Production Design with Paul Lasaine

In the first of a series of production diaries, production designer Paul Lasaine talks about crafting the look of Sony Pictures Animation's 3D-animated feature, Surf's Up.

by Paul Lasaine

This lava flow sketch helps begin to set some of the world building for Surf's Up. (Artist: Marcelo Vignali.) All artwork (c) 2007 Sony Pictures Animation.

It's important to understand that, as with most animated films, nothing you see in Surf's Up actually exists. Everything, from vast landscapes to the most minute detail, had to be conceived, designed, and created from scratch: characters, locations, sets, props, weather, lighting and, of course, the waves.

It was the job of the visual development department to "design" the film. At any given time, we had a crew of about 10 highly talented artists, working for the better part of three years. Of course, we also worked in tandem with the other production departments (story, look development, vfx, modeling, animation, texturing, matte painting and lighting) to keep up with the huge amount of designs necessary to feed the production pipeline. Once everything was designed, it was up to the Imageworks team lead by digital supervisor Rob Bredow to figure out how to bring it all to life.

When embarking on the design for an animated film, one of the first questions we ask ourselves is: What is the "look of the film"? There are a lot of options: cartoony, realistic, stylized, primitive, retro, graphic, cutesy, high tech, wacky, dimensional, flat, etc.

Generally the tone of the story will dictate "the look." A whacky, screwball comedy will usually have a similarly whack design style. A romantic story will usually have a beautiful, lyrical design style. And so on.

At its core, Surf's Up is a documentary... or at least, it's a parody of a documentary. And like all good parody, being faithful to the source material is of paramount importance. From the outset, I thought that Surf's Up's reality based, documentary-style story required a somewhat realistic look, and that the highly stylized look of so many other animated films would be inappropriate for this film. Not that I expected anyone to believe that we actually shot in real locations with real penguins. I just I didn't want an obvious design style getting in the way constantly reminding the audience that they're watching a cartoon.

At the same time, we didn't want it to look completely real either. There needed to be some level of stylization, so we came up with the "70% Rule." Everything would be 70% real looking... leaving the remaining 30% open for us to have fun. But what does that mean? Seventy percent real. For us, it meant stylizing the shapes of objects somewhat, but lighting and rendering those objects as realistically as possible. This gave us fun, unique looking stuff but it allowed everything to exist in a believable world.

Once we settled on a visual style for the film, it was time to start designing. The main things that needed to be designed were the characters, the environments and the cinematography.

Designing the characters presented chief character designer, Sylvain Deboissy, with some interesting challenges: Design a group of characters that are kind of realistic... but not really. Make them look cute... but not cutesy. Make the penguin characters look like penguins (which all look pretty much alike)... but make them all completely individual.

In many ways, the fact that penguins within a given species all look pretty much the same worked in our favor, because once Sylvain designed Cody, the rest were just variations. OK, it wasn't that simple, because we still needed to be able to tell them apart. So we had to come up with some rules to give them all individuality, while still retaining their "family resemblance." In Cody's hometown of Shiverpool, all the penguins are Rockhoppers. Sylvain created individual characters by varying size, haircut and feather patterns. Once we get to Pen-gu, all the main penguin characters were different species: Geek/BigZ is a King, Tank is an Emperor, Lani is a Gentoo and Cody is a Rockhopper. Sylvain also made sure that all the main characters had very distinct silhouettes, so that even from a distance each character would be instantly recognizable. All the secondary penguin characters are some form of Emperor, but with specific hair and feather patterns.

Though they're all based on real animals, Sylvain gave all the characters in Surf's Up, including our non-penguin characters (Mikey, Reggie and Chicken Joe), a certain level of stylization or characterization, which make them fun and gives them their own personalities. However, when it came to their final rendered look, we gave them very real looking textures, feathers and fur so they would be believable.

These two conceptual drawings capture a sense of Shiverpool. (Artist: Paul Lasaine and Richie Chavez, Ron Lukas and Marcelo Vignali.)

