MegaMind: Behind The Scenes

Expanding on my previous post on the extreme deformation style of Dreamwork's 'Madagascar', I found this behind the scenes video showing the production processes behind the movie 'MegaMind', also by Dreamworks. The video gives great insight in to the entire production process behind a high quality animation. If we refer to the chronological order of the video, it is suggested that the voice actors come in before the animating begins. This makes sense, as I imagine it would be easier to key a CG model to dialogue, than for an actor to try and achieve sync with a computer animation. What I also found engaging, was to see some of the concept art behind the characters in the film. We see development after development, pages of faces and varying hairstyles. This gives an idea in to the amount of work that goes in to creating a character, before the modelling process even begins. It is also clear that different people are working in different areas of computer animation. We see one artist producing an epic fly-cam over a city landscape, where as one animator is working on the character's facial expressions. It is also interesting to see the facial animator manipulating MegaMind's eyebrows on what appears to be a graph editor, which I often use in Maya to try and achieve smooth animations. Seeing this, it becomes clear how much detail is required for such an large scale production, and also, that perhaps this requires more animators taking on different roles. We also see one team member who's role seems to be to review the rendered footage and make sure no mistakes are present. We see him point out that a small streetlamp is superimposed onto the camera view, ignoring the large object destroying everything in its path.

In response to the video, I believe it has given me a general idea of the type of working environment within a large animation studio. There seems to be many different roles, so that focus and effort can be distributed evenly, ensuring every aspect of the finished animation is achieved with time and care.