More than three decades ago, during the production of Disney Animation’s Pocahontas, Steve Goldberg wore the weighty title of Artistic Supervisor of Computer-Generated Imagery, responsible for all 3D CG elements of the film and how each of the departments would work with them.
This was the early days of CG, and he says his team was tasked with uniting CG and hand-drawn animation to create the character of Grandmother Willow, along with canoes, ships, carriages, and many props. “There was much attention paid to getting our elements rendered in a way that would meld with the hand-drawn [parts] of the film,” he says.
Because 3D-rendered elements had such a different look from those that were hand-drawn, he says it was important to keep the rendering style flat and without highlights. Making sure everything blended also required multiple approaches. For example, when Pocahontas is paddling her canoe through river rapids, she and the canoe were roughed in by hand-drawn animation. “These roughs would be scanned in, and the final animation of the CG canoe would be animated, then plotted out on animation paper,” Goldberg says, explaining that the next step would be for the animator to clean up the rough character animation and then make sure Pocahontas was positioned correctly to correspond with where the CG-animated canoe would be in the frame. Rendered through Renderman, the canoe would eventually be composited with the inked-and-painted Pocahontas. “There were a lot of back-and-forth steps!” he says.
As if this wasn’t complex enough, Grandmother Willow posed unique challenges. “Originally, we were going to create all of the parts of the character in CG, including the tree trunk, all of the tree bark, her face, and her willow leaf canopy,” says Goldberg. But because her design was finalized too late in production for all of those elements to be created in 3D, she had to become a blend of 3D and hand-drawn. Her canopy was either painted 2D layers or hand-drawn fronds, her trunk and bark were created and animated in 3D, and her facial animation was hand-drawn. “It was quite challenging to match the look of the bark on her animated face to the rendered 3D bark,” says Goldberg.
Being on the ground floor at a turning point in animation history created bonds on the crew. Paths would cross on films over the years, and 20 years on, Goldberg’s leadership team for Grandmother Willow reunited on the fully computer-animated Frozen films. Along the way, Goldberg’s role evolved to Visual Effects Supervisor, most recently on Strange World. As new technology was developed and processes unfolded, various facets of this growth could trace their origins to innovations that started with his work on 1992’s Aladdin, which in turn influenced Pocahontas and beyond.
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