When it came to designing the environments, we had two major locations to consider: Shiverpool and Pen Gu Island. Both had natural elements to design, as well as built elements, which theoretically, were designed by penguins. Since in reality penguins don't actually build much more than nests, we had to come up with a method of construction that we dubbed "Penguin style." Penguin style is a collection of found objects (ice, bamboo, coconut shells, leaves, driftwood, vines, bones, seashells, etc.) assembled into primitive versions of recognizable "human" structures and tools. For instance, a large flat rock, lying on the ground with four large leaves on top, makes a nice dinner table.

The first act of the film takes place in the town of Shiverpool, Antarctica, which is really just an iceberg. There's nothing there but ice, so it seemed logical that everything in Shiverpool should be made out of ice, including Cody's surfboard.

Beyond just looking like Antarctica, we wanted Shiverpool to be bleak and depressing... like a cold, harsh, factory town. The kind of place you move away from at your first opportunity. We purposely staged the entire Shiverpool sequence under a heavy cloud cover, with no direct sunlight, and a color palette that would make a battleship look psychedelic. The idea was to make Pen Gu, by contrast, look like paradise, so that when Cody first arrives there, it would be like Dorothy stepping out of her house, and into Oz.

We wanted Pen Gu to be your classic island paradise: sandy beaches and swaying palms. We had several locations on Pen-gu, so we tried to make each one distinct.

Style choices affect the looks of Competition Beach and Z's Beach (Artist: Noelle Triaureau and Armand Serrano, Joty Lam and Armand Serrano.)

We had two Beaches on Pen Gu to design. Competition Beach, where all the action takes place, is on the "dry" side of the island. It's big, open, sunny and there's always a party going on. The design for this beach, lead by art director Marcelo Vignali, was inspired by the beaches of the Seychelles islands off the coast of East Africa.

The other beach is Big Z's Beach. It's on the "wet" side of the island. In contrast to Competition Beach, Z's Beach is small, secluded and quiet: it's surrounded by cliffs and the jungle. Designed by chief location designer, Armand Serrano, this beach was inspired by the Phi Phi islands in Thailand.

The rest of the island is covered with jungle. To deal with the fact that an entire jungle is time consuming and expensive to build in CG, we came up with a simple method of using one tree over and over again to create a dense jungle. We designed a tree made up of several components: a trunk, climbing ivy and dripping vines. These components, when used in different combinations, sizes and angles of rotation, gave the illusion of a vast and varied jungle. We didn't bother building branches or leaves, because with the exception of one shot, we never actually see the treetops. Instead, we concentrated on the trunks and the Jungle floor. For this we designed what we called our "Digital Nursery," but it was environmental modeling lead Greg Galliani who brought it all together.

All the props and structures on Pen Gu were built in our "Penguin style," and we only used objects that could be found on the island as our construction materials. Many of these objects were used over and over again, and recombined to create new props. For instance, Big Z's ukulele: the body is made out of a coconut shell that first shows up as a crash helmet in one of the archival-footage sequences; the neck of the ukulele is a piece of driftwood; the bridge is from a bamboo fork (borrowed from Geeks Banyan tree); the tuning pegs are sea shells; and the strings are actually from Cody's necklace. For some fun, take a close look at Tank's "Ladies" (his trophies). See how many objects you recognize from other parts of the film. Hint: we used pretty much every prop we had to make those trophies.

This illustration of 'The Boneyards' captures the rich role that waves play in the feature's production design. (Artist: Paul Lasaine.)

Then there were the waves. We knew the film was going to hinge on whether or not we could pull off convincing waves in CG. Designing them was the easy part. There's a lot of great footage of waves out there, and we basically pointed to the best looking ones and said, "Like that!" For you surf buffs out there, we based our designs on a few famous waves: Mavericks, Jaws, Pipeline, Cortes Bank and Teahupoo. But how do you build a wave in a computer... and actually make it move? There really was no precedent. All the waves done thus far in film were only parts of waves. A crest here, a splash there. No one had really done a complete, start to finish, crashing wave before... at least, not to the level that we needed our waves to be. These had to be fully functioning, animatable waves. Waves that were versatile enough to be able to look different as the needs of the script dictated, and be able to work well in a production pipeline. And they had to look fantastic. Anything shy of awesome simply wouldn't cut it. Thank goodness we have geniuses working at Sony, because that's exactly what this job required. Our 3D vis dev team lead by Todd Pilger took the first crack at it. After proving it could be actually done, the wave work was picked up and carried to the finish line by the Imageworks wave team lead by Dan Kramer.

