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Legend of the Guardians: Art director Grant Freckelton

To celebrate the release of Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, Encore will publish a series of interviews with the key creatives behind the animated film.

Today we start with art director Grant Freckelton, who had to draw the line between visual realism and storytelling to create the owl world of the film.

Where do you draw the line between photorealism and a sense of artistic interpretation of this world?

Serving the story is more important than being a slave to realism, so I believe strict photorealism is not as important as creating dramatic imagery and eliciting and emotional response from the audience. When it comes down to it, we have to start reinterpreting reality the moment we stick a helmet on an owl and expect it to talk.

Part of the design process on Guardians was to figure out what we wanted to keep from reality, and where to start art directing. With our characters, we felt that reality was a very good starting point because owls are such utterly engaging and beautiful creatures by themselves. We wanted to keep the textural integrity of their feathers, beaks and feet intact. We wanted their eyes to feel as deep and piercing as real owls. We wanted to keep their anatomy as faithful as possible. From there it became a process of tweaking the characters until they could do all the things they need to do in the story.

For instance, Soren is a barn owl, he’s the hero of the story. In reality, barn owls are ghostly, ethereal, slightly alien looking birds, with black eyes and a heart shaped face. Their faces don’t have much range of movement, their beaks are solid, their eyes are unable to move within their skulls, which is why they’re always moving and turning their heads. Initially we wanted to keep his eyes as real as possible, black with very little movement, but the result was a character you couldn’t relate to. So we had to tweak his eyes so they were less black, and we have to give them a little more movement. It became a process of working between the art, character and animation departments, trying to figure out how much range we put into their faces so that we allow them to emote without getting too stylized. There was a good 18 months spent developing the look of our birds before they were ready for production.

Scale was another aspect of the film that took a lot of thought. There was a lot of discussion early on about the size of our owls, particularly from a lensing standpoint. Are we shooting real owl sized characters with human lenses, which would make everything look like a wildlife documentary? Or are we translating our lenses down to owl size. Or are we making our owls bigger? We ended up erring on the side of making our owls larger and shooting them as if they were human actors. We also tweaked scale depending on species and their role in the movie. So in reality, Metalbeak, who is a Sooty owl, wouldn’t be too much bigger than Soren, but in our movie, we made him huge and imposing. We made Soren a little smaller because he’s young.

We took a similar approach with our sets, trying to find a sweet spot between actual reality and the dramatic reality of our world. If we played everything completely real, the scale of the world would be reduced significantly and you’d end up compromising the epic nature of the story. In real world scale, Metal Beak’s stone palace would only be 3 stories high, instead of a towering monolith, the Great Tree of Ga’hoole would be more like the Large-ish Tree of Ga’hoole. So we tended to make the textural and structural detail a little larger to help support the vastness of the world. We then piled on a lot of atmosphere to make everything seem larger and more epic.

When it came to lighting the movie we wanted to create an owl’s eye view of the world. A lot of the film takes place at night, so if we were to take a traditional cinematic approach, we’d end up with a fairly dark, cool toned movie. We wanted to conceive a look that was akin to how an owl might perceive the world, with their night being as warm and comforting as our day. The Tyto Forest scenes are lit with an over exposed moon that casts warm light and hard shadows. We’d play a warm, bright key against darker cooler shadows to come up with a look would be impossible to get in reality. We liked to push the moonlight so bright that is bordered on clipping, particularly when rim lighting fluffier characters like Eglantine.

I remember having a creative discussion with someone who insisted that moonlight should always be cool, because that’s the traditional language of cinema, but if you actually look at long exposure moonlit photography, the moon is nothing but a giant celestial bounce board that kicks warm sunlight back down onto the earth. The resulting photographs look like daytime except the shadows and sky are denser, and all the stars start to become overexposed. That look was a real inspiration for us.

We also altered the look of moon depending on context. So in St Aggies, where moonlight is threatening, the moon tended to be cold and scary, but at the great tree it tended to be warm and comforting. We also look inspiration from cinematography that driven by beauty over realism or logic. We were always piling atmosphere into the shots and cheating the lighting setups regardless of how unrealistic or illogical it might be. If one of the artists was feeling nervous about the inexplicable rim light we wanted, or the unjustified smoke drifting through the shot, we’d just play them a scene from Ridley Scott’s ‘Legend’ and point out all the things in the scene that don’t make any sense.

One of my favorite shots is a macro shot of Metalbeak’s battle claws. It looks beautiful with all this atmospheric depth and light glinting off the metal from all angles. Yet if you actually analyze it from a reality standpoint, it’s a shot that covers about 5 centimeters of space and only has the moon as a light source. In reality it would have to be a long exposure shot in a cloud tank to get that much atmos and moonlight! So its moments like that where realism isn’t as important and the drama of a shot.

