The sequel beat Avatar and eight other movies to claim the top prize at the cinema owners event, which starts later this month.

New Moon garnered 66 per cent of the vote.

A few months ago, it was announced that The Twilight Saga: New Moon was up for Fandango's ShoWest Fan Choice Award, and that its competition ring was pretty vast (including the following films: 2012, Alvin And The Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, Avatar, Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs, Monsters Vs. Aliens, Night At The Museum: Battle Of The Smithsonian, Star Trek, The Blind Side, The Hangover, The Proposal, Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, Up, and X-Men Origins: Wolverine).

Today, MTV announced that New Moon beat out its competition with a whopping sixty-six percent of the total user vote.

MTV also quoted a Fandango representative to say that while many people might've expected Avatar (which has raked in ticket sales to the tune of over two billion dollars) to win, "never bet against the passion, loyalty and dedication of the vociferous 'Twilight' fans."

New Moon, the second film in the Twilight series, is just out on DVD/Blu-ray. Director Chris Weitz and visual effects supervisor Susan MacLeod called on Tippett Studio's to bring to life a pack of large wolves. We speak to some of Tippett's key visual effects team about the creation of the wolves.

Check out the Interview here and/or on fxguide.com - Thanks!

Phil Tippett (visual effects supervisor): The approach was that we had to get as close as we could to real wolf behaviour in the wild. Anatomically, these wolves are as close as we could get digitally to timber wolves. Chris Weitz insisted they be real wolves photographically. So that was our objective from the beginning. We did what we normally do when we have to match a real creature - we get a great deal of anatomical reference and photographic material. We look at a lot of books on wolves and just steep ourselves in wolf look and behaviour. Also, a bunch of the guys under my co-supervisor Matt Jacobs - puppet makers, animators, model makers and TDs - went to a wolf preserve outside of LA and got inside a big pen with a bunch of these 200 pound wolves and spent the afternoon with them.

Stephen Unterfranz (character CG supervisor): The wolf sanctuary visit was even more interactive than I hoped it would be. We got to go into enclosures with real animals - some had been kept as pets and some were wild. There were different degrees of wildness in these animals. It was really exciting to get to see them and their behaviour. They were comfortable enough with us to get great reference photography and video. We had pictures of the pads of their feet and and how their teeth connected to their gums. Then we had some selects from the production - who was the biggest wolf and who was what colour.

Tom Gibbons (animation supervisor): Animators in general are reference-oriented people, so we looked at nature videos. We did look at lions which are a little bit heavier than wolves and horses for their gait. YouTube is a godsend! If you're good at typing in the words, you can find amazing freakin' reference. We do have some high-speed cameras in the animation department so sometimes we shoot our own dogs doing stuff at 3000 frames a second just to see what it does.

fxg: What were some of the key things you picked up about wolf behaviour?

Tom Gibbons: The reference gathering was very specific to how they should look like in the film. Wolves are not dogs, but it takes a while to understand how different the two species are. The problem is that not a lot of people have had experiences with wolves - actually, even in some movies that are supposed to be about wolves they are actually huskies or other dogs. We felt that the audience might think our wolves didn't look right, so we had to make adjustments with the specific wolf behaviour and soften it a little.

fxg: Once you had your reference, how did you get started on modelling and animation?

Phil Tippett: We had some time in pre-production and we were very clear in what needed to be done from Chris' storyboards, so were able to work with Chris and the visual effects supervisor on the show, Susan McLeod, to create some previs that was very much locked into what the locations were. We were able to develop the pantomime and choreography for the wolf action - in animation terms exclusively. We weren't bound by any other constraints. We could just let the wolves go and do the best behaviour that looked great for the shot. That would inform how we would move the cameras when they went out and shot the actual backgrounds, which are empty without wolves. We needed to know where the lenses and the camera movements were. It was most important that the animation drive the cinematography.

fxg: Can you talk about the modelling process?

Stephen Unterfranz: We modelled one primary asset that we called the generator, based on the character Jacob, in Maya. The model was pretty straightforward. Fur grooming was a little bit more involved, with the style and the clumping. That look was defined in the art department which consisted of model and paint. To generate the variations for the rest of the pack, we brought Jacob into rigging and built a puppet for him. Then for as long as we could we were deriving the other four variations from Jacob. We were always prepared for the need to separate them into different assets. That worked really well for animation for things like walk cycles and run cycles between the different wolves.

fxg: How did you approach the facial set-up for the wolves?

