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AW: It makes for a lot of variety, too, doesn't it?

NICK: Oh, yeah. We're dealing with all manner of stuff, and at the same time, having to very quickly just fly through all sorts of different ideas and rig up all sorts of things. If we need a way to shoot on board a ship and have it feel like a steadycam, we'll need a new camera rig for that. Or maybe we'll need some sort of crazy texture-swapping, OK, we'll rig that up. There's just all sorts of Bizarro, new needs that come flying through the department really fast, you know… we need it now!

AW: 'Blueprints done fast', eh?

NICK: Exactly.

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AW: You were talking about the Layout Cut of the film. On certain DVDs, they will release sort of the animatic. I don't think I've ever seen an animatic for an entire film, but certainly good portions of a film. I think Pixar is fond of doing that.

NICK: Part of it is that the concept of Animatics and 3D Layout and all that sort of stuff is still relatively new. It's now starting to catch on. You're starting to hear about it happening for half the action films that are realeased nowadays. So, it's becoming enough of a common thing that people are starting to be interested in it. I wouldn't be surprised in a couple of years if we could actually release a Layout View cut of the film as a bonus feature.

One of the obstacles to doing that would be the fact that there are additional changes to the dialog and to the length of shots that happen after the Layout stage, and we don't necessarily keep out stuff up to date on that. So it might not be a super-clean transition into the whole film.

AW: I would find it very instructional.

NICK: It's instructional for me. I think it would be super-instructional for folks who are learning about the craft, too.

AW: So, the people who are working on the film… are they watching the whole film as a 3D animatic?

NICK: No, we'll do one sequence at a time. There are maybe 30 sequences or so in a film. Each sequence is 2 or 3 minutes long. Very rarely would you wind up watching more than a sequence at a time in Layout form.

They'll watch the whole film together, assembled, but even then, they'll watch storyboards and animation and lighting. Traditionally, that was because one of the things we don't typically do is a lot of facial animation. That takes a long time and we're trying to work quickly. And so traditionally, all the layout characters had this blank look on their faces, and that tends to undercut the emotion.

On this film, on Shrek the Third, one of our supergeniuses came up with this new idea to use the default poses of facial expressions that the character animators had already created. Basically, we stole those heads and swapped in low-res versions of those heads so we could take advantage of all those emotions. We've only got stock emotions that way, but then the directors also aren't trying to micro-direct. 'Could you make him just a little more happier, could you make him just a little bit sadder…' It's just a stock emotion, just a stand-in.

But as a result of using this process, you feel the emotion and the flow of the sequence a lot better. There were sometimes I remember seeing a full cut of the film where they started to include some Layout shots cut in amongst it. So I wouldn't surprised if swapping in expressive heads continues, I wouldn't be surprised to see Layout shots cut into these rough cuts more often. It will take convincing folks that it still flows well and that it's worth doing.

AW: Obviously, there are tons of obstacles you run into during the making of a film like this. Can you think of one in particular that sticks in your mind, and the way that you overcame it?

NICK: One of the biggest ones is in the climax of the film. The climax takes place a stage. It all flows together, but in our terms, that was actually three sequences. You just have to chop it up so that it's digestible various departments down the line. So, we've got these three big sequences. We do all the work on one of them because the story's ready and the first third where they're doing the stage show. That's all pretty well worked out so that can go through quickly. But meanwhile, the climax still needs a little sorting out of dialog and what exactly we want to have every person doing, and how all the elements are going to impact each other.

So, it was very late in the game when we finally got to shooting the climax. But once we get there, we realized that the set really didn't fit. We didn't have the space to do the things that we want to do. So, we try to cheat the set pieces, for instance, we cheated the Swamp House back a bit to give us double the room actually on the stage. Do you notice that? Do you feel it when you cut it directly with the other sequences? We moved all these set pieces around, and then we had all these complications where you're shooting in this wide open stage, spinning around 360 degrees, and seeing in every which direction. That's a lot of characters to keep track of and figure out who all you should be seeing in various scenes. We're still trying to figure out just what some people are doing in the middle of all this. We didn't even take the whole sequence as a whole, but the first half or the second half, and then figuring out that middle part there a little later. Dealing with the character continuity was HUGE.

A lot of time it is just a matter of figuring out what we can get away with, the things that no one is going to notice, you know, changing camera angles just a bit. There's a scene where you just lose where Fiona's standing, so that you don't see here and you don't think about here. There are all sorts of little shot-by-shot tricks you have to pull off just to keep the overall flow of things working so that nobody really thinks about all the people popping up in the wrong place at the wrong time in a sequence like that.

"You just kind of flow with it. If the flow is right, it's amazing what the audience will let you get away with. And at the same time, there are times when you can be technically, completely correct, 100% continuous, True Continuity. But if you're just not shooting it right, or if the flow of the scene isn't working right, it can feel completely wrong." --Nick Walker

AW: More fodder for the director's commentary, then, right? 'You're not going to notice, but Fiona isn't in the coming shot, and then she shows up on the left side of the stage…'

NICK: (Laughs) Exactly.

AW: It's amazing what people don't notice, though, isn't it?

NICK: That's the thing. This is one of the things you find in animation. We sit there just looking at each individual shot so many times over and over again, and we have the power to change things constantly. So there's always that feeling that something isn't perfectly Continous, and we should fix that.

I was watching Point Blank just today, which is this late 60's Lee Marvin film. Listening to the director's commentary on that, they talk about how Lee Marvin's suit changes at one point. He never really had time to go anywhere and pick up new clothes, but it kind of fit the color scheme, so they went with it. You don't even think about it. You just kind of flow with it. If the flow is right, it's amazing what the audience will let you get away with. And at the same time, there are times when you can be technically, completely correct, 100% continuous, True Continuity. But if you're just not shooting it right, or if the flow of the scene isn't working right, it can feel completely wrong. You've got to figure out a way to change how you're shooting it, change how you're cutting it, introduce a cheat or something like that just to make it flow right and feel right.

Really, there's no magic bullet for it. Sometimes you want those cheats to actually make the flow feel better. It's just part of the Art part of it.

AW: Yeah… well, it is an art, isn't it? It's an art as well as a science, and a very powerful tool.

NICK: Definitely.

AW: Well, it sounds like you've been having a lot of fun. I guess that's all I really have for you, so thanks a whole lot for talking.

NICK: Yeah, no problem.

Shrek the Third is in theatres currently.

Special thanks to Olivier Mouroux and Nick Walker for their assistance putting this article together.