During his 14-year career at ILM, Rob Coleman helped George Lucas to create some of the most imaginative digital characters in cinema history. He tells Rodney Appleyard about his plans to help Happy Feet director George Miller take Australian animation to a higher level.
It’s 1.30 on Friday afternoon and most people are enjoying a peaceful meal and a drink at the Doma Bohemian Beer Café in Kings Cross. But they do not realise that Rob Coleman is watching them closely. He picks out a family browsing the restaurant’s menu to reveal one of the secrets of creating great animation.
He notices the mother’s disdain for the menu and how her body language alone reveals her power in the family of five. And Coleman is right. He predicts that they will leave the restaurant to find somewhere that suits her better. This is exactly what they do.
Coleman also points out how one of the daughters walks differently because she has one leg shorter than the other.
“It’s those kind of things that fascinate me,” he says. “When you become tuned into these nuances in people’s behaviour it makes your work better. It’s all about reading body language and including those subtleties into the animation.”
It seems that animators are paid to watch people and Coleman is definitely cashing in on this particular day.
Across the road from the restaurant lies The Metro, which houses George Miller’s Dr D Studios, where he is working on Happy Feet 2. Coleman has travelled a long way from his cold home town of Toronto in Canada, where he found his first animation gig at the local job centre, before heading to George Lucas’ renowned Lucasfilm and ILM facilities.
“I was looking for a bar tender job at the time, but to my surprise, I spotted a vacancy for an animator,” he recalls.
“When I stepped in to work for George Lucas at ILM, I was the ninth animator there. We were relatively small then but ILM was already the pre-eminent VFX house in the world. I went on to help George set up Lucasfilm Animation from the ground up at Skywalker Ranch and in Singapore – which is the Asian base for The Clone Wars TV series.”
He says he has come to Sydney to work under the same kind of environment, this time with George Miller.
“As an animation director, I think it’s very important to have direct communication all the time with the person who is creating the movie and I can see that Miller has a big vision for the animation industry in Australia.”
Coleman prefers to work under these conditions rather than under the traditional way that VFX houses work, which involves waiting for projects to come to them. He is inspired by Miller’s decision to join a combined animation and production company that can operate in the same building with the in-house director at the helm.
Instead of chasing ideas, they are creating them, similar to how director Peter Jackson and effects guru Richard Taylor have been operating since their career-defining Lord of the Rings trilogy almost a decade ago.
According to Coleman, having your own place allows you to control the flow of work into the team and tailor the talent to serve your own creative vision. Miller has a story-driven pipeline with the tools, technology, artist and technicians shaped around it.
It’s now 2.30 and the crowds are thinning. But Coleman is still keeping an eye on every person in the restaurant as he takes another swig of beer and recounts his experiences on films like the recent Star Wars Trilogy, Men In Black and Dragonheart. He says that throughout all these movies, the key to success involves perceiving animation as a form of acting.
Dragonheart leads the way
Dragonheart was the first Hollywood feature to be centred around a fully-digital animated character. It was also Coleman’s first time as the supervising character animator, which involved creating the animated dragon, voiced memorably by Sean Connery.
“The work we did on Dragonheart played a major part in allowing Lucas to believe that ILM could handle the digital characters in his second Star Wars trilogy,” he says.
“He had been waiting for the computer digital artistry to catch up with his vision. Although he had been pleased with the effects in the original Star Wars trilogy, he was waiting specifically for the character team to come along and be able to handle the digital characters in his mind.”
The actual head alone for Dragonheart had the same number of control vertices – which are points in a three dimensional mesh that define the outer edge of a computer model. – as the whole T-Rex dinosaur in Jurassic Park. That leap in technology took place in just three years.
It was the first hero digital character in a movie. On that project, James Strauss, the character animation supervisor, led the charge for animators to think like actors. I already knew this but he really pushed it. We had been treated merely as technicians up until that point.”
Disney animators used to believe strongly in this philosophy and they have always been a great inspiration for Coleman. “They got their animators to think about what it takes to perform, act and what it means to connect with the audience. I remember working with the animators on our projects and teaching them that reaction shots, plus movement we see in live action all the time, should be used as much as possible in our animations.
“For instance, if I’m speaking to you, the expression on your face will tell me if you’re listening to me or not really listening to me. This shot of your expression is enough to tell the audience more about the scene than me jabbering on. But in those days, we rarely cut to shots showing the reactions of animated creatures because the directors didn’t believe we could sustain the illusion of life.”
To master the art of animating creatures, Coleman says that animators need to get inside the character’s skin, as if they were actors playing the role.
“The best animators are naturally very observant people. I like to study the ripples of emotions that go through people’s faces and then include that intensity.”
Working with Lucas
He put these ideas into practice on the second Star Wars trilogy, ‘directing’ the performances of the digital characters in his role as the animation director.
“But the real challenge of an animation director in my position is that you may have five or ten animators animating Yoda, who each come with different acting skills, technical skills and understanding of the story, which all contribute to the overall performance. As a director, I have to pull one cohesive performance out of these many animators.”
He didn’t actually create any of the characters – they came from the art department after falling out of George Lucas’ imagination. The art department would draw them, sculpt many of them and then the ILM modelling department would re-sculpt them digitally. After that, the characters skeletons were placed into the digital sculpts and, at that point, Coleman’s team would take over and make them move.
