Animated Film: The Blending of Art with Science (By Gene S. Lee)

In this post I will review about a seminar I attended last this week. Yep, I still have many things to write from my previous blog post series. However, this issue is still fresh in my mind and to prevent the possibility that it may evaporate from my memories quickly, I will review this issue first instead and postpone the previous blog post series.

So, in the beginning of previous week I read a seminar notice posted in KAIST Portal. This portal is basically an internal web that provides information to KAIST student and staff. Coincidentally, I checked the notice in seminar tab which in the top of it I saw a seminar organized by KAIST Graduate School of Culture Technology. I carefully read the notice and what made me surprise was the speaker of the seminar. The seminar would be presented by Gene S. Lee, Ph.D. according to that notice.

Who is he? Why it surprised me? What made me wanted to attend this seminar at first place?

It all because I saw where he came from. He is currently a Senior Software Engineer for Walt Disney Animation Studios. That's why dude. Because he is from DISNEY.

Walt Disney Animation Studio's Logo

Who doesn't know Disney? Disney, founded by Walt Disney is a leading diversified international family entertainment and media enterprise (as stated in the company overview in its company website). Since its foundation in 1923 Disney has always been creatively finding its way in the show business and living the children dream. As an important division of the whole Disney company, the Walt Disney Animation Studios since 1937 have been producing more than 50 animation motion pictures which have been proved not only profitable, but also featured high quality story indicated by many awards won by the movies, including the most prestigious one the Academy Awards. List of animated movie produced by Disney since 1937 can be viewed here or in the short video below which was released on the celebration of Disney 50th Animated movie, Tangled (this video however hasn't include the most recent movies, Winnie The Pooh and Wreck-It Ralph). Because of these many years of experiences, the Disney's products are well known across the generations. I believe in their childhood our grandparents also watched Disney's movies. The key of success of Disney animated movie is not only limited to the rich story that can be enjoyed by all people, but also the basic principle of Disney that always improve their movie production, so every new movie will have better (graphical) quality than the previous one. This principle was later explained more in the seminar. The merger of Pixar into Disney in 2004, undoubtedly makes The Walt Disney Studio to be a giant in the field of animated movies.

50th Celebration Trailer of Walt Disney Animation Studios Movies (2010)

So, come back to the seminar. I was the first person to enter the seminar room last week. I saw the speaker's MacBook already set and the title slide of his presentation featuring various characters from Disney's animated movie appeared on the screen. I took a bold chance to capture the title's slide. Later, in the beginning of the seminar the speaker kindly asked the audience not to capture or record his talk due to the copyright matter and also one of the content of his presentation (Frozen) is still confidential because the movie hasn't been released yet. This was a lucky chance for us to learn about that new movie, so to pay some respect to his wish I decided to move away my iPhone and just listened to his talk carefully. So, the content that I used here, i.e. photos, videos, were obtained by employing the almighty Google search. Later during the presentation I learned that his presentation was actually prepared for a conference in Korea namely BIEN 2013, as he was invited to be one of the plenary speaker. You can view the official summary of his talk here.

Gene S. Lee

He opened the seminar by introducing us to Walt Disney Animation Studios (WDAS). Located in Burbank, the same location with the Walt Disney Company headquarters, WDAS employs around 850 people. Why so many people? Because the task of making an animated movie is not simple. It takes around 300 people for one movie for the course of 2-3 years. After that he talked about animated movie production in general. How he collaborated with a lot of people with different expertise, i.e. artists, software engineers, computer engineers, etc. He also mentioned that, the key to Disney Animated Movie's success is not only the strong background story created for the particular movie, but also the capability of the company to consistently improve the quality, mostly graphical, of the new movie by employing the latest technology, including both software and hardware breakthrough. One sad things is the hardware of previous movie production will no longer be able to use since for new production the "big boss" often demands better result and faster production time for the next product, so they need to renew the resources. On the other side, the requirement of latest software is not always come with cheap price. The community for this animation movie making is not so large, most of the time they are forced to create their own software to be able to fulfill their movie targets. After learning all this thing in introduction, I have no doubt why a MIT graduate like Gene S. Lee is interested to work for Disney. It is all because the challenges faced in making a such beautiful Disney animated movie is not that easy to be solved, and it will definitely intrigue the bright minds to come and participate. In addition, he also mentioned that the company regularly conducts a global talent search to recruit the whether employ or intern from all around the world. They are willing to bring in a promising candidate to work with the other employees in the headquarter. Some of the talents are including the expert of Finite Element Method (FEM), Machine Learning, etc. At first I confused what are these people do with making an animated movie? I always thought they mainly hire graphical designer, animator, etc. But later, after he explained about the specific requirements of his three latest production (Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph & Frozen), I began to realize the importance of these experts.

