How They Make Animals Talk

This morning I was thinking of the movie Babe, so then I decided to watch clips from the movie. One of the scenes that really interested me was the scene below.

My question was how the heck did they make the animals talk? I guess the could train them to speak English, that's not that hard. I did a little research and found that they did not train them, they used "animatronics" and digital animation. Animatronics are like puppets on steroids. They're stuffed with electronics that snake out to a control panel where a puppeteer can manipulate the creatures and make them appear to talk.

As intricate as these robots are, they're usually not convincing enough to carry all the FX shots. A good movie uses several different techniques to keep the movie-goer guessing. So they added morphing and warping to the mix. Here, the special effects crew hand-animated the frames of the movie by warping the image around the mouth of the cat. They often morphed the two techniques, animatronics and warping, together before compositing them on top of the live action.

Now ya know because it's Patricia's super short show!

Even Thor Plans Ahead

  Pre-visulization is crucial for movies that depend on visual effects, and as FX become more popular and advances each year, pre-visulization becomes more prevalent. Third Floor in London and LA did pre-visualization for the box office hit Thor:The Dark World.

Pre-visualized

Final

  Pre-visualization helps pace out time, set shots, and help make FX seem as realistic as possible. I feel in our course we should focus more on Pre-Visualization for each of our projects. Without this step, projects can be scattered and unfocused. 

Be like Thor and plan ahead. 

Lip-Sync Animation

As an audio-production student, I find myself paying close attention to the sound design of animated works and how the process of audio production is applied - either with voice overs /SFX, etc.  The following link is a behind the scenes look at the voice-over process for the FX show Archer.  Pertaining to the current project, the second video shows the animated intro sequence for Archer, which is pretty interesting.

Motion Graphics On Television

A lot of television channels use motion graphics for intros to shows and commercials for shows. They can be very intricate with their design and they are very interesting to watch. I found a website that showed a lot of good ones but I picked a few of my favorites to post here.

I thought this introduction to MTV was very good. I enjoyed all the colors and the complexity of it but I was not able to post the video. You can view it on the website I posted above.

I thought this video was good for the SyFy channel.

This last video is for FX and it is very interesting because it shows the steps of how they made the final product. It shows you from storyboards to every step they take after filming. You can view the full commercials on the website.