Changing Course
Moana 2
Walt Disney Animation Studios
From budgets to story scope to cinematic style, television and feature are such different formats in animation that most studios produce them in separate departments. Because of this, the transformation of Moana – The Series into the film Moana 2 created a unique production process that kept Head of Story Ryan Green and Story Artist Luis Logam on their toes.
Green began working as a Story Artist when the project was still what Disney called a long-form musical series. Logam came on shortly after him. But as they screened cuts of the show to various people around Disney, its fun, larger-than-life style kept standing out. “Why is this not a movie?” was a common reaction. Eventually, the studio pivoted.
But going from a format typically watched on tablets and small screens to something shown in theaters across the globe was not as easy as just stringing all the episodes they’d made together into one cut. It required a shift in the visuals of the project—literally zooming out for wide angles and sweeping cinematic sequences. “Once we were going to the big screen, we could pull the camera way back,” says Logam. In Moana – The Series, they were often cutting between medium shots and reverse shots. In Moana 2, they could do a wide shot overlooking the whole ocean. And while the television show bounced between many different stories and sets, the feature spends significant time with all of its characters on one life raft. “Having to frame the characters on the boat taught me how to maximize the use of space,” says Logam.
One benefit, however, of having spent so long on the series, was the amount of character work the team had done. In television, character is king, and the nuanced, developed takes on each of the characters that had been built for the show made working with them that much easier in the feature. The team already knew how the characters interacted with the world and how they interacted with Moana. They knew each character’s comedic potential. The characters were as familiar as old friends.
Moana, three years older in this project, was especially fun to explore. “She’s a little bit more mature, confident, sure of herself,” says Green. Her movements are steadier, less clumsy. She carries a certain bravado into all of her interactions, such that even in scenes with Maui the trickster demigod, who’s more than twice her size, she’s his physical equal. In more quiet, emotional scenes, the artists boarded them in shots together, rather than cutting back and forth between them, to show the intimacy and trust they forged in the first film.
Maui himself was a complex, yet essential part of building the film. In early versions, he didn’t show up until closer to the end. But when he was brought in sooner, the team found that he injected a level of silly energy that they’d been missing. Introducing Maui to Moana’s new friends felt like combining two friend groups, and Logam used that comedic dynamic to develop new gags. One in particular features a new character; Moni, who is the story keeper for the island of Motunui, turns into the world’s biggest fanboy when he meets a real demigod in the flesh.
The key to nailing the filmic iteration of the Moana project was finding Moana’s emotional root in her sister, Simea, an unexplored aspect of her character in the first film. Moana had always been a community-driven character, but tying her to a little sister added stakes—she had to build a better world for her and come back safely. But with Simea at home on the island and Moana at sea on a tiny raft, reminding the audience of those stakes could never be as simple as a phone call. Instead, the creative team landed on the token on Moana’s necklace as a way of signaling her emotional state. Given to Moana by her Gramma Tala on her deathbed, it’s a symbol of love between Moana and Simea, and if Moana touches it, she’s thinking of home.
Beneath this heart of the film, Green and Logam were always careful not to lose the silliness. The musical sequences helped with this goal, allowing them to balance heart and humor all in the span of a few minutes. Logam took stylistic inspiration from music videos, using the song sequences as a chance to take fun visual risks, but he always returned to the humanity of the characters.
By the time the film made it from a television series to a fully-fledged feature, Green was Head of Story, and the project had taken turns he never expected it to. But one woman’s analysis of the project’s theme at an early screening stuck with him throughout the journey: “No matter what your past has been, you can always make a different choice and do something new with who you are.” Even when the crew was deep into one version of the project, it could still be turned around and made it into something new.
