Framestore's inaugural animation feature film is a Universal Pictures presentation in association with Relativity Media a Larger Than Life production.
DIRECTORS Gary Ross, Sam Fell and Rob Stevenhagen
PRODUCERS Allison Thomas and Gary Ross
CO-PRODUCER Tracy Shaw
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS David Lipman, William Sargent, Ryan Kavanaugh and Robin Bissell
SEQUENCE SUPERVISOR Dale Newton
CG LEAD Laurent Hugueniot
The Tale of Despereaux has been widely acclaimed for its distinctive look, which took the classic works the Flemish masters as its starting point. But when the film's hero devours a book about knightly heroic deeds, the production team wanted the audience to lose themselves in the books delights much as the hero loses himself. They wanted something completely different from the rest of the film, to give the book's magic a distinctive edge.
Initially they were considering going outside of Framestore for this sequence, but when the Commercials team got wind of it, they were determined to keep it in-house. But this was no insider deal – the production were not about to compromise their vision for anyone, so Sequence Supervisor Dale Newton and his team, working at weekends and during off-hours, produced some stunning ideas based on the brief – including a distinctive fire-breathing dragon – that won them the work.
“I've always been interested in cut-out animation,” says Newton, “And I thought that this sequence offered a beautiful opportunity to produce something along those lines that would be exciting and entertaining, but in a way that the audience would not have seen before. The production wanted something more 3D than the phrase 'cut-out' suggests, which was lucky as I’ve been experimenting with figures that appear 2D but also seem to be moving in 3D space for some time.”
A combination of multi-plane camera animation and 'squashed' 3D rigging helped create the sequences unique style. The 32-strong team had just four months to put the sequence together, but that included time during which the team was actually being assembled, for in addition to a core of his existing Framestore 3D Commercials colleagues, Newton brought on board players from elsewhere within the company as well as outside it.
Ultimately, Newton attributes the success of the sequence to two elements: the creativity he could bring to the table, making an imaginative artistic solution to the sequence's problems possible, which was coupled with deep technical literacy, enabling the Framestore team to use the most modern of digital tools to forge the vision they were pursuing.