Paul Kavanagh talks animation and challenges
With Red Tails out now on DVD and Blu-ray, The Fan Carpet had the pleasure to interview Paul Kavanagh, the lead animator at Industrial Light & Magic.
His many film credits include the Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises, The Adventures of Pinocchio, Flubber, The Lost World: Jurassic Park and the Harry Potter series. He received an Academy Award nomination for Best Achievement in Visual Effects for J.J. Abrams’s 2009 reboot of Star Trek.
In Red Tails a crew of African American pilots in the Tuskegee training program, having faced segregation while kept mostly on the ground during World War II, are called into duty under the guidance of Col. A.J. Bullard.
So much of your career has been spent in Indian Jones and Star Wars related content – it must be refreshing to step away from that for a change?
The best part of my job is that projects are vastly different from one to another, I could be animating a creature fighting a robot in the Star Wars universe one day or flying P51’s in a huge dogfight another. I’m a huge Star Wars / Indian Jones fan and I originally joined ILM to have the opportunity to work on the Star Wars Prequels almost 16 years ago now and it’s been a roller coaster ride ever since!
What was it about the Tuskegee Airmen story that fascinated you so much?
Just how these brave men not only fought through the war but how they also had to fight through discrimination.
Did you feel a sense of responsibility taking on a story that has affected many people across the years?
Yes indeed and we wanted to tell that story as true as it could be even with the visual effects. We did a lot of research to make sure we were building, animating and rendering our CG models with all the correct period detail.
ILM is the industry leader, were there any new pioneering techniques you developed for Red Tails?
We knew we would be relying heavily on the amazing animatics Anthony, George and their team of skilled artists were producing at Skywalker Ranch for the actions sequences of the movie. We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel when it came to turning those animatics into real shots back in the ILM pipeline so we decided to animate the show in the same Lucasfilm proprietary software ‘Zviz’ that the animatics were created in. That gave us the ability to start where they had left off and add the hi resolution planes, animate the control surfaces, add the digital double pilots and play with the composition. For some shots we followed the animatics very closely and others we completely started from scratch changing the shot design and action if we thought we could tell the story more clearly.
What new challenges did Red Tails present when bringing the story to life?
We just wanted to keep it as real as possible. We wanted the audience to feel like they were up there with those brave guys living their experiences. We talked to one of the world’s best P51 aerobatic pilots ‘Ed Shipley’ about how they would fly these amazing machines in the real world and not just the computer. His input was invaluable, we kept the flight dynamics of the dog fights within real world physics as much as possible. We would adjust shot design and camera moves to make them feel more like period WWII aerial footage, we would even animate a second air plane which was the ‘camera plane’ to get the same feeling of shooting these dogfights and action shots in the real world. All those touches help the audience to feel like they were actually there.
RED TAILS IS OUT NOW ON BLU-RAY, DVD AND TO DOWNLOAD, COURTESY OF MOMENTUM PICTURES