Stephen Unterfranz: We basically had a blend shape system with some rig controls on top to accentuate the facial features. When we first started, we weren't sure how much acting the wolves were going to do. We worked with the lead modeler to break down the different regions of the face to their constituent blend shapes to give the animators control. As it turns out, they don't have too full of a range. They were kept really realistic. There were some key things that needed to be hit like the brow movements and how the muscles around the eyes worked. It had to be really distinctive for showing anger and feeling.

fxg: Moving to animation, what were some of the important things you wanted to convey?

Tom Gibbons: It was all about being naturalistic. There had to be an emotional connection between Jacob as a wolf and Bella, but it didn't have to be as an extreme as what we thought it might have been initially. Our largest challenge was to make the wolves feel large - difficult to show because there wasn't always lots of reference. We always stayed true to the wolf. We couldn't do anything anthropomorphic with them and didn't want to do anything that looked outside the realm of a timber wolf.

fxg: How did you use the reference you'd gathered in working out the movement of wolves?

Tom Gibbons: We started with a run and a walk cycle. As I studied the movement, even in our own studio we had people say that I had come up with a very dramatised walk. The thing is, most four-legged animals walk left foot forward, rear right forward, front right forward, left rear forward. So they do a staggered step. One of the things wolves do is walk left foot front, left foot rear, right foot front, right foot rear. That was the kind of walk I developed because we wanted to do a stalk rather than just a general walk. I felt that this kind of behaviour in a walk cycle was more interesting than a traditional 'I'm just a happy dog walking forward', but a lot of people called it out and said: 'Hey, that's wrong.' But it was right!

fxg: What tools did you rely on for the animation?

Tom Gibbons: We used Maya. We have a whole arsenal of plug-ins we've developed over the years. We had a crew of about 10 working on about 60 shots. When you animate in Maya you're not animating the fur. But with a wolf, fur represents a huge amount of the volume. We would typically animate the skeleton which basically looks like a shaved wolf. Once you start to put fur on it, everything starts to change. Our recipe to compensate for the missing fur in the animation stage is to try and run full renders of the wolves after we've done blocking, so we can start to see how the fur is looking and being affected by the animation. This lets us tweek things and allows us to go back compensate for things if need be.

fxg: How did you approach the wolf fur?

Phil Tippett: That was a whole huge research and development thing that our studio has been involved with for the last ten years. So we applied the tools we've been developing in-house to the New Moon project. The rendering time is just horrendous and the more wolves you put in the shot the more crazy it is. It's also so time consuming. Our art department headed by Nate Frietberg and Erin Borgan, working really closely with Matt Jacobs, had to get really stuck on this fur, not only as photographically as we could but also dynamically. So as the wolves are moving or wind is blowing on them, it showed in the fur.

fxg: What were some of the compositing challenges?

David Schnee: It was mostly about interaction between the wolves and their environment. The wolves were supposed to be eight to 1200 pounds, so they had to move the ground around a lot and we had to show their weight with the interaction with mulch or grass. We had a huge element shoot where we shot hay and moss and mulch - anything to help us integrate these guys as they're running around sliding and picking up their paws and slamming them down. For shots of the wolves emerging from behind trees, we ended up doing a cut-out of a wolf in blue and pushed it through the branches to give them the interaction for the wolves emerging. Also, everything was planned out and shot in VistaVision so that we could have the flexibility of having the animators drive the cameras, doing post camera moves for wolf action. We composited in Shake.

fxg: Was there a particular shot that was interesting to composite?

David Schnee:(compositing supervisor) There's a sequence when the wolves phase into their wolf form from their human form, and go into some somewhat playful fighting. There's a number of shots where they'll come together and attack each other and then fall back and then jump off each other and then slide back towards camera and draw a big gouge into ground. With the elements we shot we really able to reveal some big mounds in the ground, slobber when they hit and tufts of fur. Jacob's wolf had a very red russet tinge to it which was difficult to integrate because the plates we had were very green and yellow.

fxg: How did you deal with the human to wolf transformation shots?

