North animator Paul Kavanagh hopes for Oscar glory

Feb 28 2010 by Coreena Ford, Sunday Sun

Producing magic out of darkness

PAUL’S job as an animation supervisor sounds exciting and he gets to work with esteemed directors like JJ Abrams, George Lucas and James Cameron.

But the reality is that – aside from occasional set visits – he spends most of his time in a dark room working on a computer, rendering objects to make sure they appear to move properly in the finished film.

He said: "For Avatar we did the gunships and helicopters, looking at the flight dynamics to make sure they weren’t moving too fast or too slow.

"And in Star Trek we animated the ice planet monsters called Big Red and Polarilla, which was a cross between a gorilla and a polar bear."

Paul explained that getting objects and creatures to move on screen is a little like computerised stop-motion animation, a techinique first used by Ray Harryhausen.

He said: "You move a puppet inside the computer by saving a key frame, move it, then save it, move it, then save it, and so on. The thing about computers is that you can adjust it later . . . with the old style of 3D models you had to start over.

"For Big Red, we had to get all the nuances right – it’s belly, skin flaps inside its mouth, the eyes on its back – and it took five animators six months to do a sequence that lasts just over a minute.

"Star Trek and Avatar are the two favourite films I’ve worked on. JJ Abrams, the director of Star Trek, is such a nice guy. I think Star Trek 2 will happen but I think he will do something else first.

"James Cameron has a reputation of being a tough guy to work with but he just doesn’t suffer fools gladly. Once we were in the groove and we were achieving the look he wanted he couldn’t compliment us enough.

"I asked him about another Avatar but he said he can’t think of that at the moment."