“This also involved working very closely with George Lucas to ensure the digital characters were serving his story and moving the way he wanted them to move.
“So that was an incredible opportunity to work with a man at his level, with his attention to detail and creativity. On the first movie, I was terrified. On the second one I felt more comfortable and on the third movie I was totally fine. I would never pretend that it was easy in any way.”
Coleman says ILM has a great team atmosphere and is comprised of highly trained specialists, such as artists who focus on the skin of the characters, hair, clothing and movement.
“We’d all come together as a collective and debate whether something could be more realistic? We’d ask: ‘Does it look like it needed more weight when it moved?’ If so, then that would be a performance problem.
“Another question could be: ‘Does the cloth react and overlap in a realistic way?’ If not, then that would be the simulation department’s issue. ‘Does the skin look real?’ ‘When Yoda’s sitting next to Ewan McGregor does he really look like he’s there?’
“If not, then that would be a lighting and compositing issue. So it’s about the team moving the shots and characters through the pipeline and I was one of the key creatives involved in that process.”
The challenges of Yoda
A major challenge he faced on the second Star Wars trilogy involved recreating Yoda as a digital creature.
“This was simply because he had been established before. In The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, Frank Oz performed him brilliantly as a physical puppet on set with Mark Hamill. I was fine with copying the movement but it was hard to make him move convincingly during his fight with Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones.
“Lucas had always told me he’d love to see Yoda run, jump and fight but the puppet had never done that. We never saw it full bodied and walking either! So we had to create a walk that was reminiscent of what the puppet looked like when it was moving around and then we had to completely invent the fight.”
He worked closely with stunt co-ordinator, Nick Gillard, on different styles of fighting that would fit with the Jedi tradition, based on Nick’s years of studying martial arts. Coleman also looked at films by Jackie Chan and Jet Li for inspiration.
Despite 14 years in the industry, Coleman says he is constantly learning new tricks. He also continues to use key ones, which are fundamental to every project he works on.
“A lot of them that come from the Disney guys have been updated in computer animation. A couple involve the methods of ‘anticipation’ and ‘overlapping action’. Anticipation, for example, could involve a character slowly getting up out of his chair.
"He can’t do this without moving forward first, putting his hand on the chair and lifting up. With computer animation, I could just lift off, but there’s a gravity there that I need to be aware of, otherwise it won’t look real. So with anticipation you have to be thinking of these kind of things, such as the body having weight.
“In regards to overlapping actions, this could involve a hand moving. It doesn’t just move somewhere and stay there. After it has moved to that position, it keeps on moving, involuntarily. As you can see from my hand, there is a little bit of vibration after the first movement as the muscles tighten up. If you don’t animate that the audience will miss it. If the computer makes that [hand] move rock solid, then the audience will pick that up and consider it to be fake, mechanical or wooden.”
Avoiding the uncanny valley
Coleman is also conscious about avoiding the “uncanny valley” as much as he can. Animators the term to describe the no-mans land between reality and caricature.
At ILM his team was routinely pitched by studios and producers who wanted to bring back stars like Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe.
“But I never wanted to be part of those projects because to me it’s a bit of a fool’s errand to recreate a digital version of somebody we all know. If you don’t get it right it can look creepy and veer into the uncanny valley. I am more excited about work on Star Wars, where we can create digital characters that can coexist with real people, although the audience accepts that they are not real (my kids, however, still think Yoda exists, which is fine).
“This is not so much of a turn off. I’m still blown away by the penguins dancing with Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. It makes you want to be with them. That’s been driving me my whole life. I’ve wanted to recreate that moment for kids and I think I did so in the Star Wars pictures.”
Coleman also prefers it when real people are used instead of replica animations of humans. This is because actors can give you so much more in real time, compared to an animated version, which would take weeks to create.
“People point to Benjamin Button these days as great animation, but it is still driven by Brad Pitt. So you have to use the best tools to create what you want.”
George Miller’s future vision
As for the future – one of the main reasons why Coleman wants to work in Australia with George Miller is because he craves learning from somebody who knows more than him. It reminds him of the old days with George Lucas. He was also attracted to the idea of working for a company that is in charge of its own destiny.
“George Miller is very keen for me to build an Australian team here for the long term. He’s already talking about many projects after Happy Feet 2 to keep the flow of work moving. The hardest thing to do is build a big team, do a movie and then not have another movie ready afterwards.
“As a result, the team disperses to the four corners of the world. He’s really aware of that because he knows about the effort it took Animal Logic to create the team for the first Happy Feet and it broke his heart to hear about people leaving after that project. I think that’s a motivating factor in why he’s forward thinking. He’s got us building a unit that can work on multiple projects.”
Right now, Coleman’s role on Happy Feet 2 involves recruiting the team, which will comprise about 30 animators. They are currently going through story dailies with the co-directors, which involves looking at rough versions of the movie. Miller has the final word, of course. It is all being made in computer animatics and as soon as the film is assembled they will start production in April or May next year. Production should run for approximately 63 weeks.
Coleman adds that Miller often talks with great admiration about the empire Peter Jackson has built at the Weta team with Richard Taylor. He also flags the achievements Lucas made with Lucasfilm and ILM.
So maybe the work on Happy Feet 2 are his first steps towards building the same kind of dynasty here in Australia. With Coleman involved in leading the animation team, he has a man on board who has seen this kind of vision built up from the ground before, so great things could happen over the next few years.