Iloura's
Glenn Melenhorst, Avi Goodman, Simon Rosenthal, Ineke Majoor and Caroline
Pitcher. Photo: Craig
Sillitoe
Michael Lallo, The Sydney Morning Herald, reports
Melbourne’s contribution to Hollywood has been great in recent
years: Guy Pearce, Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush spring to mind. So too -
albeit in a slightly different way - has Ted, the pot-smoking bear with a
penchant for prostitutes, who has hit the big time in his eponymous film Ted.
Ted is a Melburnian, the animated creation of the South Melbourne
production studio Iloura.
In 2010, Family
Guy creator Seth MacFarlane received an email with a clip of the
animated teddy attached, rang the Melbourne office and said that was how he
would like his bear to look. And so Ted's star was born: for eight months, 70
artists toiled full-time to bring him to life.
When it opened in the US last month, it
grossed $US54 million ($A52 million) in its first weekend: a record for an
original R-rated comedy. The company is now working on I, Frankenstein and the
Will Smith blockbuster 1000
A.E. It also has several other Hollywood films to its name,
including Where the Wild
Things Are, The
Bank Job, Ghost
Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Don't
Be Afraid of the Dark and the Steven Spielberg mini-series The Pacific.
It's a long way from the mid-noughties, when Iloura was a boutique
post-production company specialising in TV commercials. Lured by government
incentives, Paramount Pictures came to Melbourne in 2004 to shoot Charlotte's Web - and
Iloura got the animation contract.
''John Berton, the film's visual effects supervisor, took a huge
leap of faith on us,'' says Iloura's executive film producer, Simon Rosenthal.
''We were in our infancy when it came to film.'' Berton's gamble paid off:
Iloura's animated pigs were indistinguishable from the real ones used in some
scenes.
While Iloura does standard visual effects such as backgrounds, it
forged its reputation with lifelike character animations.
''We got Ted
because we don't overanimate like a lot of studios do,'' says visual effects
supervisor Glenn Melenhorst. ''We didn't make a wide-eyed, Pixar-style, overly
expressive bear. Seth wanted a 'real' aesthetic.''
Over the past decade, Iloura's staff has tripled to 90. ''We had
500 shots for Ted
and each one required separate tasks,'' explains Iloura's head of visual
effects, Ineke Majoor. Her 70 artists were assigned painstakingly specialised
jobs. One created the glass Ted drinks from, another the beer inside and
someone else did the foam.
To viewers, it appears Ted is the only animated component of the
live action film. But the scene in which he climbs a stadium tower is entirely
fake. ''You should not be able to detect what's real and what's animated,''
Melenhorst says.
Rosenthal is confident Ted
will lead to bigger projects. ''The industry is now geographically agnostic,''
he says. ''We've been around for 30 years,'' adds business development director
Caroline Pitcher. ''It feels like we've only just begun. We're hungry for the
next challenge.''
No comments:
Post a Comment