Machine Learning
Transformers One
Paramount Animation
In Transformers One, a mining robot named Orion Pax is the big-hearted ideas guy, and his best friend D-16 is his practical, detail-oriented foil. Behind the scenes, Production Designer Jason Scheier and Art Director Gerald de Jesus had a similar dynamic. When they first collaborated, setting up the visual style for Blue Eye Samurai, they discovered they worked best with Scheier doing big, broad-strokes designs and de Jesus turning them into detailed blueprints. They both view each other’s process as essential to setting up a complete, concrete vision to inspire the rest of the team.
Coming onto Transformers One, Scheier and de Jesus felt the pressure of giving longtime fans something that fit into the franchise but still had its own unique vision. The film was to be set before the war on the planet Cybertron, in a time when society was separated into an upper class of Transformers and a lower class of bots tasked with mining Energon to power the planet. Orion Pax and D-16 would go on a quest to build a better future for mining bots, but the secrets they’d uncover would threaten their friendship and set them on the course to become the beloved hero Optimus Prime and the villain Megatron. The film being an origin story meant that Scheier and de Jesus had to imagine a world before the franchise existed, as well as one that also complemented it.
This goal drove the approach to world-building for the design team. They spent time looking at the polygonal shapes of the Transformers: Generation 1 toy line, Floro Dery’s designs for the 1980s animated TV series, and the use of different kinds of metals in the live-action Michael Bay films. For this latest Transformers iteration, they created class divides by contrasting gilded, Art Deco architecture and old, rusty structures built from scrap. They used panel cuts in the bots’ faces to distinguish between old and young, and they showed the journey of careful, rule-following D-16 to his villain form of Megatron by tracking the color of his eyes, which turn from a cheerful yellow to a burning red throughout the runtime.
But it wasn’t until they completed their first sequence that they landed on the keystone that would guide them. Developed from one of the first paintings Scheier did on the project, the “train to the surface” sequence follows Orion Pax, D-16, and fellow miner bot B-127 as they chase their boss, another mining bot named Elita-1, through a cargo train on its way to the forbidden surface area of Cybertron. Inside the train, the viewer gets a clear sense of the industrial look of the mining world and the dynamics of character movement as they dodge falling crates. Then, they follow Elita-1 to the exterior of the train, giving the viewer a glimpse of upper-class Cybertron with its gold-and-glass architecture. Finally, the train bursts through to the surface, showing off a painterly background style and some truly mesmerizing lighting cues.
“It was kind of a poking the bear moment, asking: does this work?” says de Jesus. Once they knew that all of the elements of the train sequence fit together, they built the movie around this dynamism of movement.
Scheier wanted a cinematic feeling, for the camera to be a character. To do this, for example, the art department built sets that were ready for layout. These models were used for the process called VSR (virtual story reel). Shots were tested, with camera blocking to create references for animation and production. In addition, motion capture was used for specific sequences, then replaced with traditional hand-keyed animation by real animators using Maya, so that the animated shots still felt like a human holding a camera.
Throughout their process, Scheier and de Jesus wanted to make sure that everyone on the team had the tools they needed to work freely. That meant having an asset library that everyone had access to so that they could all work autonomously and end at a congruous point. They had multiple process touch-bases every week, as well as an open-door policy for the whole team. If anyone had a question, they could find an answer. This extended beyond the design team—story artists had access to the 3D backgrounds so that nobody had to draw in the dark. “That way it made the feedback loop very short,” says Scheier. “That’s something I fear is being lost in animation, it gets very closed off and very siloed.”
In Transformers One, the miner bots are forced to toil away in shift after shift to produce Energon for a purpose unknown to them. They work not out of enjoyment or passion or dedication to a common goal, but because they have to. Scheier and de Jesus never wanted the same to be true behind the scenes. At every step of the way, their team knew what they were working toward and why—and felt appreciated for it. “It takes no time to say thank you,” says Scheier.
By establishing a vision for their project at the beginning, Scheier and de Jesus were able to build a better Cybertron—both on screen and behind it.
