The Smurfs: Richard Hoover Interview
Cult classics seem to have had an incredible resurgence in the past few years. TV favourites such as Garfield, Alvin and The Chipmunks and Yogi Bear have all left our cosy childhood memories and ventured towards the big screen to be enjoyed by a brand new generation alongside live action actors and settings. This is a big step, not only do filmmakers have to carefully handle our nostalgia, but an equally large challenge is to incorporate new techniques and technologies and translate these childhood treasures from Saturday morning cornflake accompaniment to Saturday night movie matinees.
Such a property to undergo this transformation is the Smurfs. Having already successfully jumped platforms from beloved Belgian comic to cherished television series the Smurfs next big step was to invade cinemas in full 3D and introduce themselves to a new set of kids and adults. The promotion for this film has been extensive, film stars recently walked the ‘blue’ carpet in new york to celebrate the new release and even the empire state building was lit up in the familiar Smurf hue to tie in with the films release and to raise money for charity, costumed Smurf characters even opened the stock exchange.
Here at Skwigly we were given the fantastic opportunity to chat with Rich Hoover, the twice Oscar nominated Visual Effects supervisor for the new film to talk about the responsibilities and challenges presented in the making of this new film and how he managed to overcome them in order to present the Smurfs in a contemporary way without forfeiting any of the original charm and appeal that these characters have managed to hold on to since 1958. In the new film the tiny cast are realised in full 3D and trade the comfy and cosy surroundings of Smurf village for the bustling metropolis that is New York City and enter the lives of parents to be Patrick and Grace. Fans of the Smurfs will be glad to know that Gargamel and his cat Azarael return and pursue the Smurfs as ever on this new adventure.
Having worked on such blockbusters as Armageddon and Superman Returns you would think that presenting the beloved blue Belgian boys (and girl counting Smurfette) would be a walk in the park but as you will see nothing is ever as it should be. Rich Hoover talked to Skwigly on the phone from New York fresh from the star studded premier.
Richard Hoover
You have a long history in visual effects working on a wide variety of different films, how did you find working on the Smurfs?
It really was a rewarding experience its not what I expected having not really done and animated picture like this before so developing the characters and their personalities that are so important for Smurfs was really interesting task and I found it very rewarding in the end. The animation director did an incredible job of having the many number of animators animate all these characters and make it a really fun and rewarding experience.
Do you find working on characters such as the Smurfs different to working on Superman Returns or The dragons in Reign of Fire? Obviously there is a difference but what are the specific challenges?
Well I think it has to do with their personalities and the fact that they are little beings, Superman obviously is a human-like character but the shots I did didn’t have a whole lot of dialogue to them they were mostly action shots. To do a movie were every character has dialogue and they are meaningful to the story with the way they behave and how they act is as important as making them look good and integrate into the scene.
Would you say your role was more of a character animation supervisor than visual effects supervisor?
I guess in some way obviously the opening of the movie is 100% CG and the Smurfs and the Smurf village and there is a small portion of the movie that is that way but to your point the visual effects was the means of making the character, its not so much making an explosion or some foreign land so the pipeline is the same but the end result is a little different and that in essence is what makes it really fun. You get attached to what you are doing even though there are aspects to the platework that are normal for a visual effects film such as wire removal etc, but nothing was more important than making the Smurfs and making a memorable performance of each character.
With your years of experience in the VFX industry did you encounter any problems making this film that you didn’t find in other films?
