Donkay!!!

Very few people can get away with making an ass out of Eddie Murphy, but when Jeff Wike says he’s done it, you had better believe him. And Wike’s is not an idle boast. He is the director of R&D at DreamWorks Animation’s California studios, and one of the driving forces behind the movie Shrek Forever After.

Currently in the city, Wike was more than happy to share trivia about the new animation feature, which will be releasing here on Friday. Like all techno geeks, he seemed most excited about the new lighting technique, motion capture, and character development tools that his team at DreamWorks was able to utilise for this movie.

“Our digital artists had the complete technological freedom to animate hair that helps define and enrich the various characters. In Shrek, hair was kept short, modelled as a solid mass and rendered with multiple strands to create the best look possible,” he explained.

“Fiona’s hair at that time was designed in one long braid with no significant movement. This time around, she has fiery locks that flow in the wind to accentuate her new role as a glorious warrior ogress,” he adds, his eyes twinkling.

In fact, Fiona’s new haircut took digital artists about nine months to develop!

When it came to motion capture, programmers at DreamWorks used the technology to animate a battle that takes place between ogres and witches in the movie.

“Three actors with more than 22 years of combined martial arts experience, including one Aikido instructor and one US collegiate Wushu champion marked the motion capture sequence for the actors,” Wike disclosed.

And then, there was light! One of the most challenging sequences, he says, was of the ogres’ camp.

“With our new lighting technique, light bounces off objects and is reflected just like in the real world. And in the camp, there are 35 torches in 59 shots,” he says. “That’s 2,065 layers of torches, and 4,130 layers when you bring stereo (3D) into the equation.”

No wonder then that Shrek Forever After took almost 9x more time to render than Shrek.

“In 2001, production utilised around 6 terabytes (1 terabyte = 1024 gigabytes) of data and 5 million render hours,” Wike said. “Compare that with whopping 76 terabytes of data, and more than 46 million render hours for this 2010 movie!”

Other Trivia…

• According to proportions used by the movie’s animators, Shrek is seven feet tall, has 22 teeth, and his hand is about 13.5 inches from the base of his palm to the tip of his middle finger. His shoe size would be a size 22 (15.5 inches), similar to Shaquille O’Neal.
• New character Rumplestiltskin wears four different wigs in the movie: business wig, speech wig, angry wig and victory wig. His feet are 6.25 inches long, about the size of an average two- or three-year-old child.
• There were 65 sequences written, recorded and storyboarded over the course of filmmaking. The final product has just 32 sequences.
• The crew generated 74,016 different ogre variations, of which the same 51 were used throughout all the ogre shots.
• There are 430 witches on the dance floor in one scene when Shrek is brought to meet Rumpel.
• Animators had to fashion underwear for the ogres whose kilts were a little too revealing as they danced to the Piper’s song in the movie. Witches with similar problems simply had their cloth simulation revised.
• Reference for the dancing ogres was a video of a professional dance troupe with about a dozen members. The choreographer was Michael Rooney, Mickey Rooney’s son.
• Fiona’s old castle room has 4,49,166 pieces of particles floating in the air.