Sep 30, 2022

How Google Maps and "When Harry met Sally" helped create the "intergalactic" world.

Netflix's ambitious new special Entergalactic has touched the streamers of today. Unlike what the platform has done in the animation space in the past, the 94・minute musical love story is the brainchild of rapper Scott "Kid Kudi" Meskudi and black creator Kenya Barris.

Directed by Fletcher Moore, the special tells the story of 20 something Jabari, a street artist turn comic book creator who moves to a posh new flat in Manhattan after winning a new job. When he is settled, Jabari notices his neighbor's meadow, when the party at her place becomes longer at night and disrupts his sleep. A late-night meetup, with him in his pajamas and slippers, she looks like she has just come out of the pages of a magazine, the first embers of a new romance

DNEG Animation in London is tasked with adapting a detailed portfolio of concept art to 3d animation production and will be released soon. It looks 2d animated, has a painterly beauty, is subtle but still relevant, stylized in New York, but largely spatially accurate. Easy right-

Cartoon Brew sat with the film's vfx supervisor Archie Donato (cg lead for numerous Dreamworks animation features, as well as an extensive career in vfx) and animation director Kapil Sharma (animation supervisor, Ron's Gone Wrong).; Take a PDF full of concept art (Senior Animator, Troll) and discuss the steps required to turn it into a visually impressive production.

Cartoon Brew: When and how did you get involved in this project-

Archie Donato: Literally got involved as soon as they were ready to start making movies. I got a call from David Prescott, "I have one with your name on it."But the job is in London and I wasn't sure about Covid and relocation. However, they had already made a significant amount of development in the artistic aspect.They showed us this incredible PDF of what they were working on.I said, "When is the next flight to London?"When I say this, I know I'm talking for both of us.This was something that our entire career was waiting to tackle. We come from traditional cg animation and vfx, but always from very standard Dreamworks/Pixar style animation. So it was a big thing to participate in such an adult animation.

and how did the DNEG-Netflix partnership actually work-

Donato: I think it was some early tests we did for them that convinced them that we were the right choice. One big thing was that they wanted a 2d movie that looked like a stunning 3d movie. They wanted it to always feel like you're stepping into the picture. That was the director's dream. The first few months were weird if we got the job.Because I had to forget about 30 years of 3d animation experience and start over.

Kapil Sharma: I would like to add that Netflix was a really great partner for that experience. We spent just two or three months figuring out how to do this project, and they worked out how we find the look of the project.

Donato: They knew exactly what they wanted and trusted us to understand how to do it in 3d. The idea was not necessarily to make an animated film, but to forget about the medium and focus on how to tell a great love story. So we had to forget about the animated background and work on something more realistic and engrossing for adults.

So Archie you L.A.Body and Kapil You are in London. What did you do to create the New York version, and how did you keep it so authentic-

Donato: This is a kid Cudi Pro I was lucky enough to live in New York for several years in the early 1990s, so I was familiar with the city. But when we were making this film, the story had a map that could literally stretch a string and connect the places we used. Perhaps 95% of movie locations are accurate to real physical locations. Obviously everything is stylistically pressed, but when the characters are in Chinatown, you know that they are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown, and the characters are in Chinatown.

It created how much difficulty the story moves around the city-

Donato: One difficult part was Jabari, the protagonist, to ride his BMX everywhere. So he cut several boroughs in a single order and it was very important for us to maintain the continuity of New York. What we've done is set a geographical marker and say "I want to see the Chrysler building in this shot" or "The Empire State building should be in the background here.""To do that, we downloaded a 3d map of Manhattan and rebuilt it in a pipeline, but it was obviously more stylized and more disproportionate. I spent a lot of time on Google Maps imagining I was riding a bike through those areas.

About the characters, how did you treat their design-

Sharma: As Archie said, we had really great artwork PDFs, but they were all static images. The big question is, ""How are we trying to translate that style into motion- we figure out what they look like when they're talking, so we use some live-action movies to capture the character-like performance needed to deliver and then share it with us."" We used it to make you feel real in the way you need to tell your story. That said, we had a few animated films that we used as visual references that we thought we had achieved those goals. We watched me lose my body and were really inspired by the way that the movie felt so real.

and how did it appear technically-

Sharma: We made facial animation technically real without losing a painterly look when the facial parts moved.We did a lot of tests using wireframes to see how the facial parts move together. And we played with too much lighting. I never thought about lighting as much as I did in this movie. 1. One thing we've always been sure of is that we don't want to use mocap or rotoscopes. We wanted to capture the real-life performance with the animation we were doing, not just the real-life performance. On the other hand, we did not want to be too detailed in every frame. There are movies where every frame has been touched up or changed. In our movies, we sometimes spend 8 frames on the same image to try to actually capture the moment. In the daily routine, you look at the final image and ask how you want the audience to feel, if you need movement to achieve that feeling, or if more movement distracts you. I think our animators really had a blast creating these performances.

You mentioned the effects of live action. You can name it specifically—

Donato: When I got this project, I was told it was a kind of modern version of when Harry met 20 black kids in their 2s who would fall in love with Sally, and the awkwardness of that new love when you don't really know each other yet.When Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, when Harry met Sally, I think Kapil's team did a great job of capturing it because it's so hard to create subtle awkwardness in the facial expression. So we saw a lot of specific scenes when Harry met Sally for inspiration, especially a scene where the two are talking non-stop,