BFTR contributed 15 talking parrot shots to PAULIE, the highly-underrated Dreamworks film about a wisecracking bird on a quest to find his beloved owner. Working again in Adobe After Effects, with a handful of tracked and animated 3D CG beaks done in Alias PowerAnimator, BFTR effects supervisor Van Ling and artists Gunther Schatz, Erich Ippen and Todd Vaziri animated the talking bird voiced by Jay Mohr, adding eye movement, blinks and head shakes to the existing live footage. PAULIE ©1998 Dreamworks One of the challenges of the show, apart from the deadlines (we had barely a month to complete all the shots), was that six separate visual effects houses --BFTR, Hammerhead, Sony Imageworks, Light Matters/Pixel Envy, Santa Barbara Studios and CFC London (which had the bulk of the shots)-- were all animating the same character, which in turn was represented in the live action footage by seventeen slightly different-looking birds! In order to maintain a consistent performance throughout, all of the effects houses screened their shots together, trading tips and notes. This somewhat unprecedented procedure allowed us to really shine and be a resource to our fellow houses; BFTR's shots, most of them first-take finals, became the benchmarks that the production asked the other houses to follow. We started with a handful of simple one- or two-word talking shots, like "Sorry" and "Are you tired?"; by the end, we were doing wall-to-wall talking shots, behind cage bars, such as "Aw come on, Artie, we haven't pawned anything all day. Let's catch the number nine at Belmont. I'm bored." All in all, the show was a textbook case of productive multi-house collaboration. "Are you tired?" Quicktime Movie, 211K "What a jerk!" Quicktime Movie, 240K PAULIE ©1998 Dreamworks PAULIE, Visual Effects by BANNED FROM THE RANCH ENTERTAINMENT Visual Effects Supervisor VAN LING Visual Effects Producer CASEY CANNON Digital Artists ERICH IPPEN GUNTHER SCHATZ TODD VAZIRI Visual Effects Coordinator SUSAN THURMOND Visual Effects Editor HITOSHI INOUE Technical Supervisors DERICK TORTORELLA TRAVIS LANGLEY Banned From The Ranch Entertainment Home Page General Information: info@bftr.com