“We took baby steps,” he continues. “After they were comfortable sitting with us we introduced them to the props. We taught them to pick up a nut and put it into a metal bowl, which is not what they’d do in the movie but once they got the idea of picking the nut up and putting it into a bowl we could change the bowl to a conveyer belt. Once they grasped the basic concepts, they began to learn faster and things started coming together.”
Each squirrel had a name and it wasn’t long before individual personalities and talents emerged. “All of them are capable of learning, but some are naturally better at certain things than others,” says Alexander. “We found that some of them had no interest at all in picking up the nut, while others, once they had it, refused to let it go. Those that didn’t lend themselves to being ‘good nut squirrels’ were moved to a second group, being trained to run across the floor toward Veruca. Our smartest squirrels do the nut gag.”
There was a limit to what the real squirrels could do, by their nature or in deference to the potential danger of a scene. In those cases, animatronic or CG troops were called in.
“Tim wanted to use live squirrels as much as possible,” notes Nick Davis. “But some actions they are just not physically able to do, for example, throwing nuts over their shoulders. Physiologically, their bodies don’t work that way. Our job was to make the CGI squirrels as realistic as possible, to interact with humans in a kind of anthropomorphic way and yet remain absolutely true to their animal nature. Squirrels have a unique dynamic energy and that’s what attracted Tim. He didn’t want to shoot in high-speed or interfere in any way with that natural edge, that intensity and speed that’s utterly charming and can be a bit unnerving.”
Jon Thum, Visual Effects Supervisor for Framestore-CFC, came aboard to lend his expertise to the squirrel action, eventually contributing 88 VFX shots to the mix, “multiplying the real squirrels in about 15 shots as well as the much harder task of creating squirrels from scratch for another 64. Some shots of the squirrels on stools, turning their heads, had to be CG, and once they are on the floor they are mostly CG shots.”
Multiplication meant capturing the animals performing on cue, one at a time, and joining the images to present the group in unison. For example, where the squirrels are meant to jump from their stools en masse and run toward Veruca, Thum explains, “they could jump, but not all at the same time. So we had to shoot each squirrel alone, jumping off its stool, and then synchronize them into one shot.”
To create the virtual squirrels, Thum’s team “took loads of reference footage of the real thing. We had them running, jumping, shelling nuts, tugging at bits of fabric. Animation cycles were built based on this reference to use in all the shots, then for any ‘hero’ squirrels the animators would go in and keyframe that squirrel individually. In some shots our job was to animate actions the animals could not do, like tap Veruca on the head, but the movements you see them doing right before and after that are referenced from real squirrels.”
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