Valiant: “Some pigeons eat crumbs, others make history”
Skwigly
Valiant is the British answer to movies à la Shrek and is the first full-length animated feature film ever produced in the UK – which is ground-breaking for this genre in Europe not only for its astoundingly well done animation, but particularly because it was finalized in a relatively short period of time, for a pretty small budget…
It is the largest digital feature to be done in Europe, and the first to be done in the UK. The animated comedy tells the story of a lowly wood pigeon named Valiant, who overcomes his small size to become a hero in Great Britain’s Royal Air Force Homing Pigeon Service during World War II by delivering vital messages from the French Resistance to Allied Forces while avoiding the lethal (German) enemy falcons.
People and Company
Valiant is a Vanguard Animation production to be distributed by Touchstone Pictures in the USA, internationally by Odyssey Entertainment, and by Entertainment Film Distributors in the UK. The movie was created by Vanguard Animation in Los Angeles, and produced at Vanguard Animation Los Angeles and Ealing Studios London. Gary Chapman makes his directorial debut with Valiant. A Native of Manchester, England, he created displays for many major British museums. At the beginning of the nineties, he moved to Los Angeles and found himself, by accident, in the film business, and then finally at Vanguard Animation.
Vanguard Animation was established by John Williams in order to bring his low cost, high quality digital features to the screen. He served as a producer on the Academy Award-winning animated comedies Shrek and Shrek 2, and was the person responsible for optioning the original book by William Steig, upon which the first movie was based. “I came across ‘Shrek’ as a book I greatly enjoyed reading with my children, and we came across VALIANT as a treatment which was submitted to Vanguard and written by George Webster,” said Williams. “It was a great hero’s journey, and a central character with a lot of heart.” Finally Vanguard developed the script and decided to make it their first CG animated film, and signed a four picture deal with Disney for US distribution.
“Once we had this story about a small carrier pigeon and his determination to join the Royal Carrier Pigeon Service, we recognized immediately that we had a suspense drama with a fantastic central character at its core,” Williams continued. “It had the zero to hero formula, but one that was fresh enough and different enough that made it really interesting.” He turned to Curtis Augspurger (see our Interview) and Buckley Collum to construct the production pipeline and run the production on a daily basis.
Valiant began production in January 2003, in Los Angeles, doing character and location design, boarding, and animatic creation. During that time, the studio built a state-of-the-art CGI animation studio at Ealing Studios in London. In the fall, the production unit moved to Vanguard Animation London studios, and then build up a team with 180 animators from 17 different countries.
It was the 38 weeks of preproduction that ended up being the largest obstacle the team had to overcome for the film. “We refined our story, characters, environments, and production pipeline during this time period – in addition to hiring all of our production staff, building out our facilities in London, and setting the style for the film,” Curtis Augspuger explained. “Each of these posed enormous obstacles in their own way.” As the production gained momentum, John Williams brought the original character designer, Gary Chapman, on board to direct. “One of my main concerns was establishing a look for the film,” said Gary Chapman. “It is a comedy adventure, but I though it important to have some sort of homage to reality. At no point did we approach this like a cartoon.”
Speaking before the Valiant project got under way, Hector Macleod, head of the Emmy-winning London post-production company Glassworks, said in an interview with the Financial Times that London’s computer animation was 10 to 12 years behind the US in scale and quality: “There is plenty of talent here but no infrastructure.” And not enough money either. The going rate for a fully computer-generated animated feature is $1m a minute, or $70m for a film the length of Valiant. Valiant’s budget was $40m. “We completed Valiant on time and on budget while retaining an increadibly high level of quality. There is a huge point of pride that we were able to put together a great film while operating within these aggressive goals,” explained Curtis Augspurger.
When asked whether it was difficult to find investors for the film, Augspurger answered, “Initially yes, but after Odyssey Entertainment sold the foreign rights, we had several studios looking at US distribution. One of them wanted to change the entire backdrop of the film….so when Disney came along, all the other pieces became easier to put in place. Neil Braun and James Spring did a fantastic job of fitting all of the financials into place. Steve Norris of the UK Film Council worked closely with John and Barnaby to bring in the remaining funding.”