WDAS Employees

Three movies discussed during the seminar. From left to right: Tangled, Wreck-It Ralph, and Frozen.

He began to discuss about the challenges and breakthrough in Tangled. This movie's main character is Rapunzel, whose hair is 70 feet long. The first challenge was of course the long hair. They struggled to simulate Rapunzel's long hair. The simulation here means the dynamic of the hair while the character is moving. This is where the FEM takes places. Yep... They simulated the hair by using FEM. How incredible it was. I couldn't show the detail of the simulation, because I didn't record or take picture during the seminar, but I found some papers, yep they published a paper related to this movie, which discussed the hair simulation and how they control it. This hair challenges however seems to be unrealistic in the physical world, because in the real physical world imagine how much the weight of 70 feet long hair? It will make the character almost impossible to move around. But since this is movie is a story about the girl with 70 feet hair, they have to find solution for that. They improvised by creating creative physics tool, which allowed their artists (animator) to control the hair while the character is moving. I saw the original motion of the Rapunzel, and I was amazed by the role of FEM to solve the dynamic motion of the hair. He added that the blonde color of the hair was also difficult, since the blonde color behavior is strongly related with the light that struck onto it. This hair's color related problem and the light illumination of the hair (sometimes the artists want to make Rapunzel's hair to glow) were further explained in this paper. The next challenge was related to the light tracing and designing the background inside the movie to make the animated movie a little bit more realistic. Why they focused so much into the detail? As explained by the speaker, the audience will not notice any defect if they make the movie as detail and as realistic as possible. In contrast, when you make the movie without paying attention to the detail, the audiences will easily notice and complain about the quality of the movie. Yep, that's a lot of hard work to satisfy the consumer taste. The last challenge in this movie was the dynamic of multilayer cloth worn by Rapunzel. Luckily, in this movie only Rapunzel that used multilayer cloth, the other supporting characters only used single layer cloth.

Finished with the Tangled, the speaker explained about the challenges faced during the production of Wreck-It Ralph. The first one was many characters generation. This is the only Disney animated movie to have the most number of characters in one movie. The movie's story was about the adventure of a video game character into the realm of the other video game. That's why they need to generate a lot of characters. To create a character together with their (facial) expression was also a serious challenge. To overcome this problem they made their own programming language namely as dRig. This program also known as an artist-friendly object oriented programing, which allowed the artist to easily create the characters for the movie. As I also remembered, the second challenge was related to controlling the characters created. This is where the machine learning takes place. By employing machine learning, they wouldn't have difficulty even they had so many characters during production.

The last one, the speaker talked about the most recent project soon to be released during Thanksgiving holiday. This movie called Frozen used the most sophisticated technology applied in animated movie production and became the most graphically beautiful movie ever created so far by Disney. He discussed three challenges of these movies, the first one was visual effects. These movies included many visual effects since the theme of the movie is related to magic and sorcery. I'm not really understand how they solved the visual effect problem, since it was not conceptually explained as previous movie, but rather technologically approach was discussed. The second challenge was the multilayer cloth. Unlike Tangled, in this movie this problem was way much complicated since the background story told all of characters to live in freezing environment, then all characters must be equipped with multilayer cloth. The last challenge was snow behavior. He explained how they simulated the snow so the environment would seemed to be realistic. They also specifically invited the snow expert to give lectures about snow to the artist, software engineer and some other staffs participated in this movie. As one of the results they simulated the behavior of four types of snows (I didn't really recall all the types). He said, if you see the movie later, you will have the feeling that the character of the movie will experience real snow.

Souvenir from the seminar

Before closing the seminar the speaker distributed us a sticker of his company as you can see above. He claimed that we couldn't find this sticker sold elsewhere, since it was exclusively distributed by the company only on special occasions. Finally, the seminar was officially closed by watching a teaser trailer of Frozen as you can view in the following video.

 

Disney's Frozen Teaser Trailer