The movie Entergalactic has gained popularity for its unusual style of animation, colours and Kid Cudi’s music since its release on Netflix. DNEG Animation, the studio responsible for bringing the film to life, is a well-known name in the animation industry for embracing creativity and technological innovations.
Animation Xpress interviewed DNEG’s animation director Kapil Sharma to know more about the making of Entergalactic.
Sharma said, “Entergalactic came to us with some existing art and it was impressive, I wanted to be on the film since day one. Entergalactic revolves around Jabari played by Kid Cudi, who is an artist on the cusp of real success. In the movie, Jabari has to figure out whether he can make space for love in his life. Being a love story, the movie doesn’t only show the life of Jabari and his love Meadow, it also shows how life goes on in the city.”
Talking about the early stages of production, Sharma said, “Initially, the director, VFX supervisor and myself sat together and decided on what sort of decisions needed to be made to sell the story best. We deconstructed the artwork and read the script, then came up with the best way to achieve what we did, animation-wise.”
Bringing director’s vision to life
DNEG Animation took reference from the artwork provided by Netflix’s production designer Robh Ruppel and art director Michal Sawtyruk. VFX supervisor Archie Donato and his team were tasked with creating the look of a painting in 3D.
Upon deciding the style of animation, Sharma said, “When we saw the art style we knew we had to create a moving painting using CG animation. For the animation, we had to really look at anything and everything that we could do to achieve this. As a result, we set out to do a lot of experiments with the animation. We also entertained the idea of motion capture but that would have looked too realistic and wouldn’t have given the impression of a moving painting.”
As they wanted to keep the idea of a painting sprung to life, they ended up using step animation. “We divided lots of shots in the foreground, midground and background. The background still had elements/images, midgrounds were filled by the crowd – semi CG model and semi painting elements and in the foreground, most of the action was taking place,” added Sharma.
Overcoming hurdles
Being such a unique movie in its own sense, the animation team had to face lots of challenges while working on it. Apart from retaining the painting style and texture in animation, the team also had to work on integrating the actors into their animation avatar, so for that, the team worked on face callisthenics in tandem with the actors and director of the film.
DNEG Animation had to face another major challenge while working on the sequences involving music. While in production, the animation team did not have access to Kid Cudi’s songs so, film director Fletcher Moules found similar music and rhythms for the team to work with. Even though the music provided was not final, in the end, the animation matched the music perfectly.
Sharing his experience while working with director Moules, Sharma said, “I loved working with him, specifically because he was one of those directors who doesn’t just do CG animated movies, so he was very clear about what he wanted to achieve, any sequence or any idea he launched, he had a solid idea about what he wanted to see.”
To complete this visually appealing movie roughly 200 artists from DNEG Animation’s studios in Mumbai, London and Montreal worked on it over the span of two years.
Currently, Sharma is working on That Christmas as an animation director. DNEG Animation’s other upcoming projects include the films Nimona and Garfield.