“The cost of computer-generated animation has been prohibitive until recently,” Barnaby Thompson said. “There is a ceiling to the budgets you can get financed in Europe. We were able to bring it to Ealing because of the tax incentives, and because we got the support of the UK Film Council, which also invested in the film.” The project raised budget of $40 million in funding, however the actual cost of this Hollywood film would have required a $70 millio budget in comparison.
“We stood on the shoulders of giants to accomplish what we’ve accomplished,” Curtis Augspurger explained. “The years of development, research and revisions by the software geniuses who’ve come before us paved our road. This allowed us to focus our R&D on the more artistic pursuit of look development. Less time in technology huddles, and more time making artistic choices.” Taking advantage of price and performance of modern hardware from IBM and Boxx Technologies and Maya Software certainly helped in overcoming technological obstacles, thus being able to deliver all 3D assets in under 15 months and reducing costs to below USD 0.5 million per minute. years of development, research and revisions by the software geniuses who’ve come before us paved our road. This allowed us to focus our R&D on the more artistic pursuit of look development. Less time in technology huddles, and more time making artistic choices.” Taking advantage of price and performance of modern hardware from IBM and Boxx Technologies and Maya Software certainly helped in overcoming technological obstacles, thus being able to deliver all 3D assets in under 15 months and reducing costs to below USD 0.5 million per minute.
Bits and Bytes … the Computer Animation
In Valiant, Vanguard took on some of the most difficult aspects of 3D animation. “We have incredibly challenging characters in that each is covered in feathers, or in the case of the French Resistance Mice, fur,” said Mr. Augspurger. “This proved difficult to combine with wardrobe, as the interaction had to be calculated in a very expensive fashion. We also had things such as cloth, explosions, water, clouds, foliage and natural environments, all of which take an exacting toll on your technical directors’ talents. In the end, we’ve accomplished a very rich world that our characters fit into quite seamlessly.” Valiant relied on a Maya pipeline, but in-house software was also developed, mainly for character controls and queue management. “We worked with some rocket scientists from Purdue to develop our cloud rendering techniques, but most of our coding was done to serve as “glue” between off the shelf packages,” recalled Augspurger. “The starting premise was that we could finance more films if we could reduce the overall costs, and Valiant is proof of our new paradigm,” added Valiant co producer Buckley Collum. “Alias put us into play on this movie. Maya helped give our investors the confidence to back the project. It’s a recognised name that offers off-the-shelf plug and play-ability, and instantly allowed us to tap into a large pool of animation talent.”
A key decision from the outset was to base Valiant on a VFX pipeline – where background plates and characters are created and rendered out as separate layers from Maya for subsequent compositing – rather than rendering complete scenes in camera, a potentially time-consuming and costly process. Valiant contains approximately 1,150 shots, and the animation team was able to deliver 100 shots per week during peak production. Optimizing the character rigging was also fundamental to the efficiency of the pipeline. The characters are virtually all birds, with feathered wings that function as gestural arms and fingers, as well as wings.
To make the animation processes easy and fast, Vanguard developed a highly sophisticated, stand-alone character rig in Maya, which could be adapted as required for other bird characters in the movie. This ensured that every animator would be familiar with any character’s controls, allowing them to work with any character on any shot. In addition, a custom-developed Maya plug-in called Chanko enabled the animation team to create a library of poses and clips, which could then be shared between the character animators, ensuring shotto- shot continuity. RenderMan was the chosen rendering tool for most of the characters, sets and props. Using mental ray, Vanguard’s technical directors were able to light scenes and produce global illumination renders, then bake the lighting information into the colour textures. This did away with the need to render the sets using multiple shadow casting lights, and which ultimately made rendering much faster. The Maya native renderer was used to render visual effects passes, such as smoke, steam, atmospheric dust, fires and explosions.
“The story-line,” said Curtis Augspurger, “is a coming of age story that every child will be able to ascribe to and every adult has experienced. It is the plight of someone who is told they are incapable when they are too small or too young, and then they go off and prove themselves. The enjoyment of this movie is merging its two aspects. When we get into the adventure, I believe we have enough understanding of our characters that you really care about them and want them to succeed — you want them to make it through.”
Items mentioned in this article:
![Valiant [DVD]](https://www.skwigly.co.uk/wp-content/themes/skwigly-2024/images/amazon-image-default.png)