The Fabulous Disney Babe
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As I mentioned earlier, Beauty and the Beast started out as quite a different film. Thus far, it had been transformed from a pseudo-artsy nonmusical film to a Broadway-style Howard Ashman showcase...but the creators of the film still had quite a way to go.
The song "Be My Guest" was sung to Maurice when he first entered the Beast's castle. Looking to bring Belle more into the center of the film, they decided to change the song from Maurice to Belle. The song was all ready up on the reels - it had been recorded and paired to animation - so only a few parts of the song were redubbed. The orchestra and chorus were brought back in, Jerry Orbach returned to sing Lumiere's part - which at one point was to have been cut down to exclude the point from "Life is so unnerving.." til the reprise.
They dubbed "Sh" in front of the lines "He's our guest! He's our guest!" and changed "...and you're cold and you're wet," and, I suppose, the table's been set, to "you're alone and you're scared, but the banquet's all prepared".
That hurdle passed, the next task before them was to figure out how to turn a ballroom around. Jim Hillin had just finished the digital FX on a little art-house film called Robocop 2. He'd been doing visual fx for theme parks, films, and expos when he got a call from Disney, asking him to work on the digital animation for their big CGI scene: the rooftop fight between Gaston and the Beast. What? Yeah, the ballroom was actually not first choice. It wasn't second choice, either - that honor was reserved for the forest scenes. The ballroom was the third choice, because at that time the technology had not caught up to the art. It did, however, in a film that followed: Tarzan. When the "camera" follows Tarzan as he "surfs" through the trees, it's the near-perfection of what was envisioned for Beauty and the Beast.
Do you want the gig? They asked. He didn't know what the machines were, but said yes. Much to his dismay, the machines were 3 to 4-year old dinosaurs that took hours to render a single shot. He had to go in and do a test of the rooftop fight in the rain. He was using, at the time, Wavefront, which no longer exists. It became Alias Wavefront when Alias took it over. Jim "built" the ballroom in Alias, then rendered it in Renderman, a version of which is still being used today.
He'd gotten tastes of songs to listen to, to give him a feel for the film - "Be Our Guest", and the film's major plot-pushing number, "Human Again". What's this? He wondered as he listened - he'd never worked on a musical before. He realized he was working on something special when the voice major he was dating flipped out over the songs: "WOW! What is this?" Her reaction convinced him that it was good.
After problems with the organic components of the rooftop rain and forest scenes, he said "Let's just try the ballroom and see how it goes."
The team, Thomas Cardone, who did the digital painting and textures, Greg Griffith, the animator for the CGI team, who did the modeling and the "crane shot", the most famous shot in the film. Linda Bell, who is now with George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic, who did the effects for the Star Wars films among many others, did the lighting and modeling. The Shaderwork was done on Renderman. M.J. Turner shared engineering duties with Scott Johnson, who also did software programming.
Together, they created a new computer language specifically for the creation of the film. This is especially amazing considering that the film is not considered to be technically great - it is, however, masterful storytelling of the first degree. Model translators translated Alias, the "build" language, into "Common", the motion was put in frame by frame, and they back-end rendered everything in RIB (Renderman Interface Bytestream), which they then converted to a language Jim dubbed EEK. Why EEK? "It's the language mice speak in," he explains.
They had to build, render and translate quickly, so the finished scene was not perfect. "It's good enough, but just don't go leaning against anything." Fortunately, they didn't sit down to the piano. All this time, Gary and his team were saying "Yes, we can do this, yes, we can do this..." and they were bluffing.
Just in case this new technology fell apart, they had a backup plan: the Ice Capades shot. You know how in the Ice Capades they do that couples skating thing where the lights dim and only a spotlight is on the skaters? Bingo. Their computer versions, which were covered by traditional animation, were wire frames (see photo - sorry if it's blurry) Jeffrey loved the ballroom, but complained about the cone-and-cube shaped characters: "They look like avocados".
Next: Animation and "Acting!"
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-- Michelle Smith
Michelle Smith can be reached using the Talkback form below or by emailing her at [email protected].
The Fabulous Disney Babe's column is posted every Friday and whenever else she has something to say. For more on Michelle's background, see her first column. She also offers The Fabulous Tour: Disneyland Secrets and Stories. Click here for more information.
The opinions expressed by our Michelle Smith, and all of our columnists, do not necessarily represent the feelings of LaughingPlace.com or any of its employees or advertisers. All speculation and rumors about the future plans of the Walt Disney Company are just that - speculation and rumors - and should be treated as such.
-- Posted September 13, 2002