Tongue-wagging effects.(film; Rainmaker Studios' Good Boy)

For the recent live-action film Good Boy, the team at Rainmaker Studios in Vancouver, British Columbia, taught some new dogs a variation of an old trick. While giving real animals the ability to speak typically entails proprietary tools and techniques, at least for sophisticated lip sync, this time the gift of gab was accomplished with off-the-shelf software and hardware solutions, including a new commercial render format from Industrial Light & Magic (ILM).

In this "Lilo & Stitch meets Cats and Dogs" story from Jim Henson Pictures and MGM, a 12-year-old boy named Owen adopts a stray mutt called Hubble. However, the dog is actually a scout from Sirius, the Dog Star, dispatched to Earth to check on the progress of canine spies sent thousands of years earlier on a mission to take over the planet.

A fluke accident with Hubble's radio equipment allows Owen to understand dog speak, enabling him to communicate with his new friend and the four dogs he walks daily. Together, they are able to convince the supreme canine commander, the Greater Dane, that the dogs indeed have succeeded in assuming control over the humans, albeit in a different way than was initially intended.

Good Boy, in postproduction for a year, incorporates more than 450 digital effects, 350 of which entail mixing live-action sequences with CG muzzle replacements for realistic canine facial movements. To accomplish the majority of this work, Rainmaker used NewTek's LightWave for modeling, animation, and matchmoving. The team also used Worley Laboratories' Sasquatch Fur for texturing the CG muzzles with photorealistic hair. To composite the final models into the scene, the group used eyeon Software's Digital Fusion and Discreet's inferno. To simulate the physics, the artists used Alias Systems' Maya, which enabled them to calculate the appropriate amount of shake in the dogs' jowls as they spoke. On the hardware side, the group used Boxx Technologies' 3DBoxx workstations.

In all, the team replaced muzzles on seven different dogs. The most complicated of the animals was Hubble, a scruffy terrier that appears in nearly half of the talking-dog shots. "He had ten times more fur than any of the other animals," says Jason Dowdeswell, digital supervisor at Rainmaker. "In addition, his fur was difficult to light because it had a unique sheen and specularity, making it look inconsistent from shot to shot. So, we had to remodel [the muzzle] and relight it for almost every scene."

One of the other canines, Shep, a Bernese mountain dog, also required extra work because of its heavy panting. "When we shot the photography, we tried to make sure that the dogs had their mouths closed, so when we'd insert the CG muzzle into the plate, we wouldn't have to do a lot of plate reconstruction," Dowdeswell explains. "But with Shep, ...