Deep Canvas is a piece of software, similar to the earlier Pixar-designed CAPS program. Animators were able to create drawn art in a computer-generated 3D space, after it was developed for use in the 1999 film Tarzan. In a groundbreaking manner, the software "recalled" where strokes had been made, and as the camera was moved about kept the background in perspective. It was essentially as nifty as characters running through artwork. The CAPS system, impressive as it had been in older Disney films (and excellent in the creation of large environments), didn't measure up to the look produced by the Deep Canvas technology.
The work on Deep Canvas was the brainchild of Dan St. Pierre, who was working as the layout artist on Tarzan. Having been used a great number of times in film and TV, the story of a man in Africa having been raised by apes, was already famous; audiences already knew his propensity towards swinging on vines through the treetops. The audience was able to (seemingly) swing and fly along with Tarzan, through jungle treetops, thanks to the Deep Canvas technology that Disney employed.
Deep Canvas was born out of the production designers' need to make the African jungle as realistic as possible, knowing the importance of Tarzan's relationship with it. The CAPS and Pixar-helmed computer animations of the time were impressive, but to a great degree they still looked very much like video game levels. When traditionally animated characters were imposed on top of those backgrounds, the result was often jarring. With Deep Canvas, the backgrounds looked just as painted and stylised as the foreground elements, and the result was near-total audience immersion. Interestingly, the Tarzan scenes seemed like they were filmed even though no camera was used in the traditional animation.
The end result was met with praise from film critics, moviegoers, and industry professionals. Daniel St. Pierre received an Annie Award for his achievements in animation production design, and the creators of Deep Canvas were awarded a Technical Achievement Academy Award in 2003. Following Tarzan's success, it was used for sequences in other Disney films like Atlantis: Treasure Planet and The Lost Empire. However, with the decline of traditional animation in the 2000s, Deep Canvas wasn't used a great deal before the company decided to change its direction. This highly developed and specialized software has Tarzan as it's landmark production so far.
The movie's Deep Canvas sequences — which constitute only about 10 minutes of the 88-minute running time — provide an instantly recognizable visual jolt. ''This finally lets us do what live-action can do with a Steadicam,'' says Kevin Lima, who codirected the film with Chris Buck. ''For the first time, we can move our camera in and around a background, instead of just over flat layers of two-dimensional backdrops.''
By animating the backgrounds before they animated the characters. For each Deep Canvas shot, the directors first decided on their camera move. A cadre of technician-artists would then create a moving background environment made up of simplified, largely cylindrical computer-generated shapes, with tree trunks and branches represented by simple grayish geometrical abstractions.
Once this three-dimensional setting was ready, the scene went to character animators, who drew in the figures in shifting perspectives by hand in each frame. Simultaneously, it went to background painters, who'd nurture those bland gray undulations into convincing organic objects. Except that instead of using physical palettes and paintbrushes, they painted digitally, using a stylus, a digitizing tablet, and software that simulates many styles of brush strokes and paint mediums.
''Deep Canvas is something like a player piano,'' says Eric Daniels, who spent several years creating the technology under art director Daniel St. Pierre, with help from programmers George Katanics and Tasso Lappas. ''Except it goes further and learns how the painter paints. Then it replicates one or two paintings, or fragments of paintings, into dozens or hundreds of paintings, all from slightly different angles. It can do in hours what would take a painter months to execute by hand.''
Result? Backgrounds as kinetically alive as the main character. Supervising Tarzan animator Glen Keane, for one, is still amazed at the smoothness of the final images — and at how thoroughly Deep Canvas helped him realize his conception of Tarzan as a daredevil surfer. ''I thought that no matter what the programmers promised, a 3-D tree was going to look dramatically different than the rest of the [conventionally hand-painted] jungle,'' he admits. ''That didn't happen. If you freeze-frame the action, you can't tell the difference between that branch sticking out and the foliage around it.... We have never achieved that before, and it makes a tremendous difference.''
No comments:
Post a Comment