Phil Tippett: The directive from Chris was that they had to transform very quickly. Early on we had to do some tests to make sure that would work. Conceptually the mass size from a six foot man who weighs 165 pounds into a 12 foot wolf that weighs 1200 pounds sounds ridiculous. Doing a proof of concept, we figured out a pantomime style and an action that would allow us to make this transitiion. We just had to carefully articulate the transition between human and wolf in not much more than 12 frames, so half a second. It meant that the pantomime of the human actors had to be very specific to make sure it worked, so we worked with the actors on the set to make sure they made the proper moves. We only have three transformations and two of them are wire gags. As they are leaping through the air, they transform, so we had the opportunity to make the transformation mid-flight.

David Schnee: Because a transformation was such a short amount of frames, it wasn't as bad as you'd think. We did a transition from live action to digital double and into the wolf, and animation got us most of the way. Then we just had to massage the elements to reveal the arms and body and head and the performance we wanted for a few frames, adding in some clothes tearing and some shapes to make the face look more like a muzzle occasionally.

fxg: Tippett is so well known for its character work. What did you learn from the whole process for the wolves?

Stephen Unterfranz: In the very beginning, we weren't sure what the look was going to be. You hear 'werewolf' and that immediately conjures up some imagery. In terms of the story it was actually a lot of fun, because they weren't monsters - they were just large wolves. They didn't go crazy or anything. It was a lot of fun to make a naturalistic wolf, but trying to figure out what that looked like was initially tricky.

This is great, I love this...

From its humble beginnings in a garage to state-of-the-art facility at the forefront of the much-changed visual effects industry, Tippett Studio, recently observed its quarter-century anniversary. Now Cinefex honors that milestone with a career retrospective of its renowned founder, Phil Tippett, who first distinguished himself as a stop-motion animator in the Star Wars and Robocop series, before exploring the short-lived go-motion process with Dragonslayer, and then plunging into computer animation with the groundbreaking Jurassic Park and dozens of subsequent films ranging from Starship Troopers and Hellboy to Cloverfield and, most recently, The Twilight Saga.

See Also: The traditional magic behind Cinefex's first ever illustrated cover from artist Mark Raats

The March> 2010 edition of the magazine carried an in-depth editorial on Tippett along with a feature on Tippett Studio's 25 Anniversary and even though

this highly regarded magazine has never featured an illustration on its cover before, Don kindly granted me an enormous amount of freedom with the design. Raats step-by-step work in progress HERE

As a string of mysterious killings grips Seattle, Bella (Stewart), whose high school graduation is fast approaching, is forced to choose between her love for vampire Edward (Pattinson) and her friendship with werewolf Jacob (Lautner). (IMDB)

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse arrives in theaters June 30, 2010.

However, the mystical, supernatural feats depicted in the grossly popular "Twilight" movies, based on Stephanie Meyer's novels, can be attributed to one equation that is applied each time a digital effect is added to a film:

O = A x M + B x (1 x M)

Or in other words, the over-composite image-the final cohesive shot one sees-is equal to a combination of two or more constituent images-digital and film stills-layered together.

On Wednesday, Eric Pascarelli, visual effects supervisor of Prime Focus VFX, and Matt Jacobs, visual effects supervisor of Tippet Studio, teamed up at the Museum of Science to deliver "Conjuring New Moon," an explanation of the CGI effects responsible for Edward's shimmering skin, Bella's lovesick hallucinations, and the Quilete tribe's werewolf transformations in the popular second film installment.

Pascarelli first explained the techno-genius behind "The Diamond Guy Effect," the studio's name for the glitter effect applied to Edward when he steps into sunlight. Pascarelli showed a video clip of Edward (Robert Pattinson), wracked with teenage angst, unbuttoned shirt framing his subtly painted abs. Over the sounds of screaming, excited fans mooning over Edward at the shooting, Pascarelli addressed the audience-a motley crew of middle-aged women and nerdy computer science high school students: "We based the glittering of his skin off of Thrassos marble," Pascarelli said, as he replayed the clip of Edward's shimmering, Greek-god like abs over, and over, and over again.

