SQUEAKY CLEAN DIGITAL EFFECTS

Mousehunt is a darkly hilarious romp featuring two bumbling brothers and one delightfully destructive mouse. It was written by Adam Rifkin and directed by Gore Verbinski and is the first family movie to come from Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks.The movie stars Nathan Lane and Lee Evans as a pair of Laurel and Hardyesque brothers who are doing battle with a mouse for possession of a house they have inherited from their father, the founder of a string factory. Nathan Lane is excellent, as always and Lee Evans is wonderful, and there is a great cameo by Christopher Walken as an exterminator.

But the real star of the show is the mouse, created by Mary Lynn Machado, the CG Supervisor on this movie for Rhythm & Hues, which provided the computer animation and effects for the film. They are one of the oldest and most respected studios in a very young business. For eleven years they have extended the limits of visual imagery that can be created on a computer. Their greatest strength has been their ability to create digital characters that seem truly alive.

Rhythm and Hues are perhaps best known in India for their Coca Cola commercial with the polar bears and the baby seal. They also did a commercial for Xerox that got a lot of air during the Winter Olympics that involved storybook characters who come to life.

For Mousehunt, Rhythm & Hues created many of the scenes with the mouse and also a lot of the shots involving the cat, Catzilla, that is brought in to deal with the mouse problem. Rhythm and Hues also provided some FX shots; snow, smoke, and so on. Their primary responsibility, though, were the CG shots of the mouse.

The integration of the CG shots and animatronics with the live mouse is so good that it is very hard to tell when the mouse is real and when he is digital. Mary Lynn acknowledges that that was the biggest challenge in a project like this. While most of the mouse scenes utilised a real mouse, of those that did not involve a real mouse, more were CG than animatronic, overall less than 15%. That 15%, though, involved the shots that one could not get any other way, so they were very important. For example there is a scene behind the baseboards, when the mouse is nearly skewered by a large nail. The shot where the first nail comes exploding through the wall and nearly hits the mouse, is totally CG. Subsequent shots, where the mouse is trapped and surrounded by the nails were done with an animatronic puppet. While the CG mouse was added at certain points along with elements like dust and the nails, at other times a real mouse was used.

The hardware used by Rhythm and Hues was exclusively Silicon Graphics machines while the modeling, animating and rendering was all performed with proprietary software that was designed in-house by a huge staff of programmers. Inferno was the only off-the-shelf software utilised at the very end when everything was finally being put together.

In total, 35 CG shots were created for the film. It took a year and a half to complete all of the shots, which included six months of R&D work on the mouse, figuring out how to make it look just right.

Matching the CG mouse to the live mouse was the biggest challenge, with the effects specialists having to find ways to match their animation to the movements of real mice. There is also a lot of secondary animation that one doesn’t notice at first glance, that has to be just right — things like whiskers and ears. The lighting on the CG mouse had to be adjusted to match that of the scenes where he would be integrated.

Rhythm and Hues developed some new processes specifically for this movie, mainly for modelling and manipulating the density and position of the fur. A new lighting algorithm was also developed.

One of the most effective and realistic CG shots in the film is when Christopher Walken, who portrays the exterminator, Caesar, is sprawled in front of his truck. The mouse crawls down a rope, walks across Mr. Walken’s face and deposits a little “token of affection” on him.

In total, there were about a hundred people who worked on the film for Rhythm and Hues, with a core team of 15 or 20.

Mousehunt releases in India on April 10.