CFE CREATES 200 FX FOR 'DIARY OF A WIMPY KID'
CFE founder and visual effects supervisor Mark Dornfeld went on set to Vancouver during production, and later brought the film's animation supervisor, Mike Murphy, in-house for the six-month shot production period. There, Murphy and the CFE team worked with director Thor Freudenthal to develop and execute the technique for animating Kinney's illustrations.
The characters in the film appear as live action, but there are also animated versions, lifted from Kinney's original drawings, that appear against live-action sets as well as against animated pages in the opening title and end-credit sequences.
"Jeff's characters are drawn so particularly, with very clean vector art lines,” notes Murphy. “If anything was off it looked completely wrong. We found that if we just brought those lines to life, as soon as a character paused, it would die."
To prevent that from happening, Murphy and Dornfeld came up with a technique where they would draw lines on paper and capture them with a still camera, then take the shots through a proprietary software renderer developed at CFE. There, the computer-based lines were given a pencil-drawn look. Characters were then animated and composited using Autodesk Maya, Eyeon Fusion, Adobe After Effects and Illustrator.
In addition to the film’s 17 animated sequences, Custom Film Effects provided digital set extension and background replacement services. They also gave sequences shot during the summer a winter look, and helped create a moldy piece of cheese that serves as a key storytelling element. In total, 18 animators and artists worked on Diary of a
Wimpy Kid over a six-month period.