A complicated scheme of virtual manipulations creates the glittery CGI effect that simulates sunlight reflecting off Edward's body. In Pascarelli's video, Edward has black "tracking" dots applied all over his exposed skin, which the visual effects team later translated into a virtual mesh model of his body. The crew then used the mesh model to make a virtual wax model with a full-body cyber scan of Robert Pattinson as a guide. With a software program, they applied virtual miniature mirrors over the model, and introduced virtual suns-sources of light-into the frame. They recorded the reflections produced from the mirrors and super-imposed these reflections onto the real-time film of Edward, creating an over-composite image that matched the shape of his body.

"When we darkened his skin it looked like a skin disorder... this is more subtle," Pascarelli said.

The CGI sleight-of-hand is also responsible for Bella's visions of Edward-the apparitions emerge when Bella purposefully endangers her life, such as when she gets on the back of a biker-thug's Harley, or when she jumps off a cliff. When Bella rides her own motorcycle, she hallucinates that Edward is following her. This scene is testimony to Stewart's acting abilities: the motorcycle she was riding was nailed to a moving trailer, and when asked to "arbitrarily turn her head," she panted longingly as she whipped her hair around. The visual effects crew then shot Edward on a green screen and projected his image onto a cloud of computer particles in the shape of a blurred candle flame so that he would seem more transparent. This effect also facilitated the illusion of Edward's image blowing away into the wind, which was created with a nature-simulator that dispersed these "blurred candle" particles with a virtual breeze.

Matt Jacobs then described the process of creating horse-sized Quilete wolves: a combination of Timber wolves, Maned wolves, and elements of traditional werewolf lore. He wanted to stay true to "the special mythology of a wolf, [where] the wolf and the man spirits were combined, to protect his native lands, in this case from vampires." The visual effects crew spent a few days observing Timber wolves at the Wolf Mountain Sanctuary in California to better understand their expressions, fur texture, gait, and other wolfy habits.

Modelers created a base mesh, or virtual model of the wolf, and puppeteers imbued the wolves' nostrils, jaws, teeth, and ears with discreet, virtually-controlled commands so that animators could simulate wolf emotions (fear, submission, aggression, or the fervent yearning of unrequited love). The Tippett Studio invented a "proprietary fur tool" to generate the 4 million hairs on each wolf, and programmed each hair to randomly clump, rotate, vary in color, and simulate the effects of wind and movement.

The lecture exposed the two most beloved elements of the "Twilight Saga": detailed full-body scans of Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner, and manifestations of Stephanie Meyer's quixotic supernatural mysticism. A swoon-worthy cast and a genius visual effects crew are the reasons why "New Moon," with a budget of only $50 million and less-than stellar critical reviews, has already grossed $704 million worldwide.

(thecrimson.com)

* The Journey Continues: A 6-part making-of documentary
– Life after Twilight
– Chris Weitz takes the helm
– The subtle details
– A look at production
– It’s not magic
– Ready for the World

* Music Videos:
– Death Cab for Cutie: Meet me on the Equinox
– Anya Marina: Satellite Heart
– Muse: I Belong to You behind the scenes rehearsal footage
– Mutemath: Spotlight

* Fan Event Q&A with Robert Pattinson, Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner and Chris Weitz – (Content Exclusive for the UK DVD!!!)
* Fandimonium: A look at the die-hard fans
* Team Jacob vs Team Edward: The ultimate love triangle
* Deleted scenes
* Edward goes to Italy
* Edward Fast Forward
* Jacob Fast Forward
* Interview with the Volturi
* Introducing the Wolfpack
* Becoming Jacob
* Edward goes to Italy
* Jacob fast forward
* Edward fast forward
* The Beat Goes On: The music of The Twilight Saga: New Moon
* Frame by Frame: Storyboards to screen

And Target has a bonus BONUS in their pre-order, with a third disc of “never before seen content” plus a collectible film cell...

diablomag.com And the Winner is...

As the New Moon rises, so do the stars at Tippett Studio. Charged with creating the Quileute Wolf Pack for the Twilight sequel, some of the industries leading character artists sunk their teeth into just under 60 shots ranging from three to twelve seconds that were pivotal to the storyline. And those shots are getting noticed.

