Whale of a Tale. (User focus: film).(Big Idea Productions' Jonah--A VeggieTales Movie)

Big Idea Productions--which in the past nine years has established itself as a major player in the video market with its VeggieTales movies for children--has recently planted itself in the 3D feature-film arena with its first big-screen release, titled Jonah--A VeggieTales Movie. Based on the biblical story of Jonah and the whale, the film features the studio's familiar characters--Larry the Cucumber, Bob the Tomato, Archibald the Asparagus, and the rest of the garden-patch group--as they set out on a modern-day high-seas adventure.

As Big Idea discovered, taking this giant leap from video to feature film required more than garden-variety animation techniques. "We had to re-evaluate our processes and figure out what we had to do to make our project work on a bigger screen," says Marc Vulcano, director of animation. "A feature film with its larger, wider format is not as forgiving as direct-to-home videos. We realized we had to raise the bar, especially when it came to our textures mad the number of objects and characters that appear in a scene." On average, each scene required three to four times file imagery used in the videos.

The entire film project--like the videos--was completed in Alias|Wavefront's Maya. The group used Adobe Systems' Photoshop for painting the image textures and mattes, while compositing was done with Alias|Wavefront's Composer. In the early stages, Big ...