Two of the effects guys behind Speed Racer discuss the approach taken to bring Tatsunoko’s anime to life, a process they call ‘Photo Anime‘. It’s pretty technical (and therefore boring if you’re not jazzed by that sort of thing), but I found it fairly interesting. I’m always astounded by just how much thought goes into a film, particularly an effects-heavy production like Speed Racer. (And before you ask, no - I haven’t seen it yet. My son wanted to go to the zoo instead…)
The goal of Speed Racer was to re-imagine the stylistic language of anime in HD with spherical 2.5D photo elements known as “bubbles” and super saturated colors to achieve a new kind of digital cinema experience called “Photo Anime.” This obviously required a lot of artistic decision making and technical ingenuity.
Two key members that were instrumental in helping to create the Photo Anime look were Darren Poe and Jake Morrison. Poe, the head of Digital Domain’s compositing team (We Own the Night, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), assisted John Gaeta, one of the lead visual effects supervisors, during early HD proof of concept testing, “which pushed ideas of mashing HD performance and 360° spherical background layers into techno pop, multi planar scenes and then later on in post he helped us craft a color and light strategy for CG cars, which was really brought to fruition by his 3D composite finesse techniques. He is perhaps the best applier of 3D composite technologies found in Nuke,” Gaeta commends. “He was masterful at experimental and designer focus, motion blur, textural ‘look’ (grain free, noise free, beautiful and scrubbed, super clean) and ‘Techno Color’ enhancements, allowing us to get close to the idea of a Photo Anime feel.”