No Going Back
Spellbound
Skydance Animation
Most animated teenage princesses want to break free from their old lives and adventure through a new world. But in Spellbound, all Princess Ellian wants is to get back to normal. She’s not rebelling against her parents, she’s trying to save them—they’re monsters, and she desperately needs them to be human again. While this emotional core stayed consistent throughout most of the film’s three years of production, the challenge was building the story around it.
“You can be 100 percent sure that something will work, and then it doesn’t,” says Brian Pimental, Head of Story. Spellbound relied heavily on a brain trust of workers across all departments, as well as writers and heads of story from other projects at Skydance for feedback. They’d hand out surveys after in-house screenings and look for trends. Pace was a key factor. Sometimes Pimental didn’t even need the surveys. He could just watch the audience and feel the points at which they started to get restless. Often, that meant cutting sequences and shifting storylines.
But it also allowed for the discovery of new characters and ideas. For example, the oracles started as one character, and split into two later on—a decision that gave the artists the chance to do a fresh spin on an old married couple and play with comedic yin and yang. A hilarious body swap storyline (that leads to one of the funniest songs in the film) only came about after the second act was mostly constructed and they realized it needed more silliness. “It was fun to be so free to experiment,” says Sasha Shotzco-Harris, a Story Artist on the film.
A big priority was making sure the film maintained its comedic tone. In early cuts, it was clear from the beginning why the parents turned into monsters. But holding the reveal until the end meant that the audience could get to know the parents as monsters first and slowly see their humanity along the way. As monsters, the parents are bumbling, destructive, and impulsive—great for physical gags. When constructing their movements, Pimental compared the father to a dog and the mother to a cat. The father was always sloppy and goofy in his movements, while the mother was quick and likely to climb up the curtains.
The monster parents’ physicality was a subject of debate and change throughout the film’s production. Sometimes they were ferocious, genuinely scary. In other cuts, they were playthings: silly creatures who could no longer function as parents, but still posed no real threat to anyone. Walking that line came down to having Ellian as a figure who could always calm them down. They may be monsters, but they never harm her.
Ellian herself was another character who required careful work to keep the tone comedic and light. “Everyone likes to have a plucky, chipper female heroine, but this was also a character that was experiencing an ever-deepening well of hurt, anger, and frustration,” says Shotzco-Harris. She wound up drawing on her own mannerisms to convey Ellian’s attempts to bury her feelings and maintain her spirited optimism.
When the filmmakers realized they needed to show more of Ellian’s world outside her family, they added a sequence at the beginning of the film of Ellian riding her griffin with her friends. Doing this then made it necessary to revise other scenes. For example, for the song “The Way It Was Before,” Ellian’s hope for breaking the spell on her parents has been dashed, and she yearns for the time before they turned into monsters. Now that griffin riding had become part of her character, that was threaded into this sequence where she remembers the life she wants back.
“A big thing I learned from this process was: sometimes you never know until you try,” says Shotzco-Harris. She recalls working on the “Remembering” song sequence, where Ellian’s monster parents regain the power of speech, and she tries to help them remember their lives before they were transformed into monsters. The director had asked Shotzo-Harris to keep the camera in constant rotation around the family for the entire song. In experimenting with the mechanics of the movement, she realized that the rotation caused the subjects to appear close together for one half of the circle, and far apart for another. She used this discovery as a storytelling device, to emphasize the closeness that Ellian longed for juxtaposed against the distance she was experiencing.
Through trial and error to find the best version of Spellbound possible, Pimental and Shotzco-Harris said goodbye to some scenes and sequences they loved. Both learned lessons about killing your darlings and being open to new ideas that they hope to take with them into future projects. “Storyboarding almost feels like a meditation in detachment at times!” says Shotzco-Harris.
In the final moments of Spellbound (no spoilers, don’t worry), Ellian finds that she can never truly go back to the way it was before, but the future she builds can be just as beautiful. During their own creative journey, the filmmakers learned this same transformative lesson.
