G-Force Presentation And Q&A With The Creative Team
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By George 'El Guapo' Roush on
July 10, 2009
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Have you ever imagined a team of highly trained Guinea Pigs operating for the government, doing tasks mere man wasn't able to handle? If not, don't worry - Director Hoyt Yeastman's son came up with the idea of a group rodent super spies and the rest is history.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer brings his first 3-D film to the big screen with "G-Force," a comedy adventure about the latest evolution of a covert government program to train animals to work in espionage. Armed with the latest high-tech spy equipment, these highly trained guinea pigs discover that the fate of the world is in their paws. Tapped for the G-Force are guinea pigs Darwin (voice of Sam Rockwell), the squad leader determined to succeed at all costs; Blaster (voice of Tracy Morgan), an outrageous weapons expert with tons of attitude and a love for all things extreme; and Juarez (voice of Penelope Cruz), a sexy martial arts pro; plus the literal fly-on-the-wall reconnaissance expert, Mooch, and a star-nosed mole, Speckles (voice of Nicolas Cage), the computer and information specialist.
I had a chance to check out some footage of G-Force at a presentation and Q&A with Hoyt Yeastman (director), Jerry Bruckheimer (producer), Troy Saliba (animation director), Rob Engle (3-D supervisor) and Scott Stokdyk (visual effects supervisor).
Each of the artists did a small presentation on the 3-D aspects of the film and how it was created. There wasn't too much groundbreaking material covered that you haven't read before on the 3-D process, though one thing I did find interesting was the letterboxed look of the film with the black bars being seen on the top and bottom. They went for this look because some of the 3-D effects jump out of frame and into the bars. For example, in one scene a window shatters and the glass falls out of frame into the black bar below. It was a pretty cool 3-D effect and one I hadn't seen before.
Here's some Q&A with the artists and then I'll get into the footage I saw. There might be some spoilers, so be warned.
What was your son's reaction when you told him his idea was going to be made into a movie?
Yeatman: I don't think he really understood. He was about five and now he's 11. I purposely only showed him a little bit [of the movie] because I want him to see the final piece. He's really excited. He did a couple of the voices so he got to go to Disney to record. Just to go through that part of it is really fun.
Since this is a 3-D movie how will that work for the DVD?
Engle: I would argue that there are actually conceptually three releases of this movie. There's the traditional 2-D release. The other two releases are the left and right eye of the 3-D release. We could take the 3-D version of the film and put it in IMAX. It's one of those things we did at Imageworks in 2007 with "Beowulf." We produced a 3-D version that was for released for digital projection for small scale theaters as well as IMAX theaters. I think it was the first time they had done that.
Who does G-Force actually go up against? Is there a bad guy animal team that we don't know about?
Yeatman: The bad guy in the movie is the prestige savor who is like a Bill Gates. He is a gentleman who was in [the] military construction and now is the leading appliance king of the world - washer and dryers and toasters. Things like that. The FBI is concerned that he's up to no good. He used to make military ships and they've realized he's doing something with a mysterious character in the far east. The G-Force members go in to prove their ability as covert spies and then uncover a plan that's actually brewing which is to take over the world.
Were there ever talks to do a bad guy version of this team?
Yeatman: Not really, no. I pretty much felt that it was better dramatically to come and have the guinea pigs deal with saving the world. To me, it was more about how is a 9-inch character going to do that when he's faced with giant robots and big appliances. And just the fact that he's being chased by FBI agents. It's really guinea pigs saving the world.
Jerry, can you talk about how this project came to you and what was it about this story that you thought would make a great film?
Bruckheimer: Hoyt brought me the project. He came to the office and explained the story about his son. He had all these drawings of what the characters would look like. I thought it was something unique and fresh and fun that could reach out to a younger audience which is something I haven't done before. We like to change it up from time to time.
You originally starting shooting this movie in 2-D and then half way through decided to do 3-D. Is there anything that gets lost during that conversion?
