Behind Disney's Chicken Little

Last on the panel was Dale Mayeda, the special effects (or "tech") supervisor, who gave a broad description of what was done to create things like corn fields and water splashes on the Maya and Renderman programs. In his challenge of animating liquid in different states of motions, Mayeda referred to animated sequences from Dumbo, Peter Pan and Bambi. Simple shapes, he said, was key in designing water splashes. He pointed out on his slides where the "umbrella splashes" of figures in water created a stylized effect that could give Chicken Little more appeal. He showed a test to illustrate his choice of words, displaying an animated toon car on top of a geyser of fire-hydrant water (from a scene cut from the final film). To make the water spill in the arc of an umbrella, he started out with particles and turned them into ribbons to direct the flow. An arc of a raindrop splashing on the grounded was copied several times and played as cycles to create the worm's-eye view of a rainstorm.

There is one scene at a baseball game where Chicken Little's teammates pour a tub of Gatorade on our hero and he gets swept away. Mayeda insisted that if this liquid was to be believed, it had to feel cartoony and not at all biological. Before any animation of the liquid began, the characters were first blocked-in like a storyboard, and then completely animated, leaving a scene of the characters, props and sets interacting with what might be called invisible Gatorade. After this, the animators drew two-dimensional roughs every few frames to guide where and how the liquid was going to flow. Then began the three stages of animating the assignment: First, they blocked the water, illustrating it as large shapes for every few frames. Secondly, the artists added detail to the geometry and animated displacement maps that added ripples. Finally, they prepared what they called a "render pass," perfecting every frame and ironing out the kinks in the animation.

Of course, Mayeda could not ignore the subject of the corn stalks, which represent major scenes in the film through their formation of crop-circles. The corn is almost another force in the film: the characters run through it, the spaceships blow it, lasers slice it, and so on. Mayeda emphasized the importance of first tagging the different types of corn, i.e., determining which stalks of corn does what. For instance, the corn in the foreground is much more interactive than the passive stalks in the background. For his own team, Mayeda mapped out the field of different corn stalks depending on what was happening where; the chopped corn was tagged green, the corn at rest was red, and the "disturbed" corn was blue (these maps were to be replaced with particles, and then with geometry). He noted that the corn at rest, which was solely in the background, was only ever rendered in a low resolution in order to save time and energy. He also gave them each a "pose cycle," letting them sway in a realistic-looking breeze.