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Feathers, Fur and Fire in Free Birds

Free Birds is an unlikely tale of two talking turkeys brought to life by Texan production company, ReelFX we caught up with them to discuss their first solo venture.

Free Birds is an unlikely tale of two talking turkeys brought to life by Texan production company, ReelFX we caught up with them to discuss their first solo venture.

All images copyright (as supplied by PR): ReelFX

Dallas, Texas-based studio Reel FX has, until now, served some of Hollywoods biggest animation studios. Its worked on big films such as The Wild, for which it created the opening sequence, and the Open Season sequels, which were developed in conjunction with Sony Pictures Animation. But the studio felt the need to create a feature-length theatrical project for itself, and it did so with the unlikeliest of stars: turkeys.

Free Birds protagonists are no ordinary turkeys, though. Reggie (Owen Wilson) enjoys a life of luxury at Camp David, but his laid-back lifestyle is rudely interrupted by Jake (Woody Harrelson), who wishes to go back in time and permanently remove his species from the Thanksgiving menu.

The artist delivered renders, volume dtex renders, and electricity geometry to the lighting and compositing team for final tweaks


In order to travel back to the past, the turkeys must steal a time machine from an underground base, which proved to be one of the films most challenging effects, according to effects supervisor Walter Behrnes.

The direction was to have this time pod sitting in the middle of this big room, and then there's this swirling vortex, which eventually grows off of the egg, and around all that there's a bunch of fog that's also spinning as well, says Walter. The technical challenge of the effect was; how do you render something volumetric that big?

An artist created the electrical elements for the time travel sequence

Once lighting was approved, ReelFX layered in the background fog with a rough composite to start testing illumination


Initially, Walter and his team tried point based rendering (PBR) in the latest beta version of Side Effects Houdini animation software. When that failed to give the effect they wanted, they switched to a shader to generate a point cloud, which was then used to change the colour of the volume. It worked, but Walter was still unhappy with the effect.

We went back to the drawing board and then we re-optimised a couple of things, introduced a new volume type; we tried that and we ended up working out a way to get the PBR to work, says Walter It just took a matter of about five months to get it working.

"We had thirty or forty individual fires, and these are all volumetric, and getting that to work with the memory was quite challenging"

Another scene in which the turkeys must escape from a flaming underground lair proved equally tricky for Walter. The whole set's on fire, in every shot there's fire, he says. We didn't want to run a simulation on every single shot, so we ended up developing a tool that would instance pre-simulated fires throughout the shot, which proved to be difficult in itself because to fill the background we had tons of fires in here. We had thirty or forty individual fires, and these are all volumetric, and getting that to work with the memory was quite challenging.

These fire simulations were used across several sequences as a generic drop in element

Here the artist would render fire and smoke layers and check for errors

Feather and fur

Meanwhile, feather and fur character supervisor (which has to be one of the coolest job titles ever) Monika Sawyer was facing her own problems creating a semi-realistic way of creating the turkeys plumes. The answer lay in AVIAN, the proprietary software ReelFX built for the film.

We went to a turkey farm, which is always fun field trips!

The great thing about AVIAN is that it's the first system that I've ever worked with that is actually real-time feedback inside your Maya viewport, she says. So all the way down to every single individual barb of every feather, our artists could see in real-time without having to render.

Reggies final fur groom contains over 30 different feather clubs and approximately 6.2 million hairs


Research was also important to the team, and despite the films cartoony look it still needed a degree of realism. We went to a turkey farm, which is always fun field trips! she says.

We took a lot of video, a lot of photography, we ended up getting some real feathers in the studio. We definitely wanted to make sure that the underlying structure is based off of real life. They all have quills, they all have barbs, they have downy feathers at the end, they have all the basic elements of turkey feathers.

The default rig for the animators

Reggies wings were a complex layer of controls. At the very top layer, animators only had to worry about four main controls to pose the majority of the feathers

Deforming guides were created for Jakes wings and tail to blend the motion of the hero and body feathers

The view from the top

Digital supervisor Scott Peterson oversaw the whole production with David Esneault, and he was keen to keep to schedule while delivering a huge amount of varied characters both avian and human. In addition to the challenge of creating feathers, the films average character count is 10, and there were lots of crowd shots.

We built our entire cast of characters off of a base set of about 20 meshes

To tackle the problem, ReelFX used a set of basic character meshes which could be altered to create new people and beasts. We built our entire cast of characters off of a base set of about 20 meshes, he says. There's something like 50 different turkeys in the end, but they had point compatibility with a base set of seven.

Working this way meant that most of the teams creating the film came in ahead of schedule something of a rarity in the world of animation. The AVIAN system came into its own, too, with the team adding feathers to the birds in a mere couple of days, when two weeks had been scheduled.

Whenever possible we used the exact same mesh, says Scott. When you see the president, later on in the movie there are these three huntsmen who are actually built over his mesh, but they look nothing like him at all. These are tricks that we've learned over the years, because we did a lot of client-based work, and they can be extremely picky.

This is a pre-simulated sequence based on smoke by location

End credits

Much like the titular turkeys, ReelFX enjoyed a certain amount of freedom when it came to Free Birds. "This isn't for the studio, we're making it for ourselves. I think there's a learning curve there where you've got to pull back on your own desires," says Walter.

The final elements are approved and sent to the compositing team to be combined with other render elements



"For the first time we got to push ourselves," says Scott, echoing Walter's sentiments. "One of the tricks with a client is to find out what the client wants and to try to get there as quickly as possible and move on. Now is our chance to raise the bar; we could look at our work and call attention to certain details. We could spend more time to make it more story-driven."

Free Birds was also Monika's first job at ReelFX, and she appreciated being able to create AVIAN from the ground up. "Everybody contributed, everybody came up with solutions, and in the end I think we made a really great film it's funny, it's entertaining I like those kinda movies! We're really proud of it."

Free Birds is released on 1 November in the USA and 29 November in the UK.

Related links

ReelFX website
The Free Birds movie official site

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