Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made Visual Effects by Framestore

VFX Online March 27, 2020, 12:39 pm 2k Views

Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made Visual Effects by Framestore

Framestore was proud to deliver stunning VFX for critically acclaimed Disney+ title Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made.

Key to the team’s role as creative partner was bringing to life key character ‘Total’ – a photorealistic 1,500 pound polar bear who had to be seamlessly integrated into director Tom McCarthy’s deadpan, quirkily matter-of-fact universe. Timmy Failure was the first Disney movie to premiere at the Sundance Film Festival.

VFX Supervisor Nicolas Chevallier worked with Framestore’s previz, animation and VFX teams across the entirety of the film’s VFX. “Total represented a fun and really interesting challenge,” says Nicolas. “Rather than the anthropomorphic characters audiences often see on screen, Total is an actual polar bear, even if the situations he finds himself in are entirely un-polar bear-like.

On working with Oscar-winning filmmaker Tom McCarthy (Spotlight, The Station Agent), Chevallier notes, “It was a very collaborative relationship. It really imbued the process with a sense of creative alchemy. Tom was totally involved and went out of his way to meet the team, which made for a truly privileged relationship.”

In order to create the perfect photoreal polar bear, Framestore’s Capture Lab team visited Ontario’s Cochrane Polar Bear Habitat. The team found ‘their’ polar bear in Inukshuk, a characterful, 15-year-old male. They captured hours of footage and thousands of photos of Inukshuk and his peers, gathering reference to match anatomy, muscle, wrinkles as well as facial expressions and physical behaviour.

The modelling team then headed to the Natural Heritage Campus in Gatineau, Quebec to collect skeleton proportion ratios between male, female, young and old bears, which was crucial to building accurate anatomical structures. Once Total was ‘shot ready,’ the animation team built on the Capture Lab’s reference footage with their own research, ensuring Framestore’s creatives had an encyclopedic understanding of bear behaviour. “We wanted Total to be as real a bear as he could possibly be,” says Chevallier.

Framestore created a fully-furred render of Total, and placed this directly into the edit for post-visualization. This allowed McCarthy to have an accurate representation of what his final character would look like. “We were able to pinpoint how we could improve Total’s interactions and connection with Timmy to support the duo’s relationship throughout the story”, explains Chevallier. Not only did this allow for a faster turnaround but it also allowed the team to previz the bear’s volume, scale and location within each frame. “We nailed the look of the bear early on and pretty much stuck with it”, says CG Supervisor Pierre-Loic Hamon.

McCarthy’s deadpan humor is intercut with moments of complete stillness from Total, which led to one of the team’s biggest challenges: creating a sense of life in Total whilst being utterly still. The team carefully analyzed the perfect range of motion to accurately depict Total’s wordless behaviour. the rigging and creature effects artists developed new technology which enabled an infinite range of motion dynamics for the polar bear’s facial expressions “We found this approach very successful”, says Chevallier. “A lot of the challenge lied in reining things back.” “We had to suppress some of our CG instincts and make Total’s interactions as realistic as possible by carefully analyzing the muscle, fat and fur as well as the power in his stride. Subtlety was key”, says Hamon.