RANGO
Industrial Light & Magic Animators Turn Gore Verbinski's Vision into a Highly Acclaimed Animated Feature

By Barbara Robertson

After Pixar's Toy Story introduced a new kind of animated film made possible with computer graphics tools, conversations were peppered with the idea that filmmakers were now only limited by their imaginations. And yet, only a few filmmakers truly leveraged the tools to push their imaginations to new limits. Gore Verbinski is one of those few.

Rango, Verbinski's first animated feature, draws on live-action techniques to light, texture and film characters as richly detailed as any character in a photorealistic live-action film. Known for directing the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, Verbinski wrote and directed Rango. His animated feature is not a children's story seasoned with enough elements to keep adults interested. Produced by Blind Wink, GK Films and Nickelodeon, and distributed by Paramount Pictures, his animated feature is an animated spaghetti western — wacky, weird and unpredictable. It stars quirky animal characters designed by Mark "Crash" McCreery that look as hot, grungy and beat up as Dirt, the desert town they live in. It's a traditional western story — a hero saves the town and gets the pretty girl. But, with a little Hunter S. Thompson, Chinatown and other surprises rolled in.

"Rango is one hundred percent Gore Verbinski's vision," says Charles Alleneck, a mentor at Animation Mentor, and one of six lead animators at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), the visual effects studio that created the film. "The film is very true to what he initially pitched to us. It didn't morph into something else along the way. It was cool to see that the film stayed so true to its creator."

The production also stayed true as much as possible to Verbinski's way of directing. For example, rather than recording the actors doing solo performances in sound studios like most animated features do, he gathered all of the actors for a scene, put them in costumes and recorded the dialog on set as if he were filming a live-action movie. "In most cases, we'd get one audio file with all the actors talking over each other," Alleneck says.

The sets and costumes were simple, but the interactions between the actors were complex. Surprisingly, the animators loved it. "It was a big help that the actors talked over each other and interacted," says Shawn Kelly, an Animation Mentor cofounder and a lead animator on Rango at ILM. "It gave us more material for the performance. Actors in a sound booth say their lines perfectly; they don't second guess in the middle of a word. But, the pauses and stutters we got were great for interjecting life into a character; for adding a little something in their eyes."

In addition to the audio files, the animators had video reference of the actors performing on set. "The characters would bump into each other and their lines would overlap," Alleneck says. "But because we had the video reference, we could make sense of it. We could pick it apart and analyze it. I think it made a difference in the animation. It gave us a great layered effect."

Although they had the video reference, the animators did not mimic the actors' performances. "We didn't do any sort of motion capture for the actors and we didn't rotoscope their performances," Kelly says. "We paid close attention to the acting performance, especially for the lip sync, to see the timing of their movements, because we wanted to crank up the amount of complexity in their faces more than what you sometimes see in animated films. But there was no tracing or copying."

As lead animators, Kelly and Alleneck were involved in pre-production for the characters, helping to define the feel of the characters and setting up the facial libraries. Modelers sculpted the characters using ZBrush, Maya and ILM's proprietary software, Zeno. Creature development technical directors rigged the characters in Maya and, for the faces, in Fez, ILM's FACS-based facial animation system. "We worked with the riggers to set up how the character moves and figure out what we needed beyond the standard library of face shapes," Kelly says. "The movie had a ton of unique characters, each requiring some special thing in the rig. A long floppy nose. Wings, whatever."

Kelly, for example, worked on the Mayor (a turtle in a wheelchair), Roadkill the armadillo and the 'Spirit of the West.' Alleneck worked on the bank robbers and some of the posse members, and he supervised ILM's Singapore-based crew of animators. For the Mayor, Kelly helped create lip sync poses for the character's lip and a beak, and he defined which levers the Mayor pulled to maneuver his wheelchair. For the armadillo, he asked the riggers and modelers to help match a hangdog eyelid in a drawing Verbinski loved. "We have such crazy talented modelers," he says, "and the best riggers in the business."

Among Alleneck's characters were an owl with a British accent, Sergeant Turley (a pigeon with an arrow through his eye), and the inbred rodents. "There was a deliberate grossness in some of the characters," he says. "That was one of the things I liked. The grotesqueness in the design."

