3D World

environment as well, so it was important to
get everything right.”
axisVFX were given the pre-designed
model of the stadium and were tasked with
optimising it to make it renderable. “We
looked at it to work with our renderers
and worked out how to render it with the
grass and the characters and make sure
that was all possible,” Jones says. “Then
we would take Aardman’s animations of
the characters and implement and render
them.” These audience characters were
perhaps the most complex part of the whole
project, with around 30 animations that had
five different cycles. in order to make the
audience reactions as realistic as possible,
director Nick Park gave Jones and his team
a live action video where he would act out,

in simple terms, the kind of responses he

wanted from the audience in sync with the

puppet animation.

“We got him on camera cheering or

booing,” Jones says. “That gave us a pretty

clear idea of what he was after and then

from all the different animations we had, we

had to work out how to do something that

felt or looked like what he was after. even

though the direction from Nick might seem

a bit simple, it saves time creatively and then

there’s time to do a second or third pass with

it which sometimes, is a bit of a luxury.”

cREATing ThE R ighT REAcTion

When it came to the little details, it turned

out that less was in fact, more. “it became

quite clear that if we had too high a

left bottom: Aardman created a virtual

reality version of the stadium, which allowed

director nick park to pinpoint which parts

axisVFX should focus on

Below: The ‘checkerboarding’ process

allowed the team to have shots both with

and without the green screen in order to

perfect their lighting

left: Artists were given a pre-designed look

for the film’s football stadium to ensure

that they all approached it in exactly the

same way

CheCkmate

IntegratIng vIsual effects

wIth stop-motIon puppet work

Howard Jones explains that Aardman

have an effective method called

‘checkerboarding’, involving placing

a green screen behind a character

but then later taking the green screen

out. “The computer will actually split

it into separate shots, so that we

can basically have a green-screen

character, but we also have it without

the green screen so that we get the

right lighting on it. You can't do

that in the real world. Some of those

tricks are good.”

industry

Prehistoric VFX