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We caught up with Oscar-winning animation expert Mark Andrews at the SDCCM to talk Brave, The Incredibles, One-Man Band and animated shorts, Super Giant Robot Brothers, and using real-time pipelines with Unreal Engine.
"Hi Gamereactor friends, this is day two of the San Diego Comic-Con in Málaga, and this is my second Oscar-winning speaker for the day, so thank you so much for joining us.
Mark, you gave us something beautiful that still resonates with today's generations, that is Brave, and it was Brave back in the day."
"How do you feel looking back all these 13 years, I think, at what it meant for animation?
That's a great question. I think what's really important about Brave is that it's a parent-child story.
It's that struggle of seeing your child coming into adulthood.
As an adult, you've been there, you know all the mistakes and pains and agonies, and you want to spare that child of that."
"But at the end of the day, the child's got to go through it on their own, right?
And be brave.
And be brave, and that the child can.
I think that's really one of the triumphs of the movie, is showing that without the adult support, without help there, everything that you've taught your child up to those points, when they are alone, they're going to be able to solve their own problems, face their own problems bravely."
"So I think that was one great theme to work on, and that resonates with a lot of people.
I think the other important thing was that it was an anti-fairytale.
It wasn't about the princess getting Prince Charming.
They weren't trendy back in the day."
"That's right. A woman's identity is not caught up in who their partner is going to be in that male identity.
So you break that, right?
We broke that to give everybody a princess that doesn't need a Prince Charming.
That's not the center of her story."
"The center of her story was defining herself and defining that bravely.
Those are two beautiful messages that the movie conveyed.
But let's talk a little bit more technically and artistically about the product itself.
To me, and I guess to many people, the hair is almost like a character in itself."
"It was telling how brave this character was and how she expressed herself.
What can you tell me about that very specific aspect, which I think was key to its success visually?
It all starts with the character design and what story we're telling with the character.
That big, red, vibrant hair that's exploding is her soul, is her spirit."
"Her mother or society at that time wanted to contain it and put it under the headdress or tie it up in some way.
So we needed that big, bountiful hair.
But now we're in animation and we need to move it.
What is that going to take?
Is it straight hair? No, it's this big, curly hair."
"Our technical team, our TDs, we worked with some very incredibly smart people.
This was a huge technological challenge because we had done hair before, but we hadn't done anything this big.
What does it take?
That was millions and millions and millions of strands of hair that we had to tell the simulation program, how does that behave?
We studied hair, we looked at hair, we got wigs, what happens when it's wet, what happens when it's dry, how bouncy is it?
We write our own programs and tweak those technical knobs just to dial it in so that it just looks natural."
"There's a lot of work behind the scenes just to get it to look natural.
I wasn't stylizing in any way like we can do in animation.
We could stylize everything.
It follows paths of action and all that stuff."
"That wasn't my concern.
My concern was just be natural, just look natural, just have gravity affect it the way it's going to look at it.
If the hair falls into the face, it falls into the face because that's what happens.
We wanted it to feel organic and look alive by itself."
"Every single shot that Meredith is in with her hair, that was a triumph to get on screen.
It's called Meredith, which is a very important name here in Spain as well.
You've mentioned technology briefly, but before that I wanted to ask you about the Incredibles.
Is there any sort of special memory that you would like to share about those projects?
And what do you expect or hope the next iterations are going to bring us?
I think the funnest thing about working on the Incredibles was really seeing that these are human beings more than superheroes."
"I think combining those two worlds of seeing that they're just a normal family where the parents have to yell at the kids.
The kids are going crazy and they're yelling at the parents.
They're really hard and difficult to deal with.
Then you've got the baby on top of that."
"They're just living life, but they also have to be superheroes.
They have the superpowers and what does that mean for them?
It's really that exploration of the mundane and the fantastic.
Having a superhero just have to be a human being, a regular flawed human being, was really fantastic to work with."
"I think that duality, those extremes are really fun.
You have your dinner table sequence and then you're going off and you're fighting bad guys.
In a really great, unique way as a family.
The thing that I can't wait for the ongoing adventures of the Parr family is them working together as superheroes."
"I think that's what everybody wants.
The first time they do it in the first moment when they get together and they're kicking butt as a family of superheroes.
