精灵鼠小弟 Stuart Little (1999)【完整台词】

That was in New York at 3:00 in the
morning as the sun was coming up.

This is an interesting shot.

We have the shadows of the cats
talking on this garage door.

This proved to be extremely difficult
to get these nuances of animation.

This was impossible to do
with a real cat...

so we basically shot
blue screen profiles of cats...

and then morphed
and cut and pasted in the computer...

and did all kinds of things to get
the performance of them talking.

The other approach would've been
to create them...

just as a cell-animated technique
and then composite them...

but we had a more realistic feeling
from them...

doing them
as a blue screen element.

Now we're coming to Central Park.

One of the things that's
interesting about the cats was...

Again, this is a sequence
that I got to direct.

And I sat down with Rob,
went through the sequence...

and storyboarded everything
we wanted and how to do it.

Then we got on-stage
and started working with the cats.

And not that the cats didn't
want to do what you wanted...

but often times their "interpretation,"
in quotes...

was better
than what you had planned.

And I think there are
sort of some happy mistakes...

that occurred
in the cats' performances...

both here and in the end sequence
in the film...

where their expressions
have more emotion to them...

than what you could
possibly have designed.

The stuff here
where the cats discover Stuart...

which you'll see in a minute,
is funny.

The looks on their faces
and the way they move.

There's also some great lighting
on the CG Stuart in front of the car.

We had to make the feeling...

that the headlights
were behind him.

And the interaction between cat
and Stuart here really works well.

So, you know, for integration purposes
we also had to add...

reflections of Stuart in the doors.
These are things that really help you...

feel that Stuart's there.

You must be Stuart.

Actually, I must...

When he goes behind the windshield,
there's a distortion effect.

You have to match whenever
the camera changes focus...

if it off Stuart to something else...

we then, in the computer,
have to match.

Basically, we blur him and animate
the blur, so it's timed correctly.

In order to make the cats in this car
look like they're going down a hill...

which we weren't able
to photograph...

we built the trees at an angle,
on a much flatter hill.

And you don't notice the fact
that the hill is only...

at about a 5 degree tilt
as opposed to a 15 degree tilt.

It's an old trick, but in fact it's great.

It's real movie magic
from a historical perspective.

The cats landing in this next shot
were shot at a separate time...

from the car departing
and then composited together.

So no, we weren't able
to get the car to leave...

and the cats to land
at the same time.

The cats landed on one piece of film,
the car departed on another...

and the two were
match-moved together...

and synch-lapped,
basically cross-dissolved...

so it appeared that the cats landed
much closer to the car than they were.

We travelled from...
We go, let's see...

One, we go from one stage...

to another stage,
to yet a third stage...

to a parking lot and back to the
first stage again, in this sequence.

So the cut you've just seen...

from the point at which
Stuart enters the park...

to the point at which
he splashes in the water...

was done in five different places...

that were meant to look
as though it was one scene.

These are all our shots
of Stuart in the water.

We had to contend now
with what is more fur, basically.

How does fur look when he's wet?
We did something called clumping.

If you look at how animals get wet,
their fur strands sticks together...

and in this case,
we applied this to Stuart's fur...

and we had to take some time to
make sure he still looked appealing.

Didn't look too spiky
with his clumped fur.

So it was a balance
of he had to appear wet...

and then also still look good.

The suitcase in these shots
are a real suitcase.

Though some of them,
they're also CG.

Here he leaps to his safety.
That's a great shot.

That's one of my favourite shots
of the wet Stuart right there.

Tina, Uncle Stretch...

Yeah, all the tunnel ones basically...

were a great challenge...

in making sure that
the lighting on him felt realistic.

And actually they were one of the
better sequences in the film.

Yeah, Jay Redd, who was
responsible for creating Stuart's fur...

and overseeing the fur...
Maintaining the fur...

during the course of the movie...

worked long and hard on
getting the clumping to work...

so that the fur looked wet.

And then, of course, added to that
were the specular highlights...

the reflectivity off the fur
to give it that sort of shiny feel...

that you get from wet fur.

I made it.

We split up the responsibilities
of different aspects...

of developing Stuart
among different departments...

so a certain person, Jay Redd,
would be in charge of fur...

as John mentioned,
there's effects animation...

there's physiquing, there's cloth...

and that way you can have
somebody really focus...

on a particular part of Stuart.

Because he was extremely
complicated to create...

because his realism really lays in all
the level of details that you notice.

But you don't want to be
fixated on them.

We went to the details of painting
veins in the flesh of his ears...

and having a bump on his nose,
and just the right degree...

of skin coming through
his muzzle...

to make him appear like a mouse,
but not too much flesh...

so that he appeared unappealing.

We studied a lot of mice.

We looked at what
features made them cute.

If you look closely a mouse,
they're not that cute.

Their tails don't have any hair
on them, their ears are bare...

so, we made Stuart's ears furry,
you know, kind of like a rabbit.

And even you'll notice Snowbell here...

how his ears are fuzzier.

So you notice the tail,
we actually put fur on it.

His hands... Stuart's hands
look like a small boy's hands.

And he's proportioned
as if he was a small boy.

So even though he has the overall
feeling of a mouse...

if you examine all his components,
you can see he's a hybrid...

of a lot of different...
From a lot of different sources.

This shot is mystifying because
everyone wonders how Stuart...

was able to climb up
onto the tabletop here.

And we're not telling.

That's nice lighting.

Some things that always
were important on the mouse.

One of them was rim light.
We used movie-star lighting.

We had a little back-cross to give
him a white line around his outside.

It helped separated him
from the background...

and also made his fur
look very clean.

And the whiskers were no mean feat.

To give the whiskers the right size
and right level of reflectivity...

in each of these scenes...

was a critical component
of making the character have life...

as were the reflections in the eyes.

These shots are interesting.

The picture that you see
of the family in the frame...

initially when we shot this,
there was not a cutout of Stuart.

Then they changed the story line...

and later we had
to run a couple shots...

and add the hole
that was cut out by the family...

when they were looking
for a picture for the posters.

And here comes everybody's
favourite shot.

This is a good example
of the height of field. The foreground...

was out of focus,
and we had to place him in that area.

So we had to blur
the bottom half of his body.

And this is the famous tear shot.

Bye, Snowbell.

It's famous internally.
We'll see how famous it becomes...

There was a debate about whether
you should make Stuart cry or not.

The rule of thumb is if you want
sympathy for your character...

you don't actually make him cry...

you make him a little wet-eyed.
But in this case...

the effect of his tear
humanized him so much...

Rob decided to go for it.
We had two versions originally.

We broke with tradition.

This picture always kills us...

because it's an airbrushed
picture of Stuart...

that we had to make
for a prop on the set...

months before we had
Stuart finished.

So it always looks different
than the real Stuart...

and we wanted to go back
and add the real Stuart on top of that...

but never got around to it.

This is a good example
of how we had to cheat the focus.

When we photographed this,
the area that Stuart's walking to...

is completely out of focus.
But if we followed the plate...

Stuart would be totally blurry.
We cheated his bottom half blurry...