In 2018 I was approached by Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart to supervise the Wolfvision sequences on Wolfwalkers. My role involved concepting and developing the pipeline as well as supervising a team of 3D and 2D artists to produce the end result we see in the film.
It was important to Ross & Tomm that the final work was produced using traditional materials, but it was my job to try and make the process practical for production, allowing quick turnaround of feedback and notes, along with enough fine control to hit the dramatic targets we had set up.
The Forest
For the forest we needed very deep scenes with a lot of travel in the camera, following the point of view of the Wolfwalkers as they weave between trees following scents and chasing off soldiers. For this reason we created the previs in Blender. I piloted the process with the dream scenes and then we were joined by David McDermott & Daniel Pinheira Lima who put their expertise to use in building the forest assets.
Above you can see one scene’s progression from loose storyboards to final shot.
An important aspect of these scenes was guiding our 3D artists’ work to follow the style of the 2D artwork as close as possible. Below you can see the style drawovers I provided to the team.
The Town
In order to further reinforce stylistic distinctions present in the 2D artwork I developed a different process for the Town, using a diorama type approach for the 3D assembly in After Effects. The final drawn artwork was similarly split up into multiple layers to further mimic the 2D artwork’s woodblock approach.
The final scenes passed through many hands, with Svend Rothman’s animation team creating the character work, Andreu de Campos’ FX team creating the smells and sounds the Wolfwalkers experience and Tatiana Mazzei’s work in adapting their cleanup to match the graphite environments.
Interviews: