What's the hardest part about matching 3D animation to 2D animation?

The hardest part is to think and animate like a 2D animator would do and that is a job in itself - the guys that did the animation for Belleville really did do their best I can tell you, some if not all of them even  attended a classical 2D school before they started their work in 3D. Furthermore, 2D artists are free to use "fake" perspectives, even more than one perspective at a time can result in a fine 2D image... They decide whether to animate at 24 frames per second (foreground), 12fps or even 6fps (background characters for example). Most 3D animators don't think of this because they are used to the "inbetweening" effect they have in the computer. It is also this effect that I needed to "sell" some shots, we calculated everything at 24 fps, and later when we previewed the animation in Digital Fusion we "timespeeded" it down to 18 or even 12 fps, which can sometimes be enough on its own to give some notion of hand-drawn animation. Also the line-type in which the drawings of the background were made steered us towards a specific thickness and type of outlines per shot, some needed to be one pixel wide, other objects in the same shot needed thicker lines, all these things and many, many more make up the final "look" of a good 3D match to 2D animation, That is also where Digital Fusion came in: we used it to "displace" the lines, so they were not 3D anymore, but gave a more "hand-drawn" jittery effect, as it would be if you had drawn the lines on paper.

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They can also get away with much of "triching" as we call it, for example something that is bigger in frame than it would be in a "correct" 3D environment. We did this by cutting up scenes in different layers, or by scaling objects up or down together with translating them in the Z axis for example. This gives the 3D animator the chance of "matching" the 2D backgrounds that were provided to us by Sylvain and Pieter's team. You can have a road that comes up in a curve (at least it looks like that on the screen), but if you want to match it you can see from the side that that curve can look deceptively flat. It takes some time to get used to this, but once you've got the hang of it, it's a nice trick to have up your sleeve...

There's too much to mention everything here, but I figure you've got a good glance at it already. :)

Is the compositing side of things really necessary? Can't you do it all in LightWave?

I always say 1 and 1 can give more than 2, meaning that LW is great in itself, but some things in a creative process need to be done in compositing - use the software together to be able to make even better-looking, more creative things. It would be impossible to do all of the things GRID does with nothing more than LW. Sometimes we render something, put it in Fusion, work on it a bit and re-use it in Fusion - it comes out looking totally different. In one of our recent feature films we needed fire and it became an effect of 2D and 3D together with compositing to achieve the look we needed...

I think it's a shame Les Triplettes didn't win at the Oscars.

I too was a bit disappointed that Sylvain didn't get the award for Best Animated Picture, but there are already new things in the pipeline, so next time we might do better, who knows.

Sylvain Chomet previously said that he didn't like 3D. What made him choose GRID to do the 3D?

I think Walking The Dog and Pieter, who already knew what we could do being a former employee, convinced him with a test we did at GRID, rendering a car (360° rotation) in outlines and colour separately, and then combining these two images in Digital Fusion, with some extra displacing of the outlines here to give a more "hand drawn" feeling...

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Did you work closely with him?

No, I did meet him after the movie was finished, but I worked through Pieter all the time, he knew exactly what Sylvain wanted after some time and we kept working close together all the time of the production...

What are you working on at the moment?

Some movies are in the pipeline, but I cannot disclose much of that. One thing is for sure - we will need LightWave again and probably a lot of polygons for our next movie... We have just finished another movie recently though, in which LW was used for creating a 3D roof, fire, etc.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us Jan! We look forward to your new productions.

All images provided © Les Armateurs / Production Champion / Vivi Film / France 3 Cinéma / RGP France / Sylvain Chomet.