How was your area impacted by the 3D component?

This was the first stereoscopic film we had worked on, so it was a learning experience all the way through. At the start there was a lot of anxiety about what we can and cannot get away with in stereo. 2D filmmaking is full of cheats that rely on the fact that the end result is essentially a flat, depthless image. Forced perspective, for example, works great in 2D but would never work the same way in stereo.

Another 2D cheat is to utilize stock elements or library footage for incidental effects, such as dust hits or embers. We thought that 2D library effects would not be possible when doing stereo. There was also worries about matte paintings and other inherently 2D techniques. What we learnt is that there is a threshold in the shot where you could essentially revert to 2D techniques with minimal impact on the stereo effect. Just as in reality, there’s a point where distant objects such as clouds or a city skyline have no perceptible disparity. Depending on what choices were made about the amount of depth in the shot, we could cheat a lot more.

For example, there’s a shot when the band arrives at the Great Tree, where there’s splashes of surf kicking off of rocks, those ended up being shot elements from Bondi. We used them because they looked great and found that they worked perfectly fine in stereo because they were background elements with were not the focus of the shot. That being said, most of the effect elements had to be created entirely in 3D because they were so close to the camera.

Another area that was impacted was set dressing. In a 2D film, you set dress to get a good balance of light, color and detail on the screen, usually to direct the eye to the action and support the story. In 3D the rules are no different, except suddenly you’re faced with the whole new element of depth. So in a 2D film, you might dress a foreground element in the shot to create a nice compositional element. In a 3D film that foreground element ends up poking you in the eye because it’s sticking out of the screen. So you have to rethink what you’re doing a little bit. We found that sometimes we would redress a shot once we reviewed the stereo lensing. Sometimes we would leave the set dressing as is, and stereographer Tim Baier would be able to push the depth of the shot back so the foreground object was no longer sticking out of the screen. Set dressing also had to be altered to make sure there was a good sense of continual depth information in the shot. For example, there was a shot with a foreground tree and a distant landscape. It looked fine in 2D, but in 3D the foreground tree was the only thing giving the shot depth, and the distant landscape ended up looking flat. We had to dress in midground trees that receded into the distance to ensure that the shot had a continual sense of depth.

What were the challenges of working long-distance with director Zack Snyder?

The relationship between a director and the crew is all about trust, so when a director is working remotely, there needs to a multiplier applied to that trust to have it all work. Working remotely is not ideal, but with Zack we had a lot of trust and a prior relationship that made the process work a lot smoother.

I had worked closely with him on 300, and we have similar aesthetics when it comes to visuals, so the design and approval process was incredibly smooth, there were very few revisions when it came to the art direction and lighting. The face to face time was fairly minimal on the project; it worked out to be around two months of having him here on the ground through pre-production, with him being here the past few weeks putting the finishing touches to the movie. The rest of it was done daily via email and every few days via teleconferencing facilities, which are great, but never as easy has having the person in the room.

The nature of this remote relationship meant we had to figure out when it was appropriate to get feedback on something, and when it was appropriate to stay on target. To his credit, Zack didn’t approach the project as a micro manager, he trusted us with a lot of the little details which meant we could function smoothly on a day to day basis, with the craft leads overseeing the creative process until we were ready to review something with him. All in all, have Zack remote was much more of a challenge in pre-production while we were figuring out the story and script, and in the later part of the project it ran smoothly because we all trusted each other with what we were doing.

When working with character designers, are you thinking about toys and other merchandise, designs that would translate well to physical versions?

We haven’t seen too much in terms of action figures out there for Guardians, which is sad for us because as we were designing we were always thinking ‘That would make a pretty good toy’ or ‘I’d love a statue of that on my desk’. A lot of love was put into the owl hardware, the weaponry, helmets, that sort of stuff. (Production Designer) Simon Whiteley certainly pitched a lot of his designs in terms of having appeal for children. When we were designing the Great Tree we were always picturing that one day it might be an action figure play set or a theme park attraction, so he was always thinking in terms of layers of chambers, secret rooms and all sorts of other cool stuff. The sort of thing a kid would find cool to explore. Simon spent a lot of time putting in all of this stuff, a lot of it isn’t featured in the film but you see it briefly in the background in some shots. As for the characters, because we were making a 3D movie a lot of the designs naturally translate into the physical world, and all their gadgets and weapons would make pretty sweet accessories.

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