Back to Gaya: Digitally creating German film history Brian Coleman
Germany has raised the curtain on its first digital feature film, Back to Gaya; a film which typifies the convergence of digital tools, which are now being used in both film and broadcast productions. Technical Director, Thorsten Kuttig talks to BEN about the complexities of the production—by Brian Coleman.
German character animator and digital artist, Thorsten Kuttig was initially hired as a professional artist to give Germany’s first digital feature film, Back to Gaya, a “lift”. Kuttig only became involved in the production through a chance phone call to Head of Production, Haggi Flöser-Krey—that call resulted in Kuttig devoting three years to the production, which saw its first screening at the State Opera House of Hanover, Germany last month. Kuttig went on to become Technical Director for Motion Capture, Additional Financial Co-producer, Animation Supervisor (for the ‘Snurks’—the villainous characters), Skinning Supervisor (for all characters), Character Modeller (for the primary characters), and Filmbox Artist.
After a brief chat with Back to Gaya’s producer, Holger Tappe, Kuttig was convinced that the project was destined to add a new page to German film history—a digital page. There were also doubts: could they deliver the production on budget and on time, given an economy of talented artists?
Tappe originally offered Kuttig complete supervision of all the digital characters and character animation, aiming to draw on his vast experiences, which included, Head of Animation at Puppeteers, and Founder and Manager of Esence, Kuttig’s own digital production company. Kuttig pointed out the enormity of that task, deciding instead to concentrate only on the ‘Snurks’ (the bad guys), adding that the ‘Snurks’ had similar behavioural characteristics to his own.
Kuttig then moved his entire operations from Stuttgart to Ambient Entertainment’s premises in Hannover. First there was the set-up and rigging—a complex task involving 20 highly detailed characters. This was split into two projects: “Haggi developed the skeleton set-ups for Inverse Kinematics (IK), and I handled the skinning,” says Kuttig. The IK was also dissected into Forward Kinematics (FK) and Motion Capture (Mocap)—“and there was the potential to blend all the animation methodology together,” adds Kuttig.
“The main goal of the production was to work on the Mocap because, given time constraints, it appeared nearly impossible to be able to have all the character and prop animation completed by hand with a floating staff of only 15 to 20 artists; a team of 30 artists was proposed in the original production plan,” says Kuttig.
It took some months to develop a working ‘pipeline’ and to design all the characters. “Haggi wrote the GUM (Gaya User Manual)—a manual where all knowledge, problems and solutions was listed. Included was a massed collection of rules of conduct, tips and tricks, and workflow optimising measures. Numerous meetings were held to try to find a professional way to reconcile all the different kinds of production elements—also we had to decide on the techniques we would work with: muscle systems; dynamics; clothes; fur/hair; facial animation, and so on,” says Kuttig.
Motion Capture
A gymnasium was rented in Hannover where Ambient’s 16 camera Vicon 8 motion capture system was set up. The Mocap production had a 14 day shooting schedule with only a few days to install and calibrate the entire system.
Director, Lenard Fritz Krawinkel became nervous after problems developed, including thousands of ‘ghost markers’, mostly the results of unintended reflections; jittered movement added to the frustrations. As a result Kuttig asked Krawinkel for a technical director: someone who could head up the project, ensure the correct calibration of the system, and deliver the Mocap on time—a much surprised Kuttig saw Krawinkel and Flöser-Krey ask him to take on the Technical Director’s job. Kuttig, with the help of administrator, Ricardo Marcellino, was then given one week to “pull the system apart” and to fix all the problems.
In the ensuing weeks several gigabytes of data would be collected every day by Marcellino for backup and animation. Fifteen artists worked on the Vicon and Filmbox Workstations to finish and clean the data, and give animation feedback.
Skinning
Skinning is the technique of attaching the geometry with the skeleton set-up of a character. “When the first characters were finished by the Supervising Character Modeller, Sven Kroog, I started skinning the premier antagonist—the bad guy, Brampf,” says Kuttig. Brampf was Kuttig’s biggest challenge; he laboured to avoid geometrical intersections and interpenetration.
“The fact that we decided to work with simulated clothes (physically calculated) forced me to think about a muscle-system,” says Kuttig. Confronted with severe time constraints, Kuttig tried to fake the muscle behaviour using Alias Maya 3D graphics technology. He worked with various ‘influence objects’ trying to develop realistic muscle movement under the skin—a difficult and complex task because skin normally moves and deforms around moving muscles.
“The visual results were great, but I couldn’t completely avoid penetrations between the geometries,” says Kuttig, who then worked with computer programmer Dirk Bialluch to develop a plug-in called Collision Deformer that squashes a geometry if a fixed distance between two geometries is reached. “So we had a fixed distance, which is needed for a cloth simulation system, providing muscle realism when an arm or a leg is bent,” says Kuttig.
A secondary version of cloth simulation was also built and used in the distance shots. These skinned clothes, which were not calculated like the close-ups, looked exactly like the real ones; the only difference being that these clothes didn’t have any gravity: they moved almost 1:1 with the extremities. Because Brampf was the first character that Kuttig bound to a skeleton and provided a muscle system for, it took an agonising 6 weeks to complete.
