Snail and the Whale -technical challenge of water
Colour key versus final image, The Snail and the Whale: © Magic Light Pictures Limited 2019
“I was particularly interested in some of the technical challenges because when you watch it, you think, my goodness, there’s an awful lot of water and interactions with that water as well. Wow. I just wanted to ask you this. It’s 100 percent CGI, isn’t it? Everything.”
Daniel Snaddon Pretty much, yes.
Katharine Nicholls Yeah. And it's some kind of wow! What you've managed to do with with that. I mean, you must have taken on this project knowing that that was something that was going to be absolutely paramount in terms of your pipeline, what you developed. Did you have any particular challenges with that? It must have been a huge thing.
Colour Key, The Snail and the Whale: © Magic Light Pictures Limited 2019
Daniel Snaddon Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Katherine. I think that was always the big... besides the story challenges, which you've already kind of touched upon. That was always the big reason not to do the movie...
Katharine Nicholls I can imagine.
Daniel Snaddon Not to do the movie and why it took sort of ten years for us all to kind of work up... for Max to convince everybody that, yeah, “we can do this!“ And funnily enough, what happened… The reason that Triggerfish agreed to do it is because they're just about to release a feature film sort of now almost two years later, which is a really fun, funny movie. Not like Snail and the Whale in terms of its tone, but also uses a lot of water effects. It takes place in Cape Town, and it's about. seals versus sharks in Cape Town. It's erm... they joked for a long time that, like Snail and the Whale was going to be the R&D. Looks like the R&D project to... the pipeline project to kind of prove that they could do the feature. I think that was the thing that kind of gave us the courage to try because I think until that point, we couldn't think of anything on TV barring like the very big sort of US shows that used a lot of CGI water and in animation... I mean, fortunately, we've seen Moana and we were like, “OK, that looks great!” So it's possible to do CGI water and we knew the kind of the basic tools where Houdini and Maya.
“At Disney they have lots of proprietary stuff, but essentially most of this stuff that you start with is out of the box. So the real trick was trying to find people”
Behind the scenes, The Snail and the Whale: © Magic Light Pictures Limited 2019
Daniel Snaddon We really tried for a long time to try to find like a VFX Supervisor who'd worked a lot in Houdini and had a lot of experience with fluids. Ryan who ended up being our VFX Supervisor, and it was amazing. He didn't have any real Houdini experience, but he had a lot of stuff on his reel where he had done very stylised fluid effects. And basically what we found is that all the big, big VFX houses in South Africa, you know, we talked to them, said, 'Do you want to partner up on this?' 'We need a lot of VFX.' They said, 'Yeah, here's the what it will cost', and it was the same price as the whole show. No room for animation or voices or anything like that. So Ryan put together a young team, at least half of them, or maybe like a third of them, came straight out of college. Almost none of them had any serious Houdini experience or fluid experience. And basically, they kind of taught themselves on the job. We gave them quite a nice long run and I think there were a couple of things that they were really trying to get their heads around first. First of all, the fluids in Houdini. And if you if you're doing everything in Houdini, you’re caching and you're simulating, caching and rendering and Houdini. It's very straightforward and very kind of nice. We only had enough licences for the VFX artists. So all the lighting artists and all the people who had to kind of integrate the characters into the special effects and everything had to be in Maya because we couldn't afford more Houdini licences. And so we had we basically had to find... that was the biggest challenge was to try to find a way to get back into Maya because you could do these amazingly huge simulations in Houdini and sort of keep it in Houdini's native. I guess it's native kind of caching setup, and it would work. But as soon as you tried to cache out alembic files or anything…As soon as you started trying to cache shots of alembic files or anything like that, all the detail that you saw in Houdini just disappeared. It just.. like to try to keep it within a reasonable amount of server space and stuff and and loadable for the artists on the Maya side because we were all using just, you know, souped up gaming machines. We didn't have any, you know, felt really fancy hardware or anything like that.
Rosa Mulraney Did that help, though, in a way because the style is quite simplistic anyway, with its roots in stop motion or, you know, trying to have that more textural handmade feel. So did that help in a way, or did that make it harder?
Daniel Snaddon There was a lot of conversation at the beginning about should we not try to do something that feels more stylised, that could be kind of inspired by.. you see some really fascinating stop motion fluid kind of effects using all sorts of different techniques from, you know, glycerine on glass and kind of doing ripples and stuff that way to, you know, replacement animation. I always loved in, and I think Aardman and the Cracking Animation book that Peter Lord and David Sproxton wrote Wallace and Gromit all the raindrops were just actually like blown glass little sculptures of raindrops. And they would just put them on for two frames. So you just get this like flash of a splash. You know, I always thought that was so great, you know, so we spoke about it, and then we had a look at all the big stop motion studios like like, you know, Aardman, how had they done stylised water or had they done stylised water? Often the water looked very real. And I think that the fact that.. what we ended up kind of settling on was it's a story of scale. It's a story about a whale and a snail. So usually when you're when you're CGI really trying to recreate that feeling of stop motion, you're really trying to kind of make everything feel miniature if you're trying to kind of get the level of the materials and the details of those materials to feel a bit oversized and a bit sort of larger
“You’re trying to get the angles to feel a bit soft and everything a little bit of handcrafted. ”
Daniel Snaddon You're trying to get the angles to feel a bit soft and everything a little bit of handcrafted. So, you know, perfectly straight, computer-generated, perfect angles and that kind of thing. No polygons, but we sort of thought, well, actually, if we... unless we have a really good reference, where we can go, OK, that's a stop motion whale and a stop motion ocean, and it still feels kind of a bit grand. We just thought we're opening up such a can of worms because we wouldn't be able to describe to the VFX team, this is going to work now if you just make the order look like this. So we thought, is it not better to sort of try to to treat the world as a stop motion inspired world? But actually, we want the whale to feel that when he's making these splashes and stuff quite, you know he makes big splashes with foam and bubbles and the rest of it. And then you compare that to these close-up shots with the snail and you can get these moments where the water, so you can feel the surface tension of the water sort of around her, like with the.. when she's on the tail of the whale kind of going down, you know, you can really feel it sort of creep over the... I think that you're right in saying that there is a little there's definitely a stylised quality to the water because we were trying to find very simple graphic moments, but it's all sort of based on references that we got from nature documentaries and stuff. And often it is. And it's within the limitations of what the hardware could give us. Yes.
The Snail and the Whale: © Magic Light Pictures Limited 2019
