Director Carlos Saldanha and VFX Producer Ken Wallace talk about coloring outside the lines to create Sony Pictures’ live-action/animated adaptation of Crockett Johnson’s famed kids’ book, now playing in theaters nationwide.
Based on the beloved 1955 children’s book by Crockett Johnson, Sony Pictures’ Harold and the Purple Crayon, which opened in theaters on August 2, follows adventurous Harold, played by Zachary Levi, who, now grown up, draws himself off the book’s pages and into the physical world. But when the power of unlimited imagination falls into the wrong hands, it will take all of Harold and his friends’ creativity to save both the real world and his own.
The film is directed by Carlos Saldanha, well-known to the animation community as the twice Oscar-nominated co-director on Ice Age and Robots and director of Ice Age: The Meltdown, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Rio, Rio 2 and Ferdinand. All produced at the now closed Blue Sky Studios. Pause… Sigh. Eyes get misty.
Harold stars Lil Rel Howery, Benjamin Bottani, Jemaine Clement, Tanya Reynolds, Alfred Molina, and Zooey Deschanel. The live-action/animated hybrid film features visual effects by Day For Nite, Clear Angle Studios, Folks VFX, Mammal Studios, OPSIS, Rising Sun Pictures, and Spin VFX, under the watchful eyes of VFX supervisor Matt Welford and VFX producer Ken Wallace. Bent Image Labs handled the 2D animation.
While it’s difficult enough to successfully adapt a kids’ book into an animated feature – especially one that has been a literary staple for almost 70 years – it’s even harder to transform it into a live-action film that incorporates animated characters and 2D/3D effects, while keeping the various levels of reality straight, and making sure your audience is with you through every narrative twist and turn.
Among those responsible for this amazing feat of transformation, Saldanha and Wallace were certainly two of the primary forces. We spoke with them about their journey.
Dan Sarto: This was really a complex project in many ways. You were starting with a kids’ book that's filled with simple 2D images, and you had to bring them into a live-action movie, where you also have 2D images and imagery that has to fit within a 3D world. How did you begin visualizing what the film could look like and what was your strategy in going forward?
Carlos Saldanha: When we started talking about this, of course we wanted the animation to pay homage to the simplicity and the style of the book. But then it evolved to having a slightly three-dimensional element to it, from simple lines to a little bit of shading…
Ken Wallace: Carlos was very insistent that the opening of the movie had to be faithful to the book. We didn't want to alienate fans of the book. We wanted to be respectful of that artwork. But we still had to figure out how do we then get to grown-up Harold, without it being a jarring transition. And, as Carlos was saying, the animation style evolved stylistically as Harold got older, which allowed us to make that bridge into the real world in a way that made sense for people.
DS: Did you do any testing or visualization before the film got the go-ahead? Or was there always the assumption that you’d be able to figure it out as you went along?
KW: By the time I came on, which was very early in the process, Carlos had already done some test animation and pitch animation for the studio that showed the 2D portion that the movie opens with. And then we went on from there, in conjunction with the creative team at Bent Image Lab, who did our animation. We did lots of rounds of character design, animation testing, and then, when we went onto the shaded look, we tested various versions of that. So it was a very extensive R&D process to make sure that we got the look that Carlos was after and that the studio was after.
CS: The tricky part for us was getting the right look for the crayon in three dimensions, like the line texture and the transitions. We had to develop that a little later, but we knew where we needed to go with that. Kudos to the effects team that was really able to push through that idea of the crayon in the real world.
DS: Tell me a little bit about how you worked with the actors in order to effectively integrate them with the animation.
KW: When I first read the script, I thought, "Oh, this is going to be a challenge. How are we going to get the actor to draw in the three-dimensional space in the right place, because that has to become a real line that then matches the real object?” The art department built these wire-frame versions of what the objects would ultimately be, and we put those on set so that Zach [Levi] would have a guide. We'd do some takes with the object and then we'd pull it out.
CS: As we shot more and more, Zach became more proficient at knowing how to draw the lines and move the crayon. And [production visual effects supervisor Matt Welford] would always make sure that he was drawing the right line in the right movement, in the right dimensional space, in order to create the depth that we wanted for focus, for overlapping, for camera, for everything.
DS: Carlos, in your career, you’ve directed a number of acclaimed and highly successful animated features. Did that experience help you in the live-action world?
CS: From working in animation, I got very skilled at planning and visualizing things – through storyboarding, animatics, previs – and also at storytelling. Just the exercise of visualizing what I wanted helped me to navigate the difficulties on the set. You always have little things here and there that divert you from creating the scene exactly as visualized. But having the guidelines, having that element of visual reference, always helped me. So, in a way, I treated this movie the way I treat an animated movie, and it worked great.
DS: Did your experience directing voice actors help you with directing actors onset?
CS: It helped, but it was a whole new ball game, because when we record just voices, the actors are much less self-conscious. There's no pressure of a camera, of makeup, of needing to look good onscreen. I think there’s a lot more freedom to explore different things, or to improvise. Also, in animation, I can look at things separately. I hear the voice, I see the storyboards, I see the animation, and then we kind of build things in stages. In live-action, I have to look at everything at the same time. That was overwhelming for me in the beginning. As we continued, I started to get the hang of it, but I have to say that was a transition that I had to learn the hard way.
DS: Ken, what in your experience as a visual effects producer do you think served you best in this film? And was anything on this film new for you?
KW: I think what served me best was knowing what was possible, and knowing what we could address in post if we couldn't achieve it on set. A good example is the big finale of the movie, where Gary (Jemaine Clement) is creating his fantasy world. Basically that set was a park in the middle of Atlanta, with a few foam rocks. It looked nothing like what it was going to ultimately look like in the final movie, but I knew that we had the talent and the ability to really bring that to life in post-production. And that's from having done 20-plus movies over the years and knowing what's possible with technology now.
The thing that I hadn't done before was any real 2D animation. So that was fascinating and a real learning process for me, to get a peek into Carlos's world and what it takes to make an animated feature. We did five or six minutes of animation that we opened the movie with, and to see how that process works, and imagine what that must be like on a feature film, was very enjoyable for me.
DS: Apart from the things you’ve already discussed, were there any other major challenges for you on this film?
CS: For me, it was navigating the daily schedule. Finding my rhythm in this new environment was the biggest challenge. I had an amazing crew. I trusted the team and knew they would make it happen. But finding my own rhythm within the complexity of it all was always the challenge for me. And making sure that, even with all the changes and the everyday battles we had to face, I kept the integrity of the story that I signed up to make.
That's something that we do a lot in animation. We always keep checking that we’re capturing the emotions and the feelings that we want to include. And that was something that I had to almost relearn, because everything was done so fast, and everything was completed every day. Once my day was over, I couldn’t go back. For every scene, I had to make sure that I had what I needed to tell the story and I had to make sure that I kept in my mind the essence of what I started with. So that kind of pressure of keeping everything in my brain was an exercise that I had to learn on the go.
DS: Ken, what about for you?
KW: There are often a lot of voices and a lot of opinions and politics in movies, and you've got the studio's vision of things and the director’s. I think the biggest challenge was navigating that and really delivering for Carlos what his vision for the movie was – the character design, the stylistic components, getting the scope that we wanted. It's always a challenge, with the schedule, with the budget, with all of these things. So navigating all of those factors and coming up with a final movie that felt unified and delivered on Carlos's vision was the biggest challenge and the greatest accomplishment for me.
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
