WISHING UPON A STAR FOR PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH

By TREVOR HOGG

Images courtesy of Universal Pictures and DreamWorks Animation.

After making his debut in Shrek 2, Puss in Boots proved to be so popular that he went from being a supporting character to the lead in the self-titled solo outing released in 2011. Eleven years later, DreamWorks Animation and actor Antonio Banderas revisit the sword-wielding feline outlaw who has used up eight of his nine lives and seeks out the Wishing Star to rectify the situation while pursued by Goldilocks and the Three Bears Crime Family and the Wolf. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish was directed by Joel Crawford, co-directed by Januel Mercado, and features a voice cast of Banderas, Salma Hayek, Florence Pugh, Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone and John Mulaney. The adventure-comedy sequel won Outstanding Effects Simulations in an Animated Feature at the 2023 Visual Effects Society Awards and was nominated for Best Animated Feature Film at the 95th Academy Awards and 2023 BAFTA Awards.

“Effects were a mix of the simulation and particular volumetric passes that are turned into meshes that can then be effectively sculpted out so we can get negative spaces. We always called it the scalping effect, which is that 2D hand-drawn scalping look, so we could get a hard edge along with the softness of the volumetric.”

—Mark Edwards, Visual Effects Supervisor

Top priority was figuring out the look of Puss in Boots. “He is an established iconic character, so we wanted to maintain a lot of that, but there were some elements we wanted to push and update like his costume,” states Visual Effects Supervisor Mark Edwards. “In the first scene of Shrek 2, Puss in Boots had a cape for minute and then threw it away because capes are hard! We wanted to have a lot of fun with the cape and a bigger feather. Then it was trying to figure out the stylization in the fur. For story points, we needed detailed fur-like hair standing on ends, but then we also wanted to simplify it in a lot of ways. A secondary challenge with that was bringing the environment to them, because it’s easy to do one treatment on the characters and another on the environment and they don’t relate, and all of a sudden you have this character that doesn’t fit in the world. The biggest balancing act was trying to make sure we could push far and go abstract, but it needed to have the right detail level to match the characters.”

“One of the technologies that we built was a tool called the Stamp Map. It effectively let us take any sort of image maps, like a brushstroke or texture, and with a point cloud project it and stick it to surfaces or in-effects case volumes. Instead of getting that soft volumetric cloud feel, we could get some texture in there, which was important. The magic secret sauce on top were hand-drawn elements. We were fortunate to lean into some of the tools that The Bad Guys had been writing and using. Our effects team could add extra lines or anything we wanted to get that 2D effect.”

—Mark Edwards, Visual Effects Supervisor

For the grooms of characters, DreamWorks Animation utilized a proprietary tool called Willow. “For the newer characters like Perrito and the Bears we wanted to push those clumps, and how the hair looked in the silhouette edges made it feel more stylized,” Edwards remarks. “A lot of controls were added to be able to add color hues not just to our normal color maps for hair, but also for clumps or sub-clumps. We could get these bigger, broader color blotches that look like paint strokes. We also mapped transparency to our thicker guide curves, and that meant we could get little breakups between a single fifth hair. It felt a lot more like what an illustrator might draw with a couple of gaps. We ended up using that a lot to get broken edges.” When Puss in Boots drinks a cup of espresso, his eyes become extremely expressive. Observes Edwards, “In terms of character rigging, we try to lean into that so animation can have the controls, because that way they can drive the timing of the expressions. Because we wanted to have some asymmetry with the eyes, we could do all kinds of things with the pupils and iris and actually get shapes.”

“Nate Wragg [Production Designer] and I would go over every step to make sure it had the right composition and feeling. It was controlled by the artists. That’s something we tried to empower our team, which is to push things on their own because they have great ideas too. The initial challenge was to make them take the step far enough.”

—Mark Edwards, Visual Effects Supervisor

Initially, a small team was put together to develop the looks of the effects. “Effects covers all of these different natural phenomenon, including volumetrics,” Edwards notes. “Effects were a mix of the simulation and particular volumetric passes that are turned into meshes that can then be effectively sculpted out so we can get negative spaces. We always called it the scalping effect, which is that 2D hand-drawn scalping look, so we could get a hard edge along with the softness of the volumetric. One of the technologies that we built was a tool called the Stamp Map. It effectively let us take any sort of image maps, like a brushstroke or texture, and with a point cloud project it and stick it to surfaces or in-effects case volumes. Instead of getting that soft volumetric cloud feel, we could get some texture in there, which was important. The magic secret sauce on top were hand-drawn elements. We were fortunate to lean into some of the tools that The Bad Guys had been writing and using. Our effects team could add extra lines or anything we wanted to get that 2D effect.”

There was a constant blending of 3D with 2D, such as with the milk, which was combination of 3D simulation with 2D splash effects. “One of the fun things with the Wolf, in particular, [occurred when] we were trying to get graphic lines in the poncho and lot of the simulations would either be too detailed or soft,” states Edwards. “We developed a shotgun technique that let us to keep the bigger lines, and those could be blended as well. We had some fun ways to get shapes that we liked that weren’t too complex that might feel like a heavy simulation, but it is still underlying the motion.” The seaside town of Del Mar was its own challenge, according to Edwards. “That was a tricky thing to simplify. When you have something complex in the background and want to focus on the characters. We did a lot of lighting compositing to make sure we could abstract detail to get almost way into the painterly realm to simplify composition when needed. The graphic simulations might be easier to deal with, and then with the city we would have to do more treatment to get that same feeling.”

Art direction was favored over a procedural methodology. “Nate Wragg [Production Designer] and I would go over every step to make sure it had the right composition and feeling,” remarks Edwards. “It was controlled by the artists. That’s something we tried to empower our team, which is to push things on their own because they have great ideas too. The initial challenge was to make them take the step far enough.” Serving as the MacGuffin is the Wishing Star. “The Wishing Star was a big concern early on because we spend almost all of act three there and, normally, you’re not in one environment for that long. It had to feel complex, evolve and help to drive the story and the action that was happening. The art department did a nice color script of the Wishing Star evolution and our Head of Look Development, Baptiste Van Opstal, was a genius in a lot ways in helping to drive the stylization, and I gave him the Wishing Star to look cool. He ran with it, and with a mix of procedural geometry and surfacing modeling was able to get a nice balance for the Wishing Star so it has depth, color and hue shifting.”

“The Wishing Star was a big concern early on because we spend almost all of act three there and, normally, you’re not in one environment for that long. It had to feel complex, evolve and help to drive the story and the action that was happening. The art department did a nice color script of the Wishing Star evolution and our Head of Look Development, Baptiste Van Opstal, was a genius in a lot ways in helping to drive the stylization, and I gave him the Wishing Star to look cool. He ran with it, and with a mix of procedural geometry and surfacing modeling was able to get a nice balance for the Wishing Star so it has depth, color and hue shifting.”

—Mark Edwards, Visual Effects Supervisor

The transformation shots with the magic map were tricky. “When the characters touch the map, then the world transforms around them. It’s going from the initial Dark Forest with trees and pink flowers to all of a sudden lava, everything burned and fire all around,” Edwards explains. “There are several transformations, even Goldilocks and the Three Bears, their cabin splitting in half; that destruction was fun. The transformations had to serve the story points and be believable enough, but were magical, so it also had to be fun and fast. The audience needed to get the ideas quickly. We spent a lot of time on those initial transformation shots.” The step animation pipeline was overhauled to allow animators at any time to go into any step animation they wanted. The giant was its own challenge for everybody because he’s a walking environment. We used a lot of our environment tools for sprinkling foliage everywhere, but it had to move. We had to build a bunch of per-frame-basis baking techniques to get all of the data for that to work. Lots of shader work for surfacing and lighting. In Nuke you might have the glow gizmo that gives you a traditional Gaussian blur glow, but we wanted it to look more artistic and have texture. We wrote a special tool for that. Volumetrics had brushstrokes in them. For every facet we could think of, we asked, ‘Can we make it feel like it fits in this fairy-tale world and not just rely on traditional tools?’”