There are definitely challenges, One of my main challenges on set was to make sure that the actors knew and understood were the Smurfs were going to be so the integration between then worked really well and their eye lines were in sync so that they were looking at each other when they were speaking. I did a lot of tricks and did a lot of homework ahead of time and we did lots of walk cycles and jump cycles to figure out how they move and how fast they move. Because for them To negotiate our world they had some physical challenges in their size and we wanted to make that as realistic as possible but on the other hand it couldn’t be so slow that the shots would be boring or way too long and we would have to rely on editing to keep pace instead so we worked out ways to make the Smurfs quick, quite fast and very agile and athletic. I did things like make very tiny wire stands that were the height of Smurfs so that the actors could look right into the eyes that were easy to remove later, so things like that we did on every scene raja was really involved in that as any director would, they had little Marquette’s and poseable ‘Gumby’ versions of the characters that we could puppeteer around the scene and actually move. We had very talented actors doing off screen voices who would do the dialogues back to the actors so that the pacing of the dialogues would be correct. So a lot of tricks and things were used to make the live action really work, special effects did a whole bunch of really neat gags with very low key technology some cases using monofilament wires to pull things around and using quite sophisticated radio control gadgets to make things move as if the Smurfs were actually doing it and all those things really helped with the integration of the Smurfs in the scene and made you believe they were really there.
It must have been a treat on set seeing Hank Azaria perform as Gargamel?
Oh it was great, Hank is such a talented man, they did quite extensive work on his look and his makeup but he really pulled that off and he came up with the voice and the p[physical behaviour and his approach to the script although fun was extremely appropriate to the character everyone knows from the comic book the audience goes ecstatic when he is on screen, he’s so funny.
Characters such as the Smurfs they get re introduced every generation or so what has the film changed to appeal to a new generation and what has it kept to retain its original charm?
One of our first challenges was to adapt the 2D characters of the cartoon into a living breathing fully dimensional being. At least a year was spent at Sony Pictures Animation doing line drawing studies and character studies and looking at the proportions of eyes and noses head, all kinds of versions were explored and rejected before we finally came up with what you see on the screen and once those were finished Sony Pictures Imageworks took over at that point and visualised them and tried to be true to that design, that occurred through a lot of dialogue with the director and the Peyo folks (Peyo created the Smurfs in 1958) to make sure we remained true to the character’s but took some liberties to make them a living being and make them somewhat contemporary, particularly Smurfette, we have altered her hair silhouette from the ‘hairspray heavy’ hair-do that she has in the comic book to something a bit more contemporary and a little prettier, for example. Then we did an extensive upgrading of our lighting pipeline using new tools like Spheron which captures imagery at higher stop resolution, 26 stop range instead of the traditional 10-13 and the sophistication of that tool allowed us to be very precise about the wattage and colour of the lighting in the scene also were the surfaces were to some degree so we could map or project the colour of the environment fairly accurately around the Smurfs we also use another tool called a Trimble which is a laser scan that use for architecture and engineer means but we used that tool and adapted it to our pipeline so that the surfaces they run on from match moving were absolutely accurate and we had no floating or sliding characters we knew exactly where they were in space. All those things combined allowed us to render an extremely lifelike and realistic character that hopefully the audience believes is there and integrating with the actors in the scene.
What software did you use?
Well everything is modelled and edited in Maya, Imageworks has their own Maya shelf for Maya tools for animators to go with our rig that’s been developed for all our characters over the past few years that had to be scaled and adapted for the Smurfs of course, but that’s a great advantage to get the facial performances and so on. Then for the lighting pipeline we used a physical shader driven render ‘Arnold’, which is commercially available. So its basically a ray trace render that uses the physical model to add and bounce light and environmental colour to the character combined with what we get from the Spheron data to make wattage and light placement exactly accurate. And that enabled us to get lighting together in half a day and look really well which gave us a lot of time to really tweak the shot and make it really artful which was a real joy to me instead of spending a lot of days just to get lighting and colour and shadows right we can get there very fast, that also gave the film makers more liberty to make changes or adjustments and not feel any pressure budget wise to deliver a spectacular looking film on time on budget without a whole lot of stress.
Did you find the actual designs of the Smurfs restrictive and did you have to compensate or incorporate that into the animation?
