HELLBOY 2 GIF TOOTHFAIRY SERIES

Christophe Ammann was the CG lead on the character, and he came up with some amazing stuff.” “When his legs drop quickly and hit the ground, you can tell his strength – not because he’s reacting to the hit, but because all the extra vines and leaves on his body would shake and flick off water and kick off steam and so forth. In the final shots, the creature is animated by hand, but those organic coverings that give important visual clues to its size and power are done procedurally. “We added a thing that we called the Ã¢Â€Â˜pimp coat’ to the character,” Burton continues, describing a layer of vines and leaves that covers what would be the creature’s shoulders and back. You’re supposed to be able to register how this character is feeling, but at the same time he needed to look cool and big and heavy. And it had to have a face that formed as he came up out of the ground. “He had to come up with a unique way for this character to move down the street that didn’t look silly. “Colin McEvoy was the animator on that character, and he had one of the toughest jobs on the show,” Burton says. And when wobble and jiggle was added to the character, he started to seem a lot less threatening.

Because the creature was made from essentially one type of material, it was typical to convey his enormousness. Meanwhile, Butler stayed at the office, making sure the characters were getting built and modeled appropriately.Ī good example of Double Negative’s approach is the film’s centerpiece action sequence, which involves a huge, organic elemental creature that smashes up a neighborhood trying to kill Hellboy. Once the relevant animation and CG leads were on set to supervise photography, Guillermo made a point of soliciting their input on how a scene could be shot to make the most of the FX work.

The team was broken down into categories and subcategories, making it clear exactly which personnel would be involved in each sequence. “We hadn’t worked on a project this big since Pitch Black.” In all, Double Negative created 761 shots for the film, with a small group of subcontractors (Cube FX, Lipsync, The Senate, Baseblack and Rushes) contributing even more work. “It was exciting and terrifying,” Butler admits. It was clear that the job would be enormous. Next, del Toro took the Double Negative crew to a meeting with the team at Spectral Motion, which did suit work and creature design on the film, to see characters in different stages of development. He wanted it to be the kind of film that you could keep going back to and discovering new things in the background.” “He wanted it to be very rich, with lots of creatures and other crazy stuff. “From the moment we met Guillermo, he said that Hellboy II was an animated film,” Butler says. It all started in 2007, when Butler flew to Los Angeles with Double Negative CEO Alex Holt and digital effects supervisor Andrew Chapman to meet with del Toro.

HELLBOY 2 GIF TOOTHFAIRY SERIES

No longer could the animators work on their own island – problem-solving on Hellboy II involved smart VFX artists knocking their heads together to figure out the solution to a series of problems. It’s an example of what went right on the production, which encouraged healthy collaboration between departments at Double Negative. We were able to art-direct the smoke to complement what the actor had to do.” His arm would triple in length, and we were able to create curlicue shapes with his hands. “Every time he’d move his hand, we would stretch his arm so it got left behind as if it were made of smoke. The riggers added an extra set of controls that let the animators stretch Johann’s semi-human figure in un-realistic ways. “I remembered Max Fleischer cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s being rubber-hose animation, so we built that facility into the human rig,” Butler explains. He’s meant to be ectoplasm trying to move like a guy, but it just looked like a guy with smoke coming off him.”ĭel Toro counseled Butler, “Just remember Fleischer.” With his background in traditional animation, Butler immediately got the reference. “We used the regular generic human rig, running the smoke sim, to create the animation,” Butler recalls, “and it didn’t look good. Getting that particular animation right was a bit of a head-scratcher. He berates Hellboy, then turns and walks away. When Hellboy smashes Johann’s helmet, Johann appears in front of Hellboy in his gaseous form, but in a human shape. Johann Krauss is not a man, but a gaseous cloud that’s locked inside an airtight diving outfit that allows it to move, speak, and interact almost like a human. “There’s a sequence where Hellboy and Johann have a fight in the locker room,” Butler says, referring to a dust-up between the film’s demonic protagonist and one of his colleagues.

Hellboy 2 gif toothfairy