“Another big factor for us was timing,” Brown continues. “With characters like Buzz, Woody or Sulley, you have an earth-based gravity. But fish underwater can travel three feet in a flash. You blink and the thing is gone. We were wondering how they did that and studied their movements on video. By slowing things down, we could figure it out. Our timing got very crisp as we learned how to get our fish characters from one place to another in the course of a frame or two. We always tried to incorporate naturalistic fish movements into the acting. By putting things like one-frame darting and transitioning from one place to another into our acting, the characters became very believable.”
In the past, animators were always told to “ground their characters” and avoid letting them “float.” With “Finding Nemo,” they had to figure out the exact opposite – how to make them look like they were floating, but in water – not air.
Alan Barillaro observes, “It became fun and challenging to come up with a whole new range of how to communicate and gesture. You don’t have gravity to deal with underwater, so we discovered things like when a character gestured, he would tend to drift a bit more. I found that a lot of the gestures humans make could be boiled down to eye and face movements. I would look at my own face in the mirror and imagine I had a tail on the back of it.”
Mark Walsh recalls, “The first thing that Andrew did on the film was to sit with us in front of the fish tank and basically pitch the story to us. He explained that the magic of the world was going down to the perspective of a clown fish and imagining him going through an entire ocean and encountering sharks, turtles, jellyfish, etc. You imagine moving in closer and seeing this little fish and how hard he is trying.”
To ensure that their characters would have the range of expressions and movements needed, the lead animators linked up with modelers and riggers from the character department and served as their “animation buddy.” With direct input from the animators, the technical directors created new and improved tools and controls (known as avars) to enhance the overall character performance.
Brian Green, the Characters CG supervisor, explains, “This was the first time that Pixar has had a character department and it allowed us to serve the animators’ needs better. The animation buddy might give us a drawing and say ‘For acting purposes, I need it to look more like this.’ We would go in and adjust it. This made for a very close relationship. We also tried to create automatic dynamic motion for some of the characters. Our goal was to try and automate everything we could – things like the movement of dangly bits on some characters – so the animator could concentrate on the performance.”
Helping the animators get up to speed on fish behavior and locomotion was Adam Summers, a noted professor in the Ecology and Evolution department at the University of California at Irvine.
Summers notes, “I’m what is called a biomechanic or sometimes a functional morphologist. My specialty is applying simple engineering principles to how animals move and eat.They asked me to come in and talk about things like fish shapes and colors, and I ended up teaching an essentially graduate-level ichthyology course to the Pixar staff. There were at least twelve lectures. It was really an incredibly rewarding thing because I found that these folks like their job as much as I like mine. They were infinitely curious about fish and they were flat-out the best students I had ever had. By the end of each lecture, they would be asking me questions that I didn’t have answers for.
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