We did a lot of research into the way Peyo drew the 2D characters and how that needed to be adapted by us. One of the things we ran into a lot was how big their heads where and their inability to reach over their heads, grab anything or push anything up or hold, he came up with interesting ways to do that, they tilt their heads to one side so they can reach their hands above one side of their heads, where as Peyo might stretch the arms in his 2D drawing to deal with that problem we obviously couldn’t do that without making them look rubbery and not real. The feet obviously we had to come up with ways to make them walk and run and look realistic, but its also an interesting characteristic that’s part of their character that you do not ignore, you embellish it and embrace it and you make that a part of how you animate them and come to life and I think that came out pretty well. Raja found a video of guys with springy feet, like a springy steel foot, so when they run they spring and bounce and cover a lot of ground because we were struggling on how to make these little guys run quickly so we adapted that into their big feet to mean that they weren’t heavy, cloggy big feet they are actually springy big feet and that allowed them to really move along when they needed to.
Like an asset?
Yeah we turned it into an asset instead of a problem apart from Clumsy of course, he is always tripping over his big feet!
Was there any character or scene you felt particular attachment to?
Everyone loves Smurfette, you gotta love Smurfette she was one of the most difficult to do because of her hair and there is a lot of running around and jumping in the movie so the dynamics in the hair and trying to keep her hairdo somewhat suggestive of the comic was really tough and to keep her looking as pretty as possible was also a challenge. We spent more time focussing on her and trying to make her special than any other character. Clumsy came to life pretty simply because being clumsy is pretty fun and funny and it gives the animators loads of room to do all kinds of things. Brainy is brainy! He has this single finger up in the air and calculated dialogue. We worked on his glasses a lot too if you really look closely we made sure everything was made like a Smurf could make it, for example Brainys glasses are made of ebony, although you have to look at the close ups to get that. There is a lot of that attention to detail in the film particularly in Smurf village, everything is made in a way that they could make it and build it, so as far as a favourite character goes I don’t think I have one but I put more attention into Smurfette than anybody else.
The film stuck quite close to the Smurf design, was it tempting to deviate from the design and if you did how far did it go before bringing it to what it is now?
They were obviously big-headed characters with big feet and all kinds of experimentation with proportion, such as how big their ears and mouth and eyes were. If you look at the cartoon there is a lot of eye white and when that became a living character that looked demonic and bizarre looking, and the eyes are how you tell emotion, character and story so we had to really make the eyes rather different from the cartoon and more real and lifelike even humanistic if you will in the proportions from sclera to pupil and the colouring to come up with a blue eye colour were as the colouring doesn’t really come up in the comics beyond that we are pretty true to the proportions of the comic with the understanding that Peyo drew quite liberally in his comics and wasn’t extremely consistent, he just did what made the character come of the page and tell the story. So far as wanting to depart I don’t think there was a big desire to depart everyone took this as being true to Smurfs and regenerating and rejuvenation the lines to the public and making a new audience but we wanted to make the old audience love it as well as making a new audience love these character.
Will the Smurfs return in a sequel?
I don’t know much about it other than they are working on it and I think it is very likely. If the reaction of the premier is any indication it is very likely we will be making another.
Are you involved?
No I’m not, it has been talked of and if Imageworks deems that I should I will be there for them.
The Smurfs is a big property for Sony to own then?
The marketing for this film has been incredible. We have done well over 200-300 custom animated shots for all kinds of venues such as McDonalds Americas got talent cable channels and NBC, not just shots from the movie this is custom animation.
What else is the studio working on at the moment?
The next film to come from Sony pictures animation is Arthur Christmas, produced by Aardman, we are all working on that now with a large team from Sony pictures Imageworks doing the digital production, we are getting started on Hotel Transylvania which is an original CG animated feature, the Imageworks team is working on several large VFX projects like the Amazing Spiderman and hard at work with Men in Black 3, we will be announcing more in the next few weeks. We are very active here!
With your long history in visual effects is there any particular film in your whole career that you would like to be known for?
I would be extremely happy to be known as the guy who brought the Smurfs to life, I just think they are cute and fun and their stories have good morals and good values for family and in this time that is really important. When I read the script initially that’s what struck me the most and to have it come out this well I believe everyone else will feel the same, it’s a great mark on my resume.