“Walking with Dinosaurs,” the BBC decided to bring the magic back to the small screen with a sequel focusing on early mammals, titled “Walking with Beasts.” Technological advances in computer animation made it possible for this series, which aired in November in the United Kingdom, to be even more naturalistic than its predecessor.
Beasts’ creators at the BBC turned again to Crawley Creatures for the animatics and Framestore for the animation series. The project ended up being one of Framestore’s most extensive animation and visual effects projects to date. Mike Milne, director of animation, doubled the size of his team, which was charged with creating ranges of movement and texture even more extensive than those designed for ‘Dinosaurs.’
Principal filming took place last year on several continents and in some instances beneath the sea. Jez Gibson Harris led the model team, which grew from seven to 18 during production. Additional support was also called in from several accessible lance specialists. In the end, over 40 items were created that ranged from full-sized mammoths to small shrew-like creatures. Making the models took a year and a half, with some of the creatures requiring twice the usual time due to the advent of more complicated animatronics. “There were more movements than before,” said Harris, “Lips, ears, and eye movements, which were all more sophisticated.”
The under-skull and body-forms were created in the Crawley Creatures’ ‘mechy’ department, where the team made radio-controlled mechanisms to move eyebrows, whiskers, noses, and mouths. All of these movements were combined to create snarls, snorts and blinks in completed models. The expressions were created through a mix of manual and radio control. “Its very tiring,” said Harris. “Creatures like the mammoth had five or six puppeteers, and special backpacks were designed to take the strain off the operators’ back and hands.” Larger engineering work went into producing Steady Arm rigs — which are similar to the Steady Cam rigs worked by cameramen — to support smaller heads during puppeteering. The rigs helped carry the weight of the heads and facilitate larger movements, while puppeteers controlled smaller movement in close-up shots.
The team also designed a wheeled dolly featuring a counterbalanced arm with universal movement in order to make the bigger creatures move more easily. “It could be assembled in 10 minutes, and could be moved around on quad bike wheels,” said Harris. The team used the dolly to help with operating the heads of larger animals like the mammoth and woolly rhino. There were several underwater shots, all of which the team filmed in one day. The most extravagant required that a mammoth fall through a sheet of ice. For this, Crawly Creatures devised a system involving wires and animatronics whereby the mammoth looked as if it were struggling as it dropped.
Once the filming with all of the animatronics was completed, the footage was passed over to Framestore for 18 solid months of work. ‘Beasts’ was such a big task that it would not have been practical for Frametsore to start from scratch. The team used a pipeline similar to the one created for “Walking with Dinosaurs” for animation and rendering, employing 271 separate programs to make the production process run smoothly. 30 artists working on Silicon Graphics and NT workstations spent a total of 11,490 processing hours creating all of the CG that went into the program. Framestore’s render farm, which consisted of 35 dual Processor NT render machines, ran for 24 hours a day for close to a year.
The basic approach for each digital creature was the same. First, a 2D computer animated model of the creature was created, from a selection of angles — top, left side, right side, bottom etc. — which were put together to create a 3D version. The artists then did three layers of texture mapping — first color, then bump mapping and shine. This created realistic looking animals with lifelike skin. After they placed the animals in a shot, the artists added shadow as a final layer.
Perhaps the most time-consuming aspect of the effort was creating the basic skeletons of the many creatures in ‘Beasts’ — several animals had never before been reconstructed, so this was a step up from “Walking with Dinosaurs.” Many of the creatures have evolved into modern animals such as pigs, cats, shrews and elephants. The sheer variety of elements on a mammal’s face — eyelids, eyebrows, whiskers, jowls, twitching noses and ears — made bringing them to life a challenge.
“All of those elements have to be animated,” said Mike Milne, head of computer animation at Framestore. “The number of animation controls the animators have to work with is vast compared with dinosaurs.” The series also contains humanoid, upright creatures, which were difficult to animate because of the obvious comparisons that viewers could make and because the team didn’t know how early hominids moved. “This was more adventurous for us,” said Max Tyrie, animation supervisor at Framestore. “There were more complex shots, more creatures, more hurdles to overcome. It was all very enjoyable.”
Framestore didn’t stop at creating the animals. The team investigated new angles and filming methods to push the animation even further. “We worked with different camera styles from hand-held tracking to wide angle, fish eye lenses,” said Tyrie. They also took various approaches to film speed, using tricks such as time ramping, ultra slow motion and time-slice photography. The team used time-lapse photography in a scene that showed a herd of mammoths grazing while the clouds flew by overhead. “We took our inspiration from ‘Dinosaurs’,” said Tyrie, “and then took into consideration what trends have appeared since then. With this work we are attempting to break the mold.”
Of all the hurdles that Framestore had to jump, realistic fur was probably the largest. “It’s quite tricky,” said Martin Macrae, digital texture artist. “There’s no easy way to do it.” The team tried out a selection of softwares and considered creating a custom program to solve the problem. Finally, they chose a combination of off-the-shelf packages to create the fur pipeline, consisting of Softimage3D, Maya, Mental Ray and PhotoShop. Strands or tufts of hair were hand-sculpted, with one hair in a hundred being individually created. The artists would then enter constraints into the program about how long the hair should be, how dense, etc. The program did the mathematical calculations to create the designated hair. This approach worked best for long hair, while short hair could more often be painted on.
The hard work paid off — the project and the technology behind it have reproduced a world not seen for 65 million years, an ice-bound wilderness in which mammals flourished.
