed at The Secret Lab. Is she real or is she digital? This puppy, one of several who played the role of Oddball, is a real dalmatian.
Until then, the team and the director had considered using a digital Oddball only for stunt work. It became so difficult to remove the black without losing details and expression on the puppy's face, particularly around its eyes, that the effects team decided to try substituting a digital puppy. "We had one shot with a puppy playing Oddball that had big black blotches all through its chest and face," says Dan DeLeeuw, co-visual effects supervisor. When none of these techniques worked, the team resorted to 3D solutions for digital spot removal. For pups with black ears, the crew would paint a white ear, then, using Avid's Elastic Reality, would replace the real ear with the puppy's new ear and add animated shadows. When there was too much motion, the cloned spots were touched up by painters who used Avid's (Tewksbury, MA) Matador software.
Using Discreet's (Montreal) Combustion program, they could track the spots in each frame as the pup moved through a scene and automatically replace the black color with white in each frame. To create the all-white Oddball, the effects crew implemented several techniques. With spots back on, the puppy playing Oddball would blend into the rest of the pack. When Oddball and her littermates turned 10 weeks old, they all became extras for two weeks-Oddball was supposed to be smaller than her brothers and sisters, so the age difference heightened the illusion. The dog trainers would pick the smartest puppy or puppies out of the new litter to be the new Oddball, regardless of gender, spot patterns, or ear color. The filming was spread across a six-month period, and puppies grow quickly, so every two weeks, a new litter of dalmatian puppies would show up. One of the challenges for TSL was that the puppy playing Oddball kept changing. The white puppy's spots were removed with 2D graphics. For the scene at right, they multiplied puppies with split-screen techniques. In addition, the crew helped a Macaw talk.įor the scene below, the crew painted out supporting platforms. Together, the teams also created new techniques to handle the visual effects for this movie-spot removal for Oddball, a digital stunt Oddball, and digital puppy extras. 102 Dalmatians, the first big project undertaken by the merged groups, uses techniques developed separately at Disney for Dinosaur and at Dream Quest Images for a variety of previous movies.
The Secret Lab (TSL) was formed when Disney merged its animation and effects studio Dream Quest Images with its in-house 3D animation group. Visual effects, which for the most part involved spot removal and digital dogs, were created by Disney's The Secret Lab. In this movie, all 102 dalmatians are puppies and the dog star is an all-white, 8- to 10-week-old dalmatian pup named, appropriately, Oddball. In the 1996 movie, the dog stars were the two adult dalmatians, with 99 puppies in minor roles. Directed by Kevin Lima, who previously directed Disney's animated film Tarzan, the live-action comedy has Cruella chasing puppies through the streets of London and Paris. This sequel to the 1996 film 101 Dalmatians puts Glenn Close in the spotlight once again as evil fashion designer Cruella de Vil, who repeats her attempt to turn a cute pack of puppies into the ultimate fur coat.
#Avid elastic reality movie
How do you teach an 8-week old puppy to hang onto the back of a moving train? You don't-even if the script calls for it, as does the script for Walt Disney Pictures' movie 102 Dalmatians.
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