3D World

left: axisVFX had to be careful not to create

fire and lava that looked too realistic, in

order to remain consistent with the Aardman

animation style

Below: Audience reactions all started

within 15 frames of each other to produce

a natural-looking crowd that didn’t perform

their actions all at once

Far left: axisVFX had a version of the stadium
without any distinguishable features,
allowing the characters to ‘run’
for longer periods of time

SCooby-Doo StaDium

axIsvfx created an alternate

versIon of the stadIum to help

them alter camera angles

As the story evolved, the progression

of where the characters were in the

football pitch would come back, and

axisVFX would have to alter their

approach to keep in line with the

updated story. “So they're running

from one end of the pitch to the other.

They can't cross the centre line twice

so we had a version of the stadium

that didn't have any distinguishable

features in it,” explains Jones. “In

other words, it was just a very long

side of audience, so you didn't go

past the royal box, you didn't go past

any entrances so that you could run

that for a lot longer, and you never

quite knew where they were in the

pitch. Then if you wanted them to

run past the centre line, you'd see the

centre box or something that would

let you know where you were in the

pitch. I called that second stadium the

Scooby-Doo stadium because it's like

a Hanna-Barbera background that just

comes in loops, so we had that one for

a number of the shots.”

industry

Prehistoric VFX

There’s also a meteor moving towards
earth and in keeping with the slightly
factually incorrect theme, Jones and his
team deliberately cheated the fact that
it was too far away from the earth to be
reacting with the atmosphere. “Nick was
very clear that he wanted it to have that
nose-cone sort of thing happening as if it’s
hit the atmosphere, so again we cheated
that because it just makes the shot more
interesting,” Jones says. The meteor then
comes through the clouds, hits the ground,
takes out the dinosaurs and makes a great
big crater, leaving a football-shaped, mini-
meteor in the middle.
“We went to one effects artist to create
the big explosions and the fireballs, and we
went to another one to do the meteor trail
and then comped the whole lot together,
but the key thing we found with the effects
works – and it’s the same with the torches
around the stadium and any hand-held
torches – was, when you first create this
stuff in CG, what you get is something
that’s very real-looking. it looks like fire
and it looks like smoke and then of course,
that doesn’t fit in with the puppets in the
Aardman world. We had to do that with all
of our effects work, we had to get it with the
right shape and the right intensity but then
we had to simplify the look of it to make
it look less real and that, in some ways, is

harder because the first thing it does is give

you something that looks great and then it

doesn’t fit in with the style of the animation,

so there’s a lot of that on a project like this.”

Jones says the use of redshift through

Maya on Early Man saved his team valuable

time when it came to rendering frames.

“it would take an hour or more to render a

frame in Arnold and we came back with a

picture that was just as good for what we

needed in ten minutes when using redshift.”

He adds that through this time-saving

practice and knowing how to approach the

project from the offset meant that Early Man

became a challenge worth taking on. “We

made sure everyone approached the stadium

in exactly the same way in compositing, so

there was a pre-design look for it and we had

a few adjustments,” he says.

“i think that approach to limit what the

artists can do works well, because you might

have 20 artists working on 20 shots and they

all look completely different, but they’ve all

got to look the same. so i think giving them

a pre-built look and saying you can tweak a

little bit of it but you can’t start again on it, i

think that approach works well. We’ve kept

a lot of the artists on at the moment so from

a learning perspective for a lot of them, it

went really well.”

FYI

Find out more about the studio’s work at

http://www.axis-vfx.com