Paulie (Courtesy of Dream Works SKG)
For Paulie, we animated the beak of the lead character for 12 shots during the final scene of the movie. This raised an interesting challenge as the appearance and the motion of the parrot's beak had to look as natural as possible while it moved in conjunction with the voice track. To do these shots, we removed as much of the parrot's real beak as was necessary from the frames where the parrot was speaking, then created and tracked in an animated 3D beak to take its place. Since we only worked on the frames that required animation, the CG beak had to closely match that of the real parrot in order for the shot to appear seamless. We also added secondary animation to the eyes for increased emotion, and to the throat to simulate the effects of actual beak movement. Working on Paulie was really satisfying, and it gave us a chance to road test some of our new software tools.

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Paulie

(Courtesy of Dream Works SKG)

For Paulie, we animated the beak of the lead character for 12 shots during the final scene of the movie. This raised an interesting challenge as the appearance and the motion of the parrot's beak had to look as natural as possible while it moved in conjunction with the voice track. To do these shots, we removed as much of the parrot's real beak as was necessary from the frames where the parrot was speaking, then created and tracked in an animated 3D beak to take its place. Since we only worked on the frames that required animation, the CG beak had to closely match that of the real parrot in order for the shot to appear seamless. We also added secondary animation to the eyes for increased emotion, and to the throat to simulate the effects of actual beak movement. Working on Paulie was really satisfying, and it gave us a chance to road test some of our new software tools.

Back