Zino, the main character, was next to step up for skinning. Zino, who is the main protagonist, had to be much more detailed than Brampf. Here Kuttig’s skinning was closely observed by Zino’s animator, Mascha Jürgens and her Supervisor, Benedikt Niemann. Kuttig developed more than 290 skinning files for Zino—a task which he says almost brought him to despair. Zino had more detailed muscles, more detailed clothes, and is embodied with the most animated controls of all the characters. “The more animated controls a character has, the more movement it can do, and it’s hard to tell the muscles what they have to do in extreme positions—and keep it looking realistic,” says Kuttig.
The disciplines Kuttig learned with these characters saw a more expeditious skinning of all the remaining characters—about one or two weeks for each.
Character Modeling
Kuttig was also asked by producer, Tappe to model the ‘animatable geometries’—a modifiers effect on an object in a scene changing over time—a technique Kuttig admits to being his favourite. He began with a character called Zeck, and, in collaboration with Oliver Kurth, Zeck’s designer, Kuttig began modelling the head, as with clay, but in a digital world, plucking virtual points in desired directions in a 3D room until Zeck, “the Brad Pitt of the bad guys” became recognizable.
The script called for a love-story between Zeck and Alanta. Alanta was modelled in the same way as Zeck, but with the added difficulty that she was afforded multiple costume changes. “Alanta had 3 different body geometries and 4 different dresses, changeable on demand. It was very difficult to adjust all the dresses and the bodies so that they all behaved the same. Here I had to work with innumerable ‘influence objects’ to force the geometries to do what I, and Alanta, wanted to do. The entire character modelling process would see various characters get modelled, textured, skinned, placed in their sets, and then sent on their way down the animation pipeline,” says Kuttig.
Character Animation:
Kuttig had to stay in close contact with all facets of the production: Character Design (look and behaviour of the characters); Set Design (size, expansion of the sets); Filmbox Division (where he worked to clean the Mocap data); Animatic Suite (camera positions, angles, animation length); Modelling Department (when props for interaction were needed or had to be changed for handling); Special FX Crew (when a character featured in or with SFX)—as well as attending to the film’s Technical Direction. There were daily meetings and screenings to discuss what to do scene by scene, shot by shot, character animation and narration, and where the crew could work in parallel production.
Kuttig worked closely throughout Back to Gaya with Puppeteers and Esence designer, Sonja Schlichter. “Sonja was our production manager and 3D producer over the whole production, and she was central to our production pipeline,” says Kuttig.
Kuttig’s team consisted of 3 Leading Animators, Henning Baumeister (Galger), Ivo Grigull (Zeck), and Matthias Reimschüssel (Brampf), and several temporary assistants for secondary animation. “We had 60 seconds per week, per character to animate; a very high demand,” says Kuttig.
“It’s not as easy to work with Mocap and traditional key-frame animation as one would think. Our set-up allowed us to blend seamlessly between three kinds of animation, but the difficulty lay in the synchronization of all three kinds,” says Kuttig.
“Mocap gave us a very good basis and precise timing, but that wasn’t always the case for character animation. We couldn’t always be as creative as to give each character an individual style. So the percentage of traditional key-framing was relatively high, and when the given Mocap data wasn’t good enough we used traditional animation—sometimes an animator would slip into the Mocap suite and act out the animation themselves,” says Kuttig, who adheres to Acting Instructor, Ed Hooks’ doctrine that “an animator has to be an actor.”
Facial animation, and hands with moving fingers were exclusively animated by FK/IK, as set up by Nicolai Tuma, Supervisor for Human Characters, in conjunction with Niemann and Flöser Krey; shapes were animated by Modelling Supervisor, Sven Kroog.
Overall animation was finished in September 2003, and although time was tight, most deadlines were met. Kuttig says that animators are never really satisfied, given the time restraints. He says he once heard an animator on Back to Gaya remark: “Our animations are never really finished, they just escape.”
In summary
“Back to Gaya is a very professional production, made by highly talented and motivated people—mostly from Germany,” says Kuttig. “A crew of some 75 dedicated professionals laboured over 3 years, working together like a family to produce a fantastic feature for children; a nice story with excellent characters, fantastic sets, and great animation. Watching the production I sometimes feel just like a member of the audience must feel: not contemplating the technicalities, just wanting to sit back, eat popcorn and be entertained.
“We have achieved our goal in delivering this great production—Germany’s first digital feature film—which will be distributed in 22 countries worldwide. We have added a new page to the history of German feature films. There’s a quote in the film where Galger says: ‘When we get back to Gaya, we will rewrite history,’” says Kuttig.
Footnote
In a strange technical, time-warped twist, Back to Gaya’s first screening at the State Opera House of Hanover, Germany was projected on a film projector—not digitally. A Kinoton FP 25 D projector showed the 90-minute movie in Cinemascope with an image size of 13 x 5.5 meters—and the film’s soundtrack was played live by the North Saxon State Orchestra.
