Talk with the animals.(use of animation in the live action film 'Racing Stripes')

The live-action film Racing Stripes is all about overcoming obstacles to reach an ambitious goal. In the movie, when a young zebra named Stripes first lays his eyes on the Turfway Racetrack bordering his farm home, he believes that if he trains hard enough, he'll be able to achieve Thoroughbred racing's top honors, the so-called Kentucky Crown. With verbal encouragement from his animal and insect friends--who do indeed talk in this family film--Stripes is off to the races.

On the other side of the fence, digital artists overcame their own obstacles to enable the animals to speak and deliver their lines with feeling. Many of the film's digital effects, distributed among four studios, were of the talking animals, ranging from Goose the gangster pelican to a cranky Shetland pony named Tucker. And creating lip sync for such a menagerie presented its own challenges, says Pierre Raymond, president of Hybride Technologies, a Quebec, Canada, postproduction facility that was hired by Digiscope to animate the manic CG horsefly duo Buzz and Scuzz, the wise goat Franny, the lazy bloodhound Lightning, Tucker, and the star, Stripes.

In fact, this project was Hybride's first opportunity at lip-syncing animals. So before bidding on the project, the studio conducted internal tests on some nontalking animals it had created for Spy Kids 2. "We started working on expression for that project, and realized that we were on the right track," says Raymond.

The Hybride artists then refined their lip-sync technique and applied it to their assigned characters, using the same process for each one, whether a live animal, such as Stripes, or 3D models, such as Buzz and Scuzz. The process involved digitally replacing not only the mouths of the characters, but also their eyes and ears so they would be more expressive while they spoke.

To accomplish this, the team ...