Jacek
Spychalski, Art director on The Flying Machine (and the man in charge of
actually making the flying contraption), talks about his experiences bringing the magical piano to life.
I have had the pleasure of being a part of this project
from its very beginning. At that stage, though, I didn’t suspect the venture
was going be so huge and that it would totally engross me totally for nearly
two years. Working on The Flying Machine was a huge challenge and the flying machine itself was of course a key component
of the film and a real troublemaker for its constructors and builders, as well
as for the animators who threw life into it.
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| Lang Lang and Heather Graham aboard The Flying Machine |
The biggest technical challenge was animation
the flying machine as a puppet. It would have been relatively straight-forward
and inexpensive to make and animate the flying machine puppet in computer
animation, but there were certain qualities that puppet stop-motion delivers
that meant we wanted to pursue this route. Puppet stop motion allows for a much
higher level of finishing and detail to the models, and a much more life-like
feel, it also has a special quality to its movement, which comes from the fact
it is being manipulated by hand. Animating the flying machine in stop motion
would make it magical.
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| Using stop motion rather than computer generated animation gave Heather and Lang's journey its magical look |
Most puppets are under 50cm high, have 4
limbs, not more than 12 joints, are self- supporting and weigh under 500 grams.
So now you see the comparison: our first flying machine puppet was 2 metres
high, had over 120 joints, each of which needed to be moved for each frame of
animation, and 13 wings, and needed to be supported in 15 places and weighed 25
kilos. This meant that we had to devise
a specialist rig (the ‘rig-zilla’), which was 4 metres high, a kind of
articulate robot, that could run along two sets of tracks, hold the flying
machine exactly still over a metre off the ground, and be adjusted to precisely
move the flying machine in any direction.
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| Rig-Zilla before the cameras |
Our animators had to use step-ladders to
animate each frame, and out of 18 lead animators only 2 animators learnt how to
use this monster of rigs. It was an epic feat of technical production with each
shot using rig-zilla, especially as most shots we used it for were complex
motion control shots, often we need a to block out a space the size of a tennis
court half for these monster shots.
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| The Flying Machine suspended by Rig-Zilla |
When starting the work on The Flying Machine, I didn’t imagine that one of our machines was
going to fly from a studio in Łódź to the very heart of Beijing, the Forbidden
City Concert Hall, and that I was going to fly after it few days later to put
it together on the eve of our film’s world premiere. After this long period of
hard toil there finally came the time for its fruits to be tasted and for the
film’s creators to celebrate the final part of the adventure. It was a great
pleasure to see the smiling faces of children watching the film, trying to
catch flower petals whirling around them (thanks to our 3D specialists).
- Jacek
Spychalski
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