Reproduced within the Link-Zone pages with the kind permission of Christian Cinema.Com: GE106/07

Directing "Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who": Steve Martino

by Angela Walker

Steve Martino, who was art director for the animated film “Robots,” brought his imagination and artistic talent to his role as co-director of Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who.

This fanciful tale by Dr. Seuss is the third of his books to be adapted to screen, but the first fully animated with CGI (Computer Generated Images) technology. The DVD comes out on December 9, [also in Australia] and the limited edition includes games and screen tests with the animators.

On the design of the movie, I really felt that Dr. Seuss was our production designer. I got to travel to Audrey Geisel’s (Dr. Seuss’s [Theodor Seuss Geisel] wife) home where Dr. Seuss penned many of his later works. She gave us a wonderful tour and I saw a lot of his artwork on the walls. I saw a couple of sculptures he had done from characters he had drawn. They almost looked like mounted trophies on the wall.

They were very goofy and fun Dr. Seuss animals, and I thought it was a key for us. These were very dimensional representations. We create our movies with computer animation, and I thought these were very good guides for us.

I started there, then Jimmy Hayward (the other director) and I traveled to the University of San Diego to the Giesel Library. They have a special collections area where we put on the white gloves and held the original manuscripts. We saw how he constructed his original rhyme and verse and saw that it was not something that comes easily, that you just dash off. It took lots of scratching out and White-Out as he found the flow and the words and cadence he wanted to use. Then we held the original artwork from the book and made quite a study of how he drew.

From that, we created a style guide here in our studio, based on his work, to help guide the animators. We had over 300 people who worked on this movie, and that became a guide to all of them as to how we would interpret his work and bring it to life in the methods we use in computer animation.

In live action films, the director’s greatest responsibility is to bring out the best in his cast. With an animated film, your cast is voice talent and animators, around 300 people working together. How do you keep them all going the right way?

Steve    It starts by laying down the fundamental guidelines for yourself. I sat down with Audrey Giesel and made a commitment to her that we would be true to Dr. Seuss’s work and try to uphold what he had done and bring that to the screen. So you use those anchors with all the little decisions you make.

As you’re looking at the initial design work for the movie, you have to be true to the style. With story development, it’s being true to the book, to the story he laid out in the book. Then all the way through to working with the actual actors.

With us, working with the cast happens in two parts. We had a wonderful cast with Steve Carell and Jim Carrey and Carol Burnett. I was working with some of my idols. They’re tremendously talented people. The main thing for us was to sort of set the goalposts. Here’s where we’re taking the story, and here’s what we’re trying to put into this film, and then leave these wonderfully talented people room to bring what they do so well.

For us, in the full creation of that character, the second half happens with our animators, who end up doing the physical performance of the characters’ actions. But we work off the voice recordings first to develop the animation. There’s so much wonderful material that our voice actors bring that we want to play off of that.

One example is that Steve Carell will pause just that couple of seconds more to create a little discomfort for you. Or the way he’ll kind of cough and do a little stutter as a point of nervousness. That’s absolute gold, and as our animation team begins to work on their individual shots, they want to play the physical side to that great vocal performance. So we don’t do any animation on the actual shots of the movie until we have the voice work done.

Did you have a division of duties with Jim Hayward that you knew from the beginning? Was the vision for the film developed together?

Steve    It’s interesting because Jimmy and I are two totally different individuals with different personalities. Jim’s a very big and flamboyant guy, and I’m a little quieter in the way that I work with folks. When we sat down together and talked about this book and how we would take it into feature form, we were surprisingly very similar in our beliefs and approach about how we would make that happen.

It was Chris Meledandri, who was the executive producer on the movie, who saw the individual talents we had and thought we would be a good mix for one another, and that ended up being the case. I was the art director on the movie “Robots” here at Blue Sky, so I come with a long history of working with computer. I have experience in the art direction and the visual styling and visual effects – getting the imagery looking great on the screen.

Jimmy came from Pixar and was an animator involved in story, so we complemented one another. What we found was that we needed to be together in story and editorial and those first reviews of animation, because that’s where you shape the story. Then as we would proceed through our normal days, we would find some places where we could cover in our particular areas. I might do extra rounds with designers or lighting folks, or materials and the effects team. Jimmy might do those extra afternoon rounds with the animators or particular story artists. Part of the work we did divide and conquer, but at the central core areas, which is editorial, story and the beginnings of animation, we were together.

How did the project come to the two of you?

Steve    Chris Meledandri was the head of Twentieth Century Fox Animation, and Blue Sky is kind of their main animation studio. The first film that Blue Sky did, “Ice Age,” Chris was involved with that. When I was the art director on “Robots,” Jimmy came to the movie late and did some story work and assistant directing on some sequences. We got to do some work together and had a chance to get to know one another on that movie.

Chris saw that it would be a good mix of talents, and we got along well in terms of our working relationship, so that’s how our pairing for “Horton” came to be.

When you have a project of this size with over 300 people working on a film that stretches over a couple of years, what are some of the budget challenges you faced?

Steve    You always set that date ahead of time. Probably a good year in advance we know what release date we’re headed for. You’ve got finite resources during that time, and I’ve worked under those constraints my entire life. I’ve never worked as a fine artist, where the “muse” drives me. That is the challenge of making a movie.

As you work on it, you’re trying to get as much of the energy of those individuals’ work up on the screen and not like water on the sand or film on the cutting room floor.

