Pete Paquette

It’s official.  I’ll be leaving Blue Sky this summer, almost 8 years after being hired to work on “Robots”.   I have accepted a job at 38 Studios in Providence, RI and I’m super excited to apply what I’ve learned from my film experience to my life-long love of video games.  While I’m totally stoked to start another chapter in my life, it will be extremely difficult to say goodbye to some of my best friends I’ve made during my time at Blue Sky.

I saw the film in its entirety a couple of nights ago at the crew screening and I can whole-heartedly say it’s the best film I’ve worked on.  I am extremely proud of everyone who worked on it with me.  After the crew screening, we had our wrap party at the Hard Rock Cafe in Times Square.

I’m featured in this article about the making of “Rio”.  Check it out!!

Feel The Rhythm Featurette:

Go inside the studio as Jamie Foxx and will.i.am create the music for the animated film.

Nigel’s Song:

Nigel explains why he is not a “pretty bird”.

Cheese & Sprinkles:

A clip from the carnival sequence that features my bulldog character Luiz.

(this one’s a little older, but is fun to watch)

The First 2 Minutes:

Yesterday the official movie site for Rio was launched.  You can check it out here.

There was also an international trailer released today:

I have been teaching the “Advanced Acting” class for animationmentor.com this semester.  There have been a lot of requests from students regarding my work-flow, so I figured the best way to teach them is to show them.

My process begins with a rough 2D blocking pass.  The quick turn-around of 2D sketches help me figure out the staging of the characters in the shot, nail down the major storytelling poses and play with the timing of the transitions between the poses in less than half the time it would take with a 3D model.

Given the time constraints of the Q&A session, I had to find a quick piece of dialogue that:

- tells a story

- has context

- has clear “subtext” (what is the character really saying/thinking??)

I found a charming little piece of dialogue from Wallace & Gromit’s “A Grand Day Out”.  I always tell, my students NOT to work with dialogue from an animated feature because the voices are usually very recognizable.  This could cause the audience to think of the original performance rather than the one you’ve created.  Since this was meant to be a work-flow demonstration, I made an exception.  This was created with the “Pencil” App for the Mac.  It doesn’t have the greatest drawing utility, but it gets the job done.  This is how I pitch my ideas to the directors before animating anything on the model:

Now I’ll explain my thought process behind the acting choices.  It seems as though the character is  having somewhat of an “AHA” moment.  I could have simply started with the pose I used on “everybody”, but there would be no contrast to help sell the “AHA”.  I figured the best way to push the contrast in that moment is to start the character deep in thought and not overdo the “AHA”, but push it enough to where you see a clear change in his attitude. After the “AHA” moment, I wanted him to become lost in deep thought while gazing up at the moon.  The subtext I used to help me come up with this acting choice was; “I wonder if the moon REALLY IS made of cheese?”.

That’s all for now.  I will be taking this through to completion, so I’ll be posting the results of each step as I go.

A while ago, I gave a talk to my fellow animators at Blue Sky Studios about what inspires me as an animator.  The idea of pinpointing what inspires me is pretty staggering because anything can.  That’s when the idea came to me.  So I decided to take a different approach to the animation inspiration discussions and talk about how I use puppetry as reference for my animation performance.  How is that possible??  I’ll explain.

If you were to break down the anatomy of a puppet in computer animation “rigging” terms, a traditional “hand and glove” puppet (like Cookie Monster, Ernie or Fozzie) is nothing more than a body mover, neck/head mover, and jaw mover with articulated hands (hence the name “hand and glove”)and a completely neutral facial expression.

It’s amazing how puppeteers can produce such a rich character performance with something so limited.  So I ripped a classic clip from The Muppet Show to discuss how they achieve such a great performance and what makes it great.  In this particular clip, Fozzie is put in charge of the stage handling because of a misunderstanding between him and Kermit.  Since I’m discussing the similarities of the “hand and glove” puppet to a simplified 3D rig, I will be talking about Fozzie’s perfomance (Frank Oz).

What’s particularly interesting to me about this clip is the dynamic between Kermit and Fozzie.  Fozzie knows Kermit is smarter than him.  He knows that Kermit won’t buy into his elaborate stories, so he uses physical contact to push his ideas on Kermit, keep him away from the situation and somewhat bully the smaller frog into leaving.

A noteworthy acting choice that is virtually non-existent in animation is the play with Z space to push the performance:

0:48 “I am gonna shift the scenery??”

2:03 “or I get fired!!”

2:08 “That’s not smoke.”

2:13 “Jet exhaust.”

4:26 “No.”

There are also some really good “story-telling” poses throughout:

0:57 upset/distraught

1:23 scared/ashamed

2:03 internal panic

3:25 proud

3:30 worried

Along with all this, is some fantastic examples of secondary action that enhances the overall performance:

0:40 slamming his bags down “don’t shout at me!!”

2:01 he rubs his mouth a little  which shows that he’s poorly hiding his panic.

The point of all this is that these puppeteers get maximum performance and appeal out of something that’s as functional as a rig not remotely considered “production worthy”.  Therefore, if we can achieve the same level of performance with these few movers, the rest of the rig would do nothing but make our animation stronger.

Here is a link to the newest Scrat short I worked on.