MPC’s Jason Wen wins Annie Award for Animated Effects.

The 33rd Annual Annie Awards saw MPC character animator Jason Wen pick up the award for Outstanding Animated Effects.
The winning sequence included 3D animated bunnies and came from Aardman Animations/DreamWorks pictures’ animated romp ‘Wallace and Gromit, Curse of the Were-rabbit.’
MPC’s animation was focused on computer generated bunnies within the Heath Robinson style ‘Bun-Vac.’ With the recognisable look of the movie, motion and texture was an obvious challenge and Jason Wen spent three months at Aardman’s Bristol studio researching how to emulate the properties of stop frame animated clay in computer.
From his research, bespoke software was written in-house to achieve the required look which allowed the final CG bunnies to show minor imperfections such as finger prints, thus matching their stop frame counterparts.
From drawings supplied by production, MPC also built the Bun-Vac in 3D tool Maya, which was then composited into shots as a separate element. To manufacture the Were-rabbit’s hair MPC’s R and D team wrote a proprietary fur shader. 2D work involved compositing in a mystical CG fog and also exploding fireworks in the climatic shots. In total, MPC completed 750 shots as well as digitally grading the entire movie.
(GB)