At the same time we were designing all the sets, props, locations, and characters, we were also designing the look of the sequences. This started with elaborate illustrations of each location and lighting set-up. Art director Ron Lucas, in turn, used these, as the basis for the creation of hundreds of color key paintings lead. Color Keys are like color storyboards, the purpose of which are for establishing the lighting, color, atmosphere and mood of every sequence in the film. These Color Keys give us a first glimpse at what shots will ultimately look like when they're completed and they act as a blueprint for the lighting of the film.

A conceptual design for Z's Board Shack. (Artist: Marcelo Vignali.)

But what differentiates the look of Surf's Up from other animated films is its cinematography. From the outset, we strove to make an animated film that didn't look like an animated film. First and foremost, Surf's Up is a documentary. And as such, it was important that it look like one. Most documentaries are a patchwork of various bits of found film footage, interviews, stills and on-the-fly footage shot by a film crew on the move. We worked hard to create what looks like real "archival footage," old photographs, newspaper clippings, postcards, etc. We also used several different film and video formats, as well as an extensive use of "hand held" camera, for that "spontaneous" look.

In terms of typical animated films, we took a very unconventional approach to the film's cinematography. There's a certain look that typifies most other animated films: pretty colors, perfect staging, beautiful lighting, great composition and flawless camera work. It may sound strange at first, but we went to great pains to avoid this kind of cinematography. Why? Because it's not "documentary." Real documentary film crews are rarely concerned with these things, because they film life as it happens... when it happens. The unexpected is normal in real life, and if something worth capturing on film happens before you're shooting conditions are perfect... too bad. You shoot anyway. In other word, life has flaws.

Again, Surf's Up isn't a real documentary, so we had to create our flaws on purpose, and we put a lot of effort into injecting them into the entire film. We came up with several different looks for aged film. We purposely lit sets "poorly," and staged action in less than ideal lighting conditions. If an ugly shadow "accidentally" fell across a character's face, we left it in the shot. We purposely created shots that had annoying sun flares in them. We designed shots where the "cameraman" missed focus and/or framing, and had to find it during the shot. We designed shots where the lens gets wet, or has smudges on it. We even shot one sequence in the dark, and had to illuminate the scene with a light attached to the camera.

Z's Beach comes to life in these two production design drawings. (Artist: Armand Serrano, Sunny Apinchapong and Armand Serrano.)

All these things make the audience very aware that there's a camera crew shooting the action. And it's this spontaneous quality, more than anything that we set out to achieve with the look of Surf's Up.

Indeed, on a feature-length animated film such as Surf's Up, there are literally thousands of things to design. The stacks, and stacks and stacks of drawings and paintings (both traditional and digital) could fill volumes, and take years to create. What ends up on screen is the culmination of that process, but it's really just the tip-of-the-iceberg of the massive amount of work that goes into designing a completely unique world. Hopefully, all of these elements come together in the end to make a cohesive film that works in terms of design as well as story. If we've all done our job well, the audience won't be aware that everything they're seeing, was designed by artists... and they'll simply enjoy the movie.

Paul Lasaine is a Production Designer at Sony Pictures Animation who most recently served in that capacity on Surf's Up. His previous project was developing the look of Open Season. Prior to joining Sony Pictures Animation, Lasaine worked as an Art Director on all three of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. Before that he worked for many years at DreamWorks Animation, where he was an Art Director and Visual Development Artist. Lasaine started in the film business in 1988 as a matte artist at Disney. A graduate of the California State University at Northridge, Lasaine is from Los Angeles, California.