To kick off a shot, an animator would receive information from the lead about the sequence and the characters in a shot, the audio, the direction from Verbinski and animation supervisor Hal Hickel, the video reference and sometimes the first part of the sequence. The animators could spend time in a private, mirrored acting room and film themselves performing the characters.

Jean-Denis Haas, an Animation Mentor campus mentor and an animator at ILM for the past seven years, worked on a seminal shot in the film. Rango, a chameleon voiced by Johnny Depp, and the star of the film, found his way into the town of Dirt. Until then, Rango had lived in a terrarium where he starred in a world of his own invention. But after his terrarium bounced out of a car, Rango was on his own in the desert. So, when Rango finds himself in the Dirt saloon, he re-invents himself as a hero gunslinger. Haas's shot happens soon after, outside the saloon, as Rango struts down the street, unaware that the bad guy, a hawk, has landed behind him.

Because Haas joined the production toward the end of the show after working on Iron Man 2 and a trailer for Super 8, he could look at previous sequences to see the performances that lead animator Kevin Martel and other animators had created for Rango. "I could see his range, how big to make his eyes, what the other animators had done," Haas says. "I also had storyboards, direction from Gore Verbinski and reference of Johnny Depp. But, I never felt like I had to copy. I stayed within the character, but I had a lot of freedom."

In addition to Rango, Haas animated several other characters in the shot. "Most of the time, we work on everything in the shot, the foreground characters and background characters," he says. "I had the guy that holds all the bottles on his back, Priscilla [a Madagascar rat voiced by Abigail Breslin] and Waffles [a horned toad voiced by James Ward Byrkit]. I liked the reference for Waffles, but for the others, I usually tried to come out with something interesting by acting it out on my own. Priscilla basically just looks out the window and stays alive."

Animation Mentor graduate and soon-to-be mentor Jess Morris, who also moved onto Rango from Iron Man 2, worked on shots during a chase sequence in which Rango passes the reins to Beans (a lovely lizard voiced by Isla Fisher) while rodents on bats shoot at their covered wagon. Morris worked on a second sequence in a store with Rango, Beans and Doc (a dusty one-eared rabbit voiced by Stephen Root), and one of the most quietly emotional sequences in the often action-packed film. In this sequence, Rango, Beans and the posse return to town after failing to retrieve the townspeople's stolen water.

That sequence took about three weeks; the full production at ILM ran around 75 weeks. "Generally, we took about two weeks per shot unless the shots were really short and there weren't many characters," Morris says. "In this scene, there wasn't much dialogue. It's one of those challenging shots where less is more to sell the emotion. You want to keep it simple, but you can't just throw in a couple of keys. You need to have a lot happening to keep the characters alive and also keep the dreary, disappointed sad emotion in the shots." Morris slumped the characters' shoulders, slowed the movement and had the sad characters look down.

"I loved Rango," she says. "I got to practice what I learned at Animation Mentor more on Rango than on other films I've worked on. It was so much fun. Gore [Verbinski] would fly up here with his team once a week and come to dailies two days a week. Watching him and Hal [Hickel] bounce ideas back and forth, and having Gore talk to us like we were people, not pawns, made us feel like we were a huge part of how the film would turn out. It was so neat to have that kind of interaction with the director."

Kelly agrees that Rango is more in line with the classes at Animation Mentor than the films he typically works on. "However, we [Animation Mentor] started a program for animating animals and creatures — the performances that need to exist with live-action actors," he says. "That's the kind of work we usually do at ILM. It takes a special set of skills and it opens more doors to people job-wise."

For the animators at ILM, having the unusual opportunity to work on an animated feature was a special treat, especially one as much fun as this one. "A film like Rango doesn't come along very often," Alleneck says. "I'd like to think it would push the envelope in terms of the types of stories told, the settings, the characters and the idea that not everything has to be cute and cuddly; that there's room for the more bizarre side of animation."

It just takes a director willing to let his imagination run wild and a crew that can make his imagined world real.

Barbara Robertson is an award-winning journalist living in the Bay Area.