Yeatman: The studio and Jerry from the very beginning wanted to do it in 3-D. We did tests and it was only after having done them that (it was) just technically not possible. We just couldn't do it. I thought about it, the problem. I wanted to do it, but I just couldn't figure it out. So as we starting shooting I realized there were ways that we could... But to answer your question about to feeling if we've lost something - I think the answer is no... To me the technology needs to shift. We've seen a lot of animated full length rendered CG characters now. We've seen very few live-action 3-D movies and the reason is it's almost impossible to shoot them very easily and make a good 3-D movie that way. There needs to be a quantum leap in the technology.
Do you think 3-D will ever be possible for people to enjoy at home?
Engle: 3-D in the home is actually already possible to some extent. There are steps that are out there. What's missing right now are standards in delivering 3-D to the home. There's a lot of interest in the consumer electronics area and Blu-ray for example - all these people are looking to see how to bring quality 3-D experience--not the red/blue, but a real quality 3-D experience--into the home. It's only a matter of time. I imagine in three years you'll see it. Maybe less.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer said that Hoyt is an inventor. What, if anything, did he create for this film?
Stokdyk: One of the cool things about working with Hoyt, his visual effects background, is that he brings a lot to the table. He's an inventor, and he created this whole device that actually captures the set, and it captures all of the lighting our [director of photography] did on set and brings it into a nice format that we can use in our visual-effects pipeline. With this we're able to get placement of lights and intensity of lights and detail and shadows on the set, and we definitely on this movie improved our lighting pipeline so that the characters look more real and tangible in the plates. It's definitely a combination of both, that base level and then that extra level of artistry on top of it, where we add layers of nuance to it.
How did you decide how much to anthropomorphize the guinea pigs versus making them look completely real?
Stokdyk: It was really important from the beginning to Hoyt that these guinea pigs feel like real guinea pigs. There was an inherent tendency to want to make them more athletic-looking and more like secret agents, but the key concept of the movie is that they're guinea pigs, and all of their physical limitations, their tiny little arms and legs, that make this movie play.
Seeing them do all of this secret-agent action stuff is really fun to watch. So going into this movie with all of these challenges when we were designing the characters, we had to take this into consideration—we were dealing with the big head, the tiny arms, even the fact that their eyes are around the sides of their heads like prey and not predators. We wanted to keep them all, because they were inherent to the look of the guinea pig, but we had to figure out a way to work with them.
So we did stylize things on a very subtle level; we kept the eyes around the sides, but we keep them angled forward just a little bit—hopefully not enough to notice, but enough that we can get both of them in a close-up. Even working with the buck teeth, that [affected] all of the mouth shapes that we could do when they were speaking, so we had to be very careful, because with full-size teeth, you get a big, cheesy grin and it would look great, but with a guinea pig you have a big, open hole with two teeth in the middle, so you have to be very careful about how you make the shapes. Otherwise they can look goofy when you don't want them to.
After the Q&A we were shown footage from the movie in the Real-D format (though it will also be shown in Dolby Digital 3-D).
Whie the movie is obviously aimed at kid's, the animation used looked great. You coould really see the attention to detail, especially in the hair on the animals themselves. Stuff like that doesn't really get noticed by most people, but it's those tiny details used in pictures like this and Bolt that really stand to me.
The 3-D effects weren't bad. The best parts were when the 3-D moved outside of frame which I thought was clever. The film has a lot of humor in it, obviously aimed at a younger crowd. We saw scenes of Blaster (Tracey Morgan) racing around in a remmote controlled car, scenes in a pet store and the big scene at the end when G-Force goes up against an enormous robot made of appliances. The scenes where the G-Force were running around inside of the robot trying to destroy it from within were pretty cool. A lot of different perspectives were used in conjunction with the 3-D so the action wasn't just coming at you directly, a novelty in 3-D films, but from above and below. It actually remined me a bit of the scene from the old Disney movie A Great Mouse Detective.
I think G-Force is going to do great with kids. The animation and 3-D, from what I saw, was pretty impressive. We'll find out when the film opens on July 24th.
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Tags: G-Force, News |
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