: Tom and Jerry

Feb 26, 2021

Tom and Jerry was an interesting film to work on. Framestore had the entirty of project with London leading and Montreal taking the backseat so to speak. London had the lion’s share of the work, and Montreal a little less. The split was 60/40 I think. London’s development and marketing team had spent nearly 2 years before production started wooing the clients with motion tests and style tests….etc. So, by the time Montreal joined the team in October 2019, the film was well into production with few unknowns.

The largest challenge with any 2D style animated feature for the artists is often continuity for the charectors and style. It litterally takes a small army of artists to model, rig, animate, render, and assemble the images for the big screen. Each person bringing thier past expierences and experties to the specific piece of the puzzle they are charged to complete.

In the case of animation this means keeping the chars “on model”…. When Tom or Jerry is looking straight at the camera, thier eyes need to be in a specific position and scale matching the charector model sheet. This is because, unlike more detailed photorealistic CG, 2D animation has very little ‘information’ for our brains to grab onto. One could go so far to say that ‘rendering animation with the smallest amount of information possible’ (lines) is a difining charisteristic of the medium. Less lines to draw = more time to focus on movement and story. So, any small variation in line position results in the charectors note ‘feeling’ like themselves. This is the animation supervisor’s work to maintain this ‘model’ continuity.

In modern animation times like now, the animators work in 2D software like Toon Boom and would be charged with keep track of color and ‘fx’ passes of the 2D work. But for Tom and Jerry, since it was rendered in 3D using the new Framestore Freak renderer, it was the lighting and compositing team who was in charge of color continuity and finishing. This was work of the London and Montreal 2D supervisors. We had to build a system where the lighters were free to ‘work like normal’ but also maintain the specific colors of the chars in changing lighting conditions.

Frederikke Glick spent many weeks assembling the workflows for the charector model sheets converting each to rec709 and P3 varients to that every artist (lighting and comp) could have an automatic button or burnin which would overlay the shot’s chars into a reference layer that the 2D, CG and VFX supervisors could check in dailies for continuity. It was an impressive suit of tools they built!

These char references were burned into most internal submissions for the first round of client notes, approvals and temps. Once a ‘look’ for a sequence was esablished we slowed phased the reference burnins out of production and could work towards finaling shots the regular way. Sequence leads would do a first pass at maintaining continuity based on client approved hero shots. VFX sups would approve shots. Finally 2D sups would sweep up for a last continity check before the shots left the studio.

The last piece of the puzzle for Tom and Jerry, and arguably the most important….was that in Jan 2020, the whole studio was sent to work from home because of the Sars Covid pandemic. This was a huge wrench in the gears for any production. How we handled this as a studio, and specifically as a film production team is something I’m really proud of.

On Tom and Jerry we made the contravesial decision to prioritize the wellbeing of our employies and team members over the requirments for delivery. The studio worked with the clients to reduce our capacity to 80% and extend the delivery by the same amount. In this way we were able to create production designs which all but eliminated overtime, and required us to many very few creative comprimises. This was a lot of work for the management teams, but I’m glad came together as studio to try our best to relieve the stress of VFX work for the time of the pandemic.

Hotel Lobby Sequence

Compositing Supervisor: Frederikke Glick

Sequence Lead: Jean-Francois Gagne

This was the first sequence we worked on in Montreal and used to onboard the team, and get the machine up and running. London had been working for nearly a year by this point and there was a great deal of workflow and techniques to catch up on and get the teams in sync. Even though the process of rendering and compositing the chars changed over the 9+ months this sequence was produced, it’s nice to see how much attention was paid to contunity.

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Hotel Exterior Sequence

Compositing Supervisor: Frederikke Glick

Sequence Lead: Antoine Goethals

The outdoor shots. We were curious as a team how the cartoon charactors would look outside under daylight. Especially in a city setting with no clear rim key or fill lights to flesh out the volumes. This sequence was chosen to dev on and was started very early in the production. I think the charactors turned out as compelling in this group of shots as any other in the film.

Of note, this was the first sequence that the Montreal team came up against the ‘white ballence’ problem. Through out the film it would become part of the process of every sequence to setup a ‘look’ or ‘model sheet’ for the shots. How far did we need to push the charactors color/luminosity to enable to sit in the shots naturally, without going too far so that they turn different unrecognisable colors.

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Jerry’s Suite Sequence

Compositing Supervisor: Anthony Luigi Santoro

Sequence Lead: Jorge Sanchez Fresno

One of the ‘full cg’ sequences where we created minitures of Jerry’s dream house in various states of vision and completion. It was slightly more complicated to get the non-photorealistic renders embedded into the photoreal BGs than one might guess. Interesting puzzles such as irradiance and specular reflections. What do we see when a toon char is reflected in a mirror? Does both the char and it’s reflection get the same rim light? So many creative visual pieces to put together.

