Keith Lango on Shrek the Third

(Source: www.keithlango.com)

I remember seeing the first image from DreamWorks Animation's upcoming Shrek the Third (Fiona and her fellow princesses in their Charlie's Angel pose) and thinking "something's off here." Perhaps it was the awkwardness in their individual stances (especially Cinderella on the far left) or the way the image just didn't work for me as a whole. Unfortunately, I don't have the artistic training to justify why I didn't like it so that's why I left it alone.

You can therefore imagine my hosannas when I discovered animator Keith Lango felt the same way. Beginning with the immortal line, "I can’t get drunk enough to make this look good," he rips this image as a demonstration of what's wrong with the current CG animation industry.

So what's wrong with it?

"There’s a lot to take issue with here," Lango writes in his blog. "The lack of contrast, few quiet areas in the image, jangly poses, cliche’d layout, the haphazard accidental relationship of the background with the foreground, etc. It’s almost like nobody ever saw this all together until it was too late. The thing is, if it was made like 99% of the imagery in big budget CG then most likely nobody did see it until it was too late."

He likens the effect to a producer asking 10 top singers to sing the U.S. national anthem to a pre-recorded track, without hearing what the other singers are doing. Individually, each singer would sound beautiful. Taken as a whole, the effect would rupture eardrums.

So why is this image a demonstration of what's wrong with the animation industry?

"In my experience as a CG Supervisor on several long form projects," says Lango (The Ant Bully, Veggie Tales), "it is clear that large CG animated projects are run more like a factory than anything else . . . CG film production is a factory paradigm. These various CG assets are built in individual tasks, much like manufacturing widgets. The idea is that in the end all the various widgets are assembled to make a single image."

Essentially, you've got one person animating Sleeping Beauty, another on Princess Fiona, and three others on the rest of the princesses, plus another six junior-level animators doing the background. Keep in mind, these people aren't talking with each other; they're working on their individual tasks. Then a supervisor takes what they've done, and puts it all together.

"So in many ways it’s no surprise at all that the end result feels haphazard and disjointed," he says. "It’s not the fault of the individual task-doers. They’re doing their best within their small isolated task (and small window of information about the whole) to make it the best they know how . . . Left to our own devices individual CG artists will over-detail things . . . I know because I’ve done it in the past myself, so you’re hearing it from one of your own. Thus the disease of detail-itis is built into the entire economy of CG production almost by default . . . Nobody can see the whole elephant at once, so we make our pieces based on our belief about what kind of object we think it ought to be (snake, tree, rope, etc.). But - let me be clear on this- Detail-itis isn’t an unbalanced love for details over macro view of art. It’s merely the result of an inability to even be allowed to think on a macro level.

"No doubt this film has a ton of talented & skilled people working on it. All CG films do . . . I have close personal friends working on this and I know for certain that they’re way better artists than this- when they are responsible for the whole image, that is. But in the current CG film production paradigm they’re not allowed to be. It would seem no one is."

You'd think this would be the job of the director to see the big picture, and to tell each individual artist "This is what the entire image will look like, so design your piece with that in mind." However, according to Lango, this doesn't happen.

"There is a significant gap of time where a director (or art director) on a CG project never sees the image with its elements all together," he says. "He or she just won’t see everything together again . . . until months later when the first lit and rendered scenes roll off the render servers . . . (by that point) the production schedule is in crunch mode. Thus all they’re usually able to do is fix the technical problems (hopefully) and get the frames rendered without mistakes and with some measure of consistency. There’s no time to change sets or camera angles or animation or models or textures or anything to make the scene work as a piece of art. It’s all most crews can do to get the darn thing . . . done on time. Because of the huge cost involved lighting is not the place to be making changes, but ironically it’s the first place where you have all of the pieces ready put together. It’s only here that one can begin to arrange these elements to create pleasing singular works of artistic imagery, but the ability to do so is a luxury that cannot be afforded."

To stop this, Lango says that "somebody needs to be allowed to think about the film from the standpoint of appealing artistic imagery. And they need to be able to do this before the money and time runs out. This is supposed to be the director’s or art director’s job, but in CG a director is often little more than parts inspector - whether by chance or by choice."

There's a saying I've heard many times: a camel is a horse designed by a committee. I guess these days, a CG animated movie is art designed by a committee, a committe that doesn't have all the information at hand. You can read Keith Lango's rant in its entirety over here.

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