Cinesite Vancouver animates MGM's The Addams Family
Credit to Author: Stuart Derdeyn| Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2019 07:30:41 +0000
The Addams Family debuted in the pages of The New Yorker magazine in 1938. Created by cartoonist Charles Adams — who signed his work Chas Addams — the single-panel pieces pictured the gothic and macabre machinations of Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday and Pugsley Addams along with close relatives Uncle Fester and Grandmama, the butler Lurch, the disembodied hand Thing and Gomez’s living hairball Cousin Itt.
Adams envisioned the strip as a satirical take on the not-yet-nuclear American family, and over 150 Addams Family cartoons were drawn, running in various publications. The strip has been adapted into one very popular TV series (1964-1966), a few additional animated and live-action series, and the successful early 1990s feature-film franchise starring the late Raul Julia as Gomez and Angelica Huston as Morticia.
The new 3D-animated, feature length movie from MGM is the first completed feature to come from the Vancouver offices of London, England,-headquartered Cinesite. The company also operates studios in Montreal and owns both the Image Engine and TRIXTER VFX brands. Cinesite’s combined offices have the capacity to employ over 1,550 artists and filmmakers on projects ranging from The Addams Family to director Cinzia Angelini’s upcoming CG-animated short MILA about a little girl in Trento, Italy, who experiences major life changes during the Second World War.
It took two years for a 240-person crew to produce The Addams Family. A total of 1,173 shots were done across the 86-minute length of the film. To put into perspective what was involved to just create one character’s look, a total of 85,000 hairs were required to generate Cousin Itt. Guided by director Greg Tiernan, the team brought the new look of the beloved family to the screen researching all the way back to the original source material.
“My job was to come up with the overall look of the picture, to develop the shape language and the colour schemes of the other world that we venture into,” says art director Patricia Atchison. “The original characters were designed by an artist named Craig Kellman, who designed them from Chas Addams’ original artwork. It’s funny that a lot of people don’t recognize the characters and the character design, so to bring it back was a lot of fun.”
Laura Brousseau is head of lighting at Cinesite Vancouver. She said that researching the original source material of Chas Addams’ cartoons became Step 1 for the team in developing the bright-and-dark contrasting environments between the Addams and the rest of the world. True to almost all contemporary big-studio, animated features today, there are odes and homages to the original comics for sharp eyes to pick up on.
“A large part of the story is the contrast between the two worlds that exist, the darkness of the Addams’ property and that of Assimilation, where Margaux and her neighbours live, which is all bright, sunny and colourful,” said Brousseau. “It was definitely a challenge to have the Addams fit into that environment and vice-versa, but I think we really got it to work.”
Naturally, all that computer animation meant that CG supervisor Nate Barnard had his hands full enabling all of the other supervisors to succeed in their jobs coming up with software options, creative solutions and a lot of pipeline tweaks to handle all the data. The Addams Family is Barnard’s third feature and he says that the learning process is always something new in contemporary animation, often resetting mid-movie as the technology upgrades.
“We did a Renderman Katana pipeline on this and it enabled us to work with massively larger scenes, more complex environments, more complex character counts and better integration of VFX,” said Barnard. “The pipeline team was constantly on-call for fighting firefight tickets and laying out the tracks before the train on this. We did do a reset on our pipeline to get this film up, which is pretty much what happens when you are doing a two-year cycle and things become redundant in that time.”
Cinesite is the sole CGI vendor on the project. MGM and the company have a long-established working relationship as Cinesite has worked on every 007 feature since 1995’s Goldeneye.