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Service Hallway Sequence

Compositing Supervisor: Anthony Luigi Santoro

Sequence Lead: Alex Jadfard

The hallways shots were one of the last sequences started and the first to complete. This was due to a reduction of the number of total shots, and the back half of the sequence where Tom hits Spike with a baseball bat being fully CG, eliminating the need for tracking and scan turn arounds.

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Jerry Hallway Sequence

Compositing Supervisor: Anthony Luigi Santoro

Sequence Lead: Alex Jadfard

Continuity of Jerry’s mouse hole doorway was oddly enough one of the hardest aspects of this ‘sequence’. While grouped here in a set of similar work, the shots were sprinkled throughout the film in 3-10shot chunks. As reels completed, sometimes small creative changes would have to be back tracked to earlier delivered. Many hours were spent quality contoling that cute little door way:)

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Spike and Toots Sequences

Compositing Supervisor: Frederikke Glick

Sequence Lead: Antoine Goethals

While part of the greater set of Spike and Toot’s shots inside the hotel. These hallway reaction shots stand alone. It was more complex than it might seem to believably get Toots into the arms of Chloë Grace Moretz. Showing, shading, cloth interation. Was a good piece of work to have completed.

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Misc Sequences

Compositing Supervisor: Frederikke Glick

Sequence Lead: Vitalii Musatov

Some one off shots that didn’t fit in any category. I liked how Tom looked in these shots:)

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Trap Sequence

Compositing Supervisor: Anthony Luigi Santoro

Sequence Lead: Jorge Sanchez Fresno

The Rube Goldberg Machine was a tricky sequence to produce. On the one hand they are classically a joy to create and watch…but the design didn’t lead to a particually impressive visual on the wide shots. So it was decided to focus on the machanics of the individual parts as they functioned:) Shallow depth of field on close up shots are sophisticated and long renders/composits to produce.

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Penthouse Sequence

Compositing Supervisor: Frederikke Glick

Sequence Lead: Antoine Goethals

Originally Spike on the chezlong and Toots on the chair interactions were filmed as practical gags with tearing and blanket elements shots. In the end, the director needed to change the timings of the shots to work in the finalzing cut, and CG versions of those set pieces were created, simulated, rendered and composited replacing the originals filmed. I thought the CG assets were fantastic and they were perfect replacements.

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Tom Planning Sequence

Compositing Supervisor: Anthony Luigi Santoro

Sequence Lead: Jorge Sanchez Fresno

A small group of lovely full cg shots (meaning no plate elements were used for the interior room). One of the few sequences in the film where we had the oppertunity to sclupt the cartoon charectors with strong rim lights. It was a pleasure to see these shots come to life.

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Lockedup A Sequence

Compositing Supervisor: Anthony Luigi Santoro

Sequence Lead: Gabrial Naveau

The Locked Up sequence was one of the most interesting compositing challenges on the show from my perspective. Most of the work on a CG film happens in animation, lighting and rendering. Compositing makes up a marginal portion of the budget. In this case, we needed to provide a mechanism for CG to consistantly produce work in progress animation submissions for the director, while also being sensably composited. To achieve this, comp created deep mattes for every shot in the sequence with the cell bars in the correct 3D positions. CG (animation and lighting) could then deep compose their imagery into the ‘deep plates’ to have more or less correct composites of all preliminary work that could be used in any screening or wip requirement. This was a fun workflow that we don’t often have need to produce.

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Lockedup B Sequence

Compositing Supervisor: Anthony Luigi Santoro

Sequence Lead: Ruochen Wang

Locked up Interrogation sequence was the only group of shots we produced in Montreal that we used 3/4 lighting and really fleshed out the volume of the chars beyond rim lighting. In the end we settled on something more subtle to match the rest of the film. These shots were creatively a challenge and it was exciting to see them both turn out well, but also fit into the greater film seemlessly.

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Wedding Sequence

Compositing Supervisor: Anthony Luigi Santoro

Sequence Lead: Vitalii Musatov

The wedding sequence was one of the more complex produced in Montreal. There was a great deal of integration to consider for animals standing on ‘soft’ surfaces such as dry leaves and grass. A great deal of prop and set interaction from the nature of Tom and Jerry’s gags. Also it had a large varity of charactors. Because the charactor’s model sheets for the film where generally produced after the delivery of the first sequence they appear, this meant the Wedding Sequence which featured nearly every character in the film had to be completed near the end of production. That being said. No comprimises were made. The gags turned out great, the set interactions were completely beleivable, and the CG chars looked great.

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