We're just going, we've been waiting 60 minutes for this moment in the movie to come.
I think that's the thing."
"It's that triumph of the family in those situations that's really exciting for everybody.
I'm looking forward to that myself as well.
If I'm correct, you were also nominated for a one-man band short animated movie.
Back in the day we were looking forward to what was coming next in terms of short movies by Pixar."
"Do you think there is still an interesting tool for creators to try something new, both creatively and also with technology and to get to be known worldwide?
I think any kind of shorts program, even with the stuff that's coming out of Netflix and Amazon now, you have the rise of things like Love, Death, and Robots, which is basically shorts of these anthology series or with Secret Level."
"I think that's the best way, even in the animation industry, you see shorts.
I always look forward to Oscar season and seeing the shorts that are coming out of all the different countries and all these different studios and these tiny little studios from these creators that I never knew existed that come out and tell the stories."
"That's the best way to see not only these new voices, but what can be done in animation story-wise, that it isn't just for families and kids, that we can tell whatever story we want in animation, in whatever style we want.
That's the magic of animation, this pure visual exploration of story."
"Now that you mentioned Netflix, you also worked with them, with Supergiant Robot Brothers.
It also relates more to us because we started focused on gaming only, but now we opened up.
It was built on Unreal Engine, which also became a tool more and more for animators and for movie makers in the past decade. It completely exploded."
"What can you tell me about that? About that specific approach for a series, that you took this tool and built the episodes right there, which at this time was innovative, of course.
That's a great question. I think the Unreal Engine is such a fantastic tool because it's just a renderer that renders in real time."
"I don't have to spend a week waiting for my shot to render.
What that allows us to do, in coordination with using mocap, is I don't need the big, cumbersome, gigantic cruise that it takes to do an animated film, where you really have to plan because it's so expensive and you're going to get everybody involved."
"As it goes down, these productions are tried-and-true 30-year-old production styles.
Now we don't have to adhere to them anymore. We can have smaller crews working faster.
Unreal helps make that happen.
All the projects I'm working on right now, the problem with animation is that to get any kind of organicness into something that's very mechanical and computery is incredibly hard. We have to plan that."
"But being on a mocap stage with a virtual camera, now I can work with the actors.
I can explore the scene. I can workshop the moment.
If it's not working, I know it's not working right there and I can rewrite on the stage.
There's much more of this improvisational, organic, back-and-forth creativity."
"Performing yourselves as well.
Exactly. And we can find stuff and you can record all of it, so you're keeping everything.
And then when I go back in, now I can shoot it, or my layout team can go in and shoot it, and now they can shoot coverage. You don't have coverage in animation."
"And so the story now, we have this process, this pipeline now, that lets us act more like live action.
So you get the best of live action in that organicness and finding stuff in the serendipity, the happy accidents, plus the total control of your visual image from animation, colliding in the best possible way."
"So Supergiant Robot Brothers, anything that gets made is a miracle.
The Supergiant Robot Brothers was able to get made and we used Unreal to do it.
It was a miracle. All the planets were aligned and we were laser focused.
So we did five hours of content in 18 months for $13 million."
"So when I came out of that experience, I'm going, wait a minute, if you gave me $13 million and I only had 90 minutes, I can do that in 18 months and all that extra money will go to the look of the film. So that's when it dawned on me, the era of the independent animated film is here, using these real-time pipelines."
"That would be a perfect way to wrap this up, but you mentioned something.
You mentioned, in other current projects I'm working on, beep beep.
So what else can you tell me about what's next coming from you?
There's a lot next. I'm attached to a lot of different projects."
"Some are my own that are originals, some are features, some are animated series.
Lots of curly hair.
Yeah, some other IPs that are out there. So there's a lot of irons in the fire and they're all centered around real-time pipeline production."
"Again, to give the studios, to break this moment in animation where nobody's really making anything.
It's really hard because the costs are too high.
I think now, with the rise of YouTube, now's the time to find these other production methods to prove that story is still king and it can still look fantastic animation-wise and be beautiful to look at, but not cost an arm and a leg."
"So that's my crusade.
That is another perfect way to finish this one.
Thank you so much for your time, Mark. Enjoy your time in Malaga.
Enjoy the San Diego Comic-Con here."
