Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Cars 2 Production Notes #10

UP TO SPEED: ANIMATING AND VOICING THE CHARACTERS 
Top Talent Steers “Cars 2” 

Making the car characters in “Cars 2” come alive requires a masterful blend of great vocal performances and top animation talents. Owen Wilson and Larry the Cable Guy reprised their starring vocal roles as Lightning McQueen and Mater, and Michael Caine and Emily Mortimer make their Pixar vocal debut as British spy cars Finn McMissile and Holley Shiftwell, while John Turturro sounds off as Francesco Bernoulli.

“Cars 2” welcomes both veteran “Cars” voices as well as a host of new vocal talents. Filmmakers were saddened at the loss of two revered members of the “Cars” cast, Paul Newman and George Carlin. Fillmore’s voice and spirit were inspired by George Carlin’s “The Hippy Dippy Weatherman.” Pixar paid tribute to the inimitable comedian by casting accomplished actor Lloyd Sherr, who emulated Carlin’s iconic character to become Fillmore in “Cars 2.” Director John Lasseter found another way to honor Newman. “Doc Hudson was Paul Newman,” says Lasseter. “The character was written after listening to him talk about his passion for racing. So in the film, they’ve renamed the Piston Cup for Doc Hudson: the Hudson Hornet Memorial Piston Cup. Lightning McQueen has won the first one and converted Doc’s office into the Hudson Hornet Racing Museum. We pay homage to Doc Hudson, which is paying homage to Paul Newman.”

“We have terrific actors,” says producer Denise Ream, “and they obviously make the animators’ lives a lot easier with their performances.”


Supervising animators Dave Mullins and Shawn Krause were charged with overseeing a team of more than 60 animators in bringing this diverse and colorful cast of characters to life. “Cars” offered the team an existing set of rules that were adopted for “Cars 2.”

Krause says the rules provided a foundation, but the team still took some liberties. “There are rules set to start with — we don’t want to reinvent it, but we also tend to break every rule. In ‘Cars,’ John [Lasseter] wanted the cars treated as heavy, two-ton cars that didn’t jump around for the most part. But even if we bend the rule a bit in ‘Cars 2,’ we always treat the characters like real cars.”

Mullins adds, “With these characters, you have to realize that cars are solid chunks of metal, and the more you can actually use them in that way, the more they feel like a car. The more we bend it around and try to make it feel like a person, the less connected the audience is with it. At Pixar, we always try to stay true to the materials the characters are made from in order to keep them believable. We do a lot of the acting with the eyes and the mouth. It’s a bit like taking a person and cutting them off at the chin and the ankles and putting the head on the feet. At first, you feel very confined by the choices you can make, and then, like with all the best art, the limitations give you the freedom to discover things that you never tried before. Animating these characters is really about head acting — figuring out how to do your scenes from the shoulder up. It’s challenging, but it’s also really rewarding. You just throw away all the usual tricks in your bag like fingers, and the attitude of the body, and figure out how to create the best performance.”


Says Krause, “The challenge with animating cars is always to take a gesture we would do with our shoulders, or with our hands, and apply those to the wheels of the character. The front wheels can be hands, they can be shoulders, they can be feet. It just depends what you want to do with them. Whereas, the rear wheels are usually legs. Once you get it down and understand the vocabulary, it can go very quickly. The driving system is a whole other thing and can add a level of complexity with all the micro-moves required to keep it moving.”

“Something else that we were able to do with ‘Cars 2’ that really helped the animators a lot was to simplify the number of controls,” says Mullins. “A rig for one of the main characters on the first ‘Cars’ film had about 3,500 animation controls, because we were trying to do all the squashes and stretches that we thought we needed. One of the first things that Shawn and I did on this film was to strip out 800 animation controls from the rig. This kept the animators on model, because they weren’t using controls they weren’t supposed to use, and it actually made the models a lot faster.”

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