We’re different in computer animation in that we try to do a lot of planning in advance. We’ll put a full version of the movie together in storyboard panels and we’re literally watching the movie in pencil drawings because we can’t afford to go out and shoot lots of footage. In other words, we can’t animate lots of shots and make scenes long and then take it into editorial and cut it into a film.

What we need to do is plan it so that when we’ve committed to a moment, we animate just that and not a frame more. The challenge in doing that is as the story comes together, and you’ve got a cast that’s giving you wonderful material and sometimes leading you to a place that’s even better than you had started, is providing enough space in your schedule to allow that to happen.

There’s a place in the movie where Jim Carrey’s character gets confused about a character named Vlad, and he thinks that his buddy Morton the Mouse is talking about Vlad the Bunny, the one who makes the cookies. That came about with Jimmy and I and Jim Carrey working in the recording studio. We were joking around and Jim said, “You know, he ought to be confused.”

We thought, “That’s funny,” and developed that into Vlad the Bunny. So then Jimmy and I thought, “Now we have to show Vlad the Bunny at the end of the movie.”

So the challenge is you’re working within that finite schedule and number of resources you have and this comes up in the last six months of production. They we ask, “How are we going to make that happen? It will be good for the movie to put that in.”

That’s a matter of working day to day with the producers on the film who are constantly telling us, “We’re running out of days!” I had one production person here who used to say, “Well, you’ve got a limited amount of duck sauce. Where do you want to spread it?” Those are the types of decisions directors make on a daily basis.

We would love to give you a crowd of 2000 Whos standing around. Do you want that crowd of Whos, or do you want this extra shot of Vlad the Bunny? So then we maybe compromise at 1500. It’s that kind of day-to-day decision-making. I’m sure that live-action directors get into the same thing on set; I’ve seen it happen. You try to make those decisions that support the best telling of the story.

When you saw the final product, what was your first reaction to it, and did you find some moments that surprised you?

Steve    You know, the end of the movie is a wonderful part of the process from my perspective as one of the directors on the movie. In the last two months we’re out doing post-production, all of the final shots we’ve been rendering are making their way into the cut.

As we’re working with our composer John Powell, all of a sudden, the emotion of the movie takes a huge leap up as we get the score put in there. As we’re sitting on the mixing stage and working in the sound design and sound effects with the score and tuning all the voice work (if they’re in a cave, we’re adding reverb so you feel like you’re in an enclosed space), it really starts to come to life.

For me, the very best moment in the entire process, was sitting with Audrey Giesel in a studio in Twentieth Century Fox. There were probably only five of us in this theater, and she was the one I had made a promise to in our very first meeting. We played the movie, and it was probably one of the first times I had sat and watched the movie where I wasn’t making any decisions about it. I wasn’t making notes about what to change or alter in the mix, but was watching it for the first time thinking, “This is done.”

Audrey was sitting right in front of me, and as the movie was wrapping up and fading to black, I was sitting there kind of like at the dentist’s chair. My hands were clenched on the arms of the seat, wondering how she was going to react. As soon as the picture went to black, she stood up and started to applaud.

She said, “That is pathos. You’ve really taken this story and lifted it to a new level.”

That was the absolute culmination of the journey for me. After that, how it did in the theaters, or how my kids liked it, or how their friends liked it became almost secondary because that had fulfilled the objective we set out – to lift up and hold up the legacy Dr. Seuss created.

I thought one of the highlights of the film was the artwork. It was so fantastic.

Steve    I remember when Dr. Seuss died. I always felt when I looked at his imagery and artwork that animation in general seemed to be the right way to bring his work to life. He put things on the page that you couldn’t construct in real life. He’s got these ribbon roads that run through town that have no visible means of support, but they feel right on the page and in his world.

I have been working in computer animation since the early 1980s, where we could do very little with the technology. In the early 90s we were getting to the place where there was a lot we were able to do. I think “Toy Story” was in the beginning stages of production at that time, and we could tell some really good stories with this kind of animation.

What’s so fun in animation is that we can make the fantastical artwork of Dr. Seuss happen. We can have characters run across there and make you believe they really are running with great effort and joy, but you don’t have to feel the limitation of our physical world where there’s gravity and you have to support things. So I’ve always felt animation would be a great way to bring his world to life.

What was interesting for us in the journey of putting the art direction together is that when we first started, we were following all the shape language and the form he put into his drawings. They’re very fun and fantastic. You don’t find houses that are all wrinkled and have loopy roofs. As we first started to put lighting and texture on it, we said, “It’s Dr. Seuss. Let’s make it really different. Who knows what material would be on there?”

It was interesting that as we began to put surface materials on these buildings that we as an audience wouldn’t recognize, we broke that suspension of disbelief needed for a film. It started to feel foreign or like a model, and we realized that what we needed to do was put texture and things an audience could relate to with a sense of scale. That wall is like stucco – I know what that looks and feels like.

So we have these wild shapes of buildings, but that looks like it’s wood trim. And your mind would say, “Oh, I understand that. That doorknob looks like it’s made of brass.”

The hope is that the audience really would feel like it’s being transported to that world, even though it is the most unbelievable-looking roof with grass on it, and there’s a guy mowing the lawn on top of it. We had the fun of making you believe that you’re really there and not just watching a model or some foreign depiction of it. You feel like you’re tangibly there and the characters really live and exist in that space.

Do you have other projects in the works?

Steve    I’m working in development here at Blue Sky, so I have a bit of a horse race going on. There are five or six projects in development, so hopefully one of those horses will take the lead and become a film some years from now.
©2008 ChristianCinema.com

©2008 ChristianCinema.com