Gadgetory

heyyou oh it's better oh thank goodness hi I'm Dorian hey yeah so I'm a character supervisor we have to engineer the puppet basically that the animators used to create the performance actually an engineer worked on Hank for about six months I think just figuring out how to do a new create a new type of curve that the tentacles could use to make an octopus move around and squish and squash yet make it specific enough that animators can grab any part of him and move correctly was a problem of simplifying breaking it apart into individual pieces and putting it back together again this is an octopus walking on land it's horrifying but there's a complexity of motion here and a specificity in terms of how it interacts with the ground how it can connect at any point and move his name's Hank I have to find my family that's a hard one this is kind of what the art department gives us it's kind of like a bit of a blueprint right so this is a really early version of Hank and the cool thing here what you can't see is that all of these tentacles were set up slightly differently we kind of look at it like we're building animation this race car and we're giving it then to drive so we gave them different configurations in each of these tentacles this is a simple test of can we get that like rolling elbow or that elbow that travels down the length that you see so much in octopus movement where the curl is actually unfurling it's not bending like a human elbow and this was a real breakthrough test for us you can see it's starting to have that weight and slop that a tentacle you want it to have its contacting and sticking and then releasing it's doing all that stuff that we were challenged to build and this was about a year after we'd started Wow working on it so that was a long it was a long time before we got to this Mary our friend is in there lost alone baby you've got to use your application I feel stupid for babies let me get that for you it just kind of shows the flexibility interface it can squash it can stretch it can move around if you move a tentacle the whole body reacts to that motion this is a final animation and I hit the front two tentacles and show the controls underneath so you can kind of see what it looks like underneath this is what kind of animators are manipulating all the time here's that shot final and with that in mind like you can you can kind of see all the sweetening that lighting is put into the shading and the shading on top of the animation and how none of us really knew and then the sim like how how they're controlling the way the suckers are interacting and the extra jiggle it's just really cool and the camouflage is really cool too so our shading artist he actually applied animated textural effect all over Hanks skin at this very kind of cellular level I don't know if you know how how camouflage an octopus can get but they can change their color to anything how the light interacts with it the texture here's the final shot you can see the beginning the sort of whole gamut they've got like a projected texture through that camouflage that'll reveal him and then you'll see all that drippy squishy motioned that we were so hard on and then you know the animators spent a long time on the shot I think this shot from when we started - when this shot was final I think it was two years this specific scene yeah because this was one of the first shots that they put into production so I think the first shot was final two years after we started the project a lot of blood sweat tears yeah from a lot of people during you were about to find your parents and when you do that you pee