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| shrek 2
How long have you been working on Shrek 2?
Almost three years.
Could you briefly describe what the role of a supervising animator is?
The role of a supervising animator is helping all the animators get the performance the directors want. Because I worked on the first one as supervising animator, it’s easier for me to carry that on into the next one: to make sure that Shrek is Shrek, and Donkey is Donkey; that they move in certain ways; and that their characters and personalities are consistent. I also help the animators. If they have some kind of problem or difficulty achieving certain expressions or certain kinds of movement, then I’ll work with them to see if we can achieve it and help them to get there.
Do you have a responsibility for any particular characters, or do you range across the whole cast?
We don’t split the work into characters like traditional animation does. We kind of oversee the whole show.
And how much of the direction is determined by the voice actors?
Well, we record the voices first until we have all the dialogue. We have the tape of the recording and they’ll cut all the tapes that they use. For example, when Jennifer Saunders says something like ‘Oh, I’m your Fairy Godmother’, she might do 10 different versions and they’ll show us the version that they picked and we’ll use that as an inspiration reference: to look at how she does it. Sometimes, when they’re doing the recording, you hear a little pause and, even though you don’t see anything, there may be a little bit of special movement on the face. For Jennifer, we also looked at what she did in AbFab to get the body language.
Is the Fairy Godmother as manic a character in Shrek 2 as Jennifer Saunders was in AbFab?
To some degree. I mean, the design of the character doesn’t look anything like her but, in terms of how to get the voice to come out of that character, we do steal a little bit of her from that show.
I notice that you have four new main characters in this movie and three of them are English.
Yes, three out of four.
Why do you think that is? Is the accent more suited to fairy tales?
I guess, in a way. Also because, for a King and a Queen, they sound right for the part. You know, they listened to a lot of voices… Like, when we were animating the Queen - Julie Andrews - when we heard her voice, we’re like ‘Oh my god, this is the Queen!’ It’s just right there. And then John Cleese is perfect for the role [of the King].
Is there a different feel to Shrek 2 than there was to Shrek? Although it’s a whole new story, did you approach it as an extension of the same kind of animation experience?
We started with that approach - the extension of the first movie - because when we first started on production, most of the characters that we were working on were Shrek, Princess Fiona and Donkey, and also the fairy tale creatures like The Gingerbread Man and Pinocchio. All those are like an extension of the first movie. But very soon into the production, we realised it wasn’t just an extension because we started working on Puss in Boots and Prince Charming, the King, the Queen - they’re all new characters. In a way, it’s like starting all over again. With the old characters, we know how they should move. And like I said earlier, when we first started animating The Fairy Godmother, it took us a while to get used to her, to ‘find’ her…
Could you expand on that a bit? How do you ‘find’ a character from an animation point of view?
We pick major shots of the characters and start the animation on those shots. And when we see something that really works, that clicks on the character, we try to capture that.
Is it a movement that you find?
A movement or some kind of facial expression. It’s very obvious when you play it with Donkey and Shrek: they are so alive. Then you want to bring the new characters to that level, to make sure they are not either underplayed or overdoing it. It just feels right for the movie. In a way, it was easier for us to find Puss in Boots. First of all, he’s a cat and, in a way, he can be a little bit more cartoony. Also, because the first sequence we worked on was him attacking Shrek, we had to find a nice balance between not overdoing it and… Like, when he does the moves, he kind of has to be graceful but also move like a cat.
Did you watch Antonio Banderas in Zorro?
Oh yeah - lots! [laughs]. And we studied some of his expressions before we did the cat, so we tried to capture a little bit of his look, especially his eyes… Because even in this movie, he thinks he is very handsome and we have to play a little bit off that in the character, too. For Prince Charming and the Queen and the King, it was a matter of finding the right balance so that they move in a certain way. The Queen, we have to make her move so that she looks royal and very elegant but, at the same time, we don’t want to make her look stiff. So it’s finding that nice balance to make them more… not so much real, but more organic.
Did you study footage of any actual royalty to see how they moved?
It’s mostly from movies. But sometimes [the Queen of England] does certain kinds of waves that we wanted to capture…
In the first movie, the Princess starts as a Princess and ends as an Ogre. In the second movie, she starts as an Ogre. Does this alter the way in which she stands and moves?
In the first movie, her being an Ogre was only in one or two sequences. So because of that, we ended up redoing her set-up. In the first movie, when we built her, it was only for two sequences so we just made sure that it worked for the first movie and that was it. In the second movie, when we realised that she was going to do a lot more, we started from scratch. We did some kind of surgery on her to make her neck a little better, so she could turn her head more than she could in the first movie. We also trimmed some of the fat from just below her jaw, so when she talked it doesn’t crash into her neck so easily. Also, we refined her chestbone a little bit so that when she moves, she looks a little more organic… it looks like the muscle is just right there…
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