Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs Animation Test #2

This piece is from 2006 or 2007 when Phil Lord and Chris Miller were on board to direct.

It was the most ambitious project we had attempted. Flint and Sam were in active design revisions, the design of the world only existed in Justin Thompson's head and two new directors were retooling the project. This test green-lit the film and led to further development where we created the look that you see in the feature film.

For the feature, the design of Flint and Sam changed, the look was refined and the animation improved. All of these things are expected in development. Production has hundreds of very talented artists and a long process ahead to create the highest quality possible.  Early development leans toward speed and low cost at the expense of quality. Quality is improved over time. The largest jump, both in cost and quality, is when production begins.

What's surprising to a lot of people is that 3d visual development does not make the assets for the film, nor should it be required to do so. If we get a design approval, then production only has to make the asset once. There's huge cost savings in having a large team with a very specific, unchanging goal. It's best to think of what we do as a concept or prototype similar to how an auto manufacturer creates a concept car with a team of designers before the production version is made.

There were six 3d artists who worked for about 20 weeks on this test. Takao Noguchi and Omar Smith modeled characters, Ernie Rinard and James Battersby modeled, textured, lit and did fx and Sungwook Su did fx. I supervised, modeled, rigged, textured, animated and lit. Justin Thompson was the production designer.