VOD Spotlight: On animating the “Owls of Ga’Hoole”

Acclaimed filmmaker Zack Snyder (Watchmen) makes his animation debut with the fantasy family adventure Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, based on the beloved Guardians of Ga’Hoole books by Kathryn Lasky. It’s a visually stunning story about young barn owls that are captured by a cult of owls that want to train them to become soldiers.

The crew worked hard to capture the real look of owls in the animation. Production designer Simon Whiteley, who spent time at an owl sanctuary in England and became something of an owl expert during production, states, “When working with owls in the sanctuaries, you immediately see that they’ve got personalities just like humans. There are happy owls, grumpy owls, angry owls, friendly owls. One particular British barn owl named Fluffy, at the Screech Owl Sanctuary in the UK, was really like a pet; you could scratch him and stroke him, and he really liked being around people. We filmed all the different species flying, running, eating, bathing and even casting — regurgitating the bits of rodent bone and hair they can’t digest — so we could replicate those behaviors in the film.”

The production designers set up an “owl school” for their animation team, immersing them in everything owl, including field trips to Sydney’s natural history museum and the local Sydney zoos. Even the rig designed to build the owls’ bodies was based on an actual owl skeleton that they were able to closely observe. The animators and technicians were taught to think and act and move like an owl.

“You have to really study them to understand the nuances of what makes up your characters,” the film’s co-producer, Zareh Nalbandian says. “As part of the crew, you’ve got to become the characters to be able to make them truly come alive on screen. The team became engrossed in the owl world, and I think the richness of that experience comes across in the movie.”

According to animation supervisor Alex Weight, the in-depth study enabled the animators to “respect the owl’s anatomy and only let the owls do as characters what they could do if they could really walk and talk. It made the performances a lot more genuine, because you could suspend your disbelief and accept the experiences they were going through and from that, the emotions they were feeling.”

In order to help convey those emotions, the animators would have to deviate from true owl anatomy in one critical area: the eyes. “Owls have these incredibly big eyes,” Weight reports, “but they can’t move them. In order to compensate, they rotate and move their heads around a lot.”

“We wanted to show so much emotion with our characters, but if they were constantly moving their heads it would become very distracting very fast,” art director Grant Freckelton points out. “So we had to find a happy medium.”

The animators integrated some of that familiar head movement, along with the owl’s nictitating membrane — their inner eyelid that causes them to “double blink” — into their animation, as almost imperceptible anatomical details that would add to the realism. However, says Weight, “We had to take a little artistic license by adding color and movement to the eyes, because we needed the ability to have the characters express what they’re feeling through them.”

In order to achieve the level of expressiveness they needed, digital supervisor Ben Gunsberger explains, “We put a lot of work into making the eyes interesting and detailed, adding imperfections and studying how the light bounces around inside the eyes to give them a kind of glow, making them more engaging for the audience.”

Freckelton adds, “We also made the eye motion of the bad guys a lot more animal-like and a little scarier, while the good guys’ eyes are a little more human so they moved around and emoted, making them the more relatable of the two.”

“Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole” is now showing on Video On Demand. Check your cable system for availability.

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© 2010 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.