Wolf Mountain and Frankenwolf
The challenge wasn't just to build a believable wolf, but to build five unique wolves of extraordinary size and weight, to portray that mass often with little more than the surrounding trees as comparisons, create believable fur and humanesque eyes that weren't distracting. Nate Fredenburg, Art Director, helped to make sure those requirements were fulfilled, combining real-world attributes and CG magic.
"At Tippett Studio, we always look to real-life creatures for reference on how to design our characters, real or mythical. For New Moon, we had a special opportunity to travel down to wolf sanctuary in Southern California to observe wolves up close and personal. The key to looking at live reference is to form a knowledge base, study the creatures, their quirks and behaviors, the language between the pack. We looked for signs of what the creature was about and added those to the visual effects to make them believable."

In Lucerne Valley, there is a sanctuary called Wolf Mountain where a dedicated group is trying to save wolves from extinction. This is where the Tippett artists traveled to spend personal time with the wolves, many tame enough to be approached and touched by strangers. There the artist could observe behaviors, pack interactions, hierarchy behaviors, and movement, and "closely examine the fur and its different lengths over the body, the coloring variations and markings, as well as the structure of the face, eyes, teeth and so on."

The trip was extremely fruitful, but Phil Tippett, with his honed eye for perfection, added a second method to study fur under different controlled lighting and wind. "We had a bunch of photographs of wolves that we were studying but Phil was insisting that we take it to the next level and have something to touch, walk around, and actually do your own," explained Fredenburg. This resulted in the creation of what became affectionately known as the "Frankenwolf".
Tippett bought wolf pelts and cut them up with an Exacta knife and pasted it onto a taxidermy blank "so that we could do a lighting lab in two conditions? controlled lighting on our stage where we could shine very specific lights and look at how the fur responded, then we took it outside on an overcast day, which was perfect for New Moon. We came up with strategies for how to artistically make the wolves look better in flat lighting, which is what we were dealing with and is a very difficult lighting situation."

For the full article visit CGSociety: Tippett Studio Jumps to the Head of the Pack with CG Wolves a Howling Success

Running on the sheer momentum of its massive opening, New Moon soared past the $200 million mark on its eighth day of release and, in the process, eclipsed predecessor Twilight, which had a final haul of $192.8 million. That, of course, also made it the biggest vampire movie on record, but it did fall 70 percent, the steepest second weekend Thanksgiving drop ever surpassing Twilight's 62 percent, and, by shedding nearly $100 million from one weekend to the next, it had the largest decline ever in terms of gross. The first Twilight, though, regained its bearings later in its run, ultimately holding up well for its genre.

(boxofficemojo.com)

But even those enormous hits didn't come close to last weekend's $142.8 million opening for the "Twilight" sequel "New Moon," with its snarling visual-effect wolves that were animated at the Berkeley-based Tippett Studio.

Tippett, whose creations include the AT-AT snow walkers from "The Empire Strikes Back" and the ED-209 robot from "RoboCop," took a break from working on the movie version of "Eclipse" (next in the "Twilight" series) for an interview in his conference room - surrounded by models, memorabilia and movie posters associated with the films he's worked on over the past three decades.

A: For "Return of the Jedi," I was totally oblivious to all the fandom. I didn't notice anything, and most of the work was done on pretty secured sets. For "New Moon," it was unbelievable.

It was like a CIA operation. Some of the locations we would go to, the production would be so concerned about fooling the paparazzi, they would take the arrows pointing to the location and turn them the other way. We were actually getting lost.

Q: Did you do much wolf-related research for the movie?

A: We nailed it down early that these were not going to be traditional beast-y horror movie things. ... We watched a lot of documentaries and looked at every single picture book out there on wolves.

My co-supervisor, Matt Jacobs, took a bunch of the art department and animators to a wolf preserve outside of Los Angeles. They got into a pen about the size of this room with about 10 wolves and just spent the afternoon with them.

Q: This sequel was made in less than a year. Was your workload insane?

A: It was actually kind of fun. ... It kind of harked back a little bit to the Roger Corman days. With the vast amount of money these things make, we don't get paid much - and the speed with which you work, you have to rely on your skill and just get it done.

That's actually a lot more of a creative kind of milieu to work in as opposed to these hundred-million-dollar movies, where there are 50 executives worried about everything.

Q: What's your favorite Roger Corman memory?

A: I was working on "Piranha" and we were shooting all this mayhem, with all these swimmers. Dailies would go back to Los Angeles and Roger would call.

Joe Dante, the director, would be on the phone saying, (sounds exasperated) "OK ... OK ... OK, Roger ... fine, Roger ... OK, fine, thanks." After the conversation was over, we would immediately ask what Roger wanted. Joe would say "He just said 'more blood.' " He wanted more blood on everything.

Q: What's the last movie you've seen with no special effects or visual effects in it?

A: I don't think they make them anymore. Probably "The Informant," although I bet you there were visual effects and I just didn't notice it. I thought that movie was terrific.

Q: Is there a movie that you did good work on that no one talks about?

A: Probably "RoboCop 2," which was a terrible movie doomed from the very beginning, but I look back fondly now because it was the biggest stop-motion (film) since "Mighty Joe Young" in terms of number of shots and complexity. And Craig Hayes' design was so cool.

Q: You have the full-size ED-209 in one of your warehouses. Has anyone offered to buy it?

A: Some British group came by and wanted to buy a bunch of stuff. And I actually thought about it for 20 minutes. It was a lot of money.

Q: And you didn't do it?

A: No. It's my junk. Plus, if it's worth that much now ...

(sfgate.com)

Darkness may be a visual effects artist's best friend, but his biggest enemy isn't bright sunlight -- it's the overcast day. So adding all those CG werewolves to scenes shot in cloudy Vancouver, Canada, was a particular challenge for "New Moon" visual effects supervisor Phil Tippett and his team. "On a sunny day, you get really nice contrasts, but with flat lighting and a furry thing -- the fur really soaks up the light and everything appears flat," Tippett said. "So to make it appear three-dimensional, we had to goose reality. We emphasized their shadows and used rim lights" to make the wolves stand out from the background. But that's not the only way Tippett and company played with reality. When that wolf checks out Bella, it's not a wolf's eyes, it's Jacob's. "We brought Taylor [Lautner] in and had him haul his eyelids back as far as possible and shot close-ups." They then added those eyes to the giant animated timber wolf used in the scene.

(latimesblogs.latimes.com)

"The werewolves are kind of the sentinel protectors of the area," Tippett explains. "And there's nothing from the werewolf mythology of the past: it's a curse of responsibility as the indigenous people of this country. But this gave us a chance to continue doing the dance with the talking, furry animals. So getting these wolves to behave and be lit and act in a convincing manner was our task here. These things are not the classic beasty werewolves, either. They're Timberwolves that are scaled up to be the size of the horse. One of the biggest tricks was to logistically turn a 6-foot tall guy into an 8-foot-long, 1,200-pound wolf. And there are three of these transitions in the movie. Surprisingly, we figured it out early enough.

"We engineered the performances of the actors and their pantomime leading up to the explosive moment because it's anger that motivates these people to actually shape shift into werewolves -- and it has to happen quick and everyone was on the same page with that. The only design adjustment was Chris wanted to have the eyes of the actors in the wolves' heads instead of the very distinctive, golden, wolf eyes."

Tippett additionally worked on what MacLeod calls the "vampire speed" effect, which involves the vamps running at superhuman speeds. "What we decided to do, based on some tests that we did," McLeod explains, "was to shoot any vampire in motion, as light would allow, up to 90 frames-per-second. And then we would take that into the Avid and manipulate that, come up with a speed ramp and then potentially enhance that with some post processing.

"That's where Tippett's effects came in for about a dozen shots we decided to do as a post effect. We did a little bakeoff and had a couple of companies do a test and Tippett had a good-looking test and we went with them. It was based on a happy accident that happened when they did a varied speed for the trailer shot, actually. They ran a Shake script that had a bug in it and the render came back and had an interesting liquid, transparent effect that happened to Taylor's body that resonated with Phil and Matt and they sent it to me. It was the visual equivalent of the sonic boom, in mind, where the person is moving faster than the camera can pick up.

"Then we had a recipe of stuff that did with vampire speed: we shot them stacked because we found that foreground trees were helpful, so with the wolves, we added some foreground CG trees passing by; and, for the actress running through the woods, we shot her long lens with real trees in the foreground; and a few whip pan effects. The challenge was the wolves, so we tried not having wolves and vampires running in the same shot because that would necessitate either seeing the wolves running in slow-motion or speed up the vampires so that they're running at least as fast or faster than the wolves, but that looks silly, so when we ended up having wolves and vamps in the same shot, we used that Tippett post effect."

(awn.com)

In most werewolf movies, men endure a bone-cracking, skin-splitting transformation from human into wolf. But in The Twilight Saga: New Moon, male members of the Native American Quileute tribe—descended, according to legend, from wolves—phase into horse-size wolves by popping out of their skin. And that posed a unique challenge for Phil Tippett, founder of Tippett Studios, which created the werewolves. "We characterized it as the ‘5 pounds of crap in the 2-pound bag' problem," he says. "How to get a 160-ish-pound guy to turn into a 1200-pound wolf is a trick."

To pull off this bit of movie magic, VFX artists first took 3D scans of the lead werewolf actors, including Taylor Lautner, who plays Jacob, and Alex Meraz, who plays Paul. "I was expecting to be in a green suit, with little pins everywhere," Meraz says. "They just had me stand on an apple box, and this big machine came up, down and over. I could watch on the monitor and my whole body was right there onscreen, a perfect scan of it."

The phasing that turned men into 1200-pound wolves was, naturally, one of the first things on the VFX artists' agenda. "The conceit for the transformation, for making the trick work, was that it had to happen quickly," Tippett says. "Our technical supervisor, Erin Boreland, came up with a system for this phasing, which she banged out in a couple of weeks. Everybody was surprised—we thought that would take months to hammer out."

Next, animators had to create the wolves. After determining what the wolves weren't—"beasty werewolf/wolfman-type things," Tippett says, "but timber wolves the size of horses"—animators had to think about conquering the uncanny valley, which occurs when something looks close to its real-life counterpart but not exactly alike, causing a feeling of uneasiness among viewers. "A lot of times, we're dealing with fantastic creatures, like the Cloverfield monster," Tippett says. "When you're doing something like that, you can get away with murder because nobody's ever seen it. But if you're doing a wolf … the audience has seen enough canine behavior to know if you make a false move. It stands out. So we immediately said, ‘We had better understand what timber wolf behavior is.' "

They started with research, analyzing documentary footage of timber wolves and reading books on wolf anatomy. But they didn't stop there. "Animators and guys from the art department went to a wolf preserve outside of Los Angeles," Tippett says. "Our guys got into a big cage with a bunch of wolves and spent the afternoon with them!" The animators filmed video of the wolves jumping, running, playing and fighting. The research helped them build computer models of the wolves from the inside out, starting with rigged skeletal systems that could move, then overlaying them with flexing muscles and, finally, layers of skin and fur.

Director Chris Weitz also wanted the wolves to have the eyes of their human counterparts. "There are a couple of extreme closeups of Jacob's wolf's eyes with Bella (Kristen Stewart) reflected in them," Tippett says. Eyes, which have to emote, are notoriously difficult to realistically pull off, so VFX artists got reference directly from the source. "When we were on the set, we got a closeup-lens camera and we asked Taylor to pull back his eyelids as far as he could stand to do and went in for a couple of closeups. That's what we used as a model for Jacob's eyes."

Eventually, it was time to combine the elements. For the first transformation—when Meraz phases—"his body sort of goes out of control," Tippett says. "Then he recoils and springs out. And at that point we began to take over his forward momentum as the wolf. We had to make a digital model of Alex [using the 3D scan] that would allow for the in-between stages and, for lack of a better term, morph between the wolf shape and the human shape." The wolf head pops out first, then the rest of his body. His clothes are destroyed. "His trousers get torn off in a PG kind of way," Tippett laughs. "He's more wolf than human by that time." The entire transformation takes about half a second.

Aside from creating the transformation, the biggest challenge for the animators was making the wolf fur look realistic. "Our art department just spent months getting the fur groomed and painted and working with the animation," Tippett says. "The effects animation team spent months working out the dynamics of the fur [using in-house fur-simulation tools] so it wasn't stiff. In once scene, Jacob [as a wolf] ends up on a cliff overlooking the ocean on a stormy day, and all the trees in the background are blowing around—so all the fur has to blow around. Dynamically, figuring all that stuff out is really tricky."

Tippett's next challenge is tackling Eclipse, the third film in the Twilight series, which filmed almost immediately after New Moon. Tippett's digital wolves have several big fight sequences in the film. "It's huge," Tippett says. "We're ramping up on it. We're just starting to get shots now."

(popularmechanics.com)