Nov 6, 2014
Paddington might be my favorite film I had worked on to date. Something about Pablo’s animation, and the script, and the amazing voice acting and timing of the edits that just made the film click for me. Each sequence worked on it’s own as little vignettes. And the work was fairly straight forward which I liked. “Put the Creature in the plate.” If you’ve done that well, you’re home free!
As far as responsibilities go, I was charged with taking up the mantle of getting the rooftop end battle cyclorama / set extension ready for the masses. We would have about 10-16 artists compositing the 80 or shot shots on the roof, and all the backgrounds needed to look the same, obviously. Also, it needed to be responsive and have notes addressed for individual shots. Just the sort of work I like to do. Creative and technical. Wound up reviving the snow system from 47 Ronin and adapting it for the sequence too. We composited the nuke particle snow using Deep which was new and exciting for many of the artists.
The two main shots that I got to loving bring to a close were the ‘Paddington on the Bench’ and the “Family Hug” shot at the end of the film. The bench shot was especially fun because I got to try the 2.5d water simulation technique that I saw a guy in London show off (but not use). He was very secretive about is approach, but once I saw that result it was more of less clear how it was done. The concept is more similar to programming and using data loops than compositing. First write the ‘frame data’ to disk, then on the next frame, re-load the previous frame’s data, augment it, and then write that data to disk. Rinse and repeat until you have yourself a 2D ‘water simulation’. Not rocket science but it’s always fun when you have to time to put these little side productions into practice.