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00:04Kung Fu Panda is a remarkable film we're seeing things come to life on screen that frankly we've
00:10not been able to do before it really is the combination of great action with the mystery
00:15of China with fighting kung fu fur and of course a great story we wanted it to be a real
00:25big action
00:26movie as much as it was an intimate character story plus we have characters with fur and they
00:37wear clothing and those are both very complicated in most movies you get to choose one of those two
00:43things then when you ask somebody to jump 20 feet in the air and do a rap house kick wearing
00:49cloth
00:50and things get tricky so we were very ambitious and everyone else who worked on the film was just
00:55as ambitious and worked really hard to figure out how they could contribute some you know
01:00creative solutions to some of these very complicated complex artistic problems that we kept presenting
01:06them with every single day but all the departments came together to really you know put their best
01:12work in you know from animation to effects to rigging to character effects we found very early on that
01:23the rigs which sort of is the internal skeleton of the character they wouldn't hold up to the
01:28physicality of kung fu it uh it was just too much strain and burden on the on the rigs so
01:34we had to go
01:34back and re-engineer and redesign all the rigs for all the characters so they would actually be able to
01:39do
01:50this shot was one that really showed off what you guys were doing with the rig for viper it's very
01:55important for a viper to be able to twist in ways that should be impossible and also to have all
02:01the
02:01breaking points in shape it was important for the whole kung fu to be visible and recognizable like here when
02:08she stretches to the left side you know it was important for us to actually give a hint of a
02:12kick and this is a great test for the technology character design for the rig that we put in there
02:17and you know once we saw this we kind of felt like we had a character that was gonna fly
02:26overall I think the coolest thing that you achieve with the surfacing was you maintain the intent of
02:31the design the idea to keep it believable was to actually make them almost more like plush toys
02:37teddy bears getting in kung fu fights which I think is the great contrast in the film that you've got
02:43this soft feel and then you've got the hard impact of kung fu we did short fur that wasn't dynamic
02:54we
02:54didn't want all the fruit to be bouncing every time the character bounce so because that we also had to
02:59spend a lot of time grooming messy we went clean and we ended up having to just put a lot
03:04of dense fur on
03:05there because it was so short and we needed it to be structured the other advantage of the short fur
03:10was we had to deal with clothing on a lot of our characters yeah excellent we knew we had furry
03:19characters with clothing we had to figure out a way to use computing power to solve that to make this
03:25really possible smooch is our technology for fur to clothing contact smooch allows us to slide the
03:31clothing over the surface and for the fur to actually move and be pushed down in the areas
03:37whereas a minute actually it springs up as the as the clothing releases it once we had that kind of
03:44look we can then customize it in terms of how much fur lays down how fast it it springs back
03:50to really get
03:50that kind of naturalistic look an important part of this was automating it because when you have
03:541500 shots several characters maybe even crowds that all use this technology it needed to be something
04:00that we could use as an artistic tool but also used as a computing tool we wanted a system whereby
04:05a lot
04:06of the stuff would go through automatically so that we could really concentrate on the action moments
04:21because we're a we're a kung fu movie we have also had to push the effects in our film further
04:26than
04:26any movie the studios ever done before one of the key examples was Thailand's escape and we wanted to
04:32break the last big obstacle kind of which is the break breaking of the bridge the first thing we're
04:37given is basically an artwork from rough layout we have a kind of a choreography of in general how
04:44things should work so this is kind of a the input that we we we give to the system where
04:50we paint the
04:50different colors on the outside geometry and the system takes that as input and spoon out basically
04:56the final pieces of your broken bridge at the same time we start adding the the detail to ask scale
05:02to
05:02the to the shots the rocks they emit from the cracks as the big pieces crack apart stuff that exploded
05:09from the seating that's falling down it's important for us to really sell the scale and make it believable
05:13it's a marriage between really art direction and technology which I think is exemplifies us on how we
05:20approach movie making the ultimate showcase of all the the technical work all our great you know
05:33departments did you know rigging character effects special effects clothing everything it was was
05:39probably the road bridge probably the single most you know taxing and demanding technically complex
05:44sequence in the whole film there wasn't a single department that was confident about you know
05:55oh yes I've done that before we have breakage we have water we have to come through destruction we
06:02had impacts on the characters we had all sorts of crazy stuff that no other movie the dream has ever
06:08done and it's one of the things we're most proud of in the movie but all we really want people
06:12to do
06:12is to be involved in the story of you know the furious five fighting tai long and get caught up
06:18in the
06:18fight and hopefully all of that other stuff even though it required thousands of manners to get right
06:23hopefully all of that just goes away and just get lost in the story when you're making computer
06:31animation technology is at the essence of what we do and having the best tool set in the hands of
06:39great artists makes great movies the ability to create richer and more compelling images is
06:46something that we look to do literally each and every time with each movie beyond what we've done
06:52before today's technology are bringing to life films that we couldn't even imagine a couple years ago
06:57and it's exciting to think about where that's all heading for the future
07:09you
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