Bring on the Dancing Penguins
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| UNSW alumni played many roles in the creation of Australia's first digitally animated feature film, the Academy Award-winning Happy Feet. In no small part, of course, was the film's director, Dr George Miller, a graduate from the Faculty of Medicine in 1971. His "second" career has spanned many box office successes but he took out the global film community's highest accolade for an animated feature with an environmentally-conscious, technologically-pioneering film about a tap-dancing penguin who can't sing. Computer science graduates from UNSW were also in high demand in the 300-strong production team that worked at Animal Logic, the visual effects, animation and design company based at Sydney's Fox Studios. They joined Miller as he learned a new medium and pushed the boundaries of computer- generated imagery for Happy Feet, which has been roundly lauded as visually ground breaking. The $110 million Warner Bros/ Village Roadshow film, produced by Kennedy Miller in association with Animal Logic, was four years in the making and presented many artistic and technological challenges: from capturing the spectacular scenery of the Antarctic to achieving the "art-directed reality" where a whole cast of penguins, headed by the tap-dancing Mumble, were given individual personalities and looks, right down to the fine detail of the colour and texture of their feathers. Mumble alone, had six million features. Every key character and scene was brought to life through a production pipeline that began with a script, concept art and design and ran through a series of processes: modeling, rigging, motion-capturing, 2-D and 3-D animation, surfacing, lensing, crowds, visual effects and lighting. As Lighting Supervisor, Ben Gunsberger, 30, who graduated with a Bachelor of Computer Science in 1998, was responsible for capturing "the mood" of the scenes in Happy Feet. "Lighting brings out the final look. Everything is lit and rendered by us, all the shading and illumination," he says. Before being lit by Gunsberger and the lighting team that grew to 70, the film segments were generally grey objects over a grey environment. At the outset of production, Gunsberger admits he had no idea the film would achieve such acclaim, but he's learned after 10 years working on the cutting edge of a rapidly developing industry, that's the nature of the business. Before Happy Feet came along in 2003, his CV already featured a number of cinematic triumphs, including the first Matrix film in 1999 and the animated feature Shrek in 2001. "At the time, we thought [The Matrix] was just this small sci-fi film that would come and go. Who knew that it would be such a phenomenon?" Gunsberger says. Shrek presented a similar scenario, as an animated feature about a monster coming out of a comparatively small Californian production house. "Happy Feet was a new style of film-making, a new genre. Part of the reason the production took so long was the need to build new infrastructure and tools", he says. "The nature of the way we work means that we see the film in bits and pieces. It's a pipeline of lots of different segments from the design of the character to the computer images, seeing how it reacts to light, looks, acts, where the shadows are…Then there's the importance of maintaining consistency throughout." Gunsberger also took on the role of VFX Department Supervisor working closely with Digital Supervisor Brett Feeney to oversee shot production for the entire film. He admits he found it difficult to watch as a finished film "after having seen every scene shot so many times with freeze frames and then back again. I know every pixel in so much detail," he says. His career is a classic instance of being in the right industry at the right time. Rather than a predetermined career direction, he's seized opportunities as they have arisen. As a school leaver, he had more of a general interest in computers, he says, but he pared back the full-time computer science degree he started in 1994 to part-time in his second year when an opportunity to work for a small computer graphics company presented itself. The following year, he took a systems administrator's role at Animal Logic, the most prestigious visual effects company in Australia, which had just 30 employees at the time. Then, he moved into the production of television commercials. His career has grown and developed with the industry, and along the way, he finished his degree. Christian So, 25, who is expecting to graduate in mid-2007, is another from UNSW who opted to take his computer science degree part-time when a NSW Film and Television Office traineeship landed him a job at Animal Logic. Fortuitously, So's arrival coincided with Happy Feet going into production.  Christian So and Ben Gunsberger Reprinted with permission from UNSWorld |
 Happy Feet, copyright Warner Bros |
© 2009 The School of Computer Science & Engineering at UNSW
