The paradox of good special effects is that the more skillfully rendered they are, the less the viewer is consciously aware of them, or. as producer Chris deFaria puts it, "If we do our job well, you won't know."
To accomplish this, they enlisted some of the very best visual effects designers in the industry today: top designers from Academy Award-winning visual effects studio Rhythm & Hues, which provided the stunning effects for "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"; world renowned multimedia production company Jim Henson's Creature Shop, home of the Muppets as well as countless other characters; famed animation and visual effects house, Tippett Studio, which contributed to "The Hollow Man"; and England's prestigious Mill Film, a partnership of London's most successful commercial facility with film directors Tony and Ridley Scott.
"We made a conscious decision early on," explains deFaria, "to create characters that existed in multiple mediums. We wanted to introduce live animals in a natural setting and then, through the use of puppets and computer animation, take the audience along an escalating path of credibility until, by the time they see a dog leaping off a two-story building onto a log-loader being driven by a cat, they're okay with it."
The first step involved the animal actors. Each animal's image was scanned onto a computer where body dimensions and facial characteristics were recorded, from which limitless actions and expressions could then be created.
The process of scanning to create animated versions of animals and giving them a wide range of motion based upon their own natural movements is not new. But, as deFaria explains, "CGI models of an animal's face are derived from the actual geometry of the face being scanned and then a catalogue of expressions are built using the animal's own physiology. That wouldn't work for us because animals don't have the kinds of facial expressions we needed. Animals don't react with the level of surprise. aggression, anger, humor or malevolence that our animals needed to show. So we had to build models that were a kind of evolved version of the animal's physiology — one step beyond. That had never been done before, it was a technique created specifically for Cats & Dogs' and delivers a level of expression that has never been achieved before."
Secondly, a life-size model of each animal was created, by the Henson Creature Shop, from which additional computer images were then made by the CGI studios depicting musculature and skeleton, so that the resulting cyber dog or cat, "essentially a computer puppet," according to deFaria. would move realistically with the same weight and flexibility as its live counterpart.
"Having a model is beneficial to animators," says Scott Souter, one of the Special Effects Supervisors at Tippett Studio. "It enables them to see how much screen space the character fills so they can better compose the shots. Plus, we can play with it, push it into a shape and examine it from all angles till we think the balance and the pose is right and the center of gravity is correct. Ultimately, the model is hacked up into pieces and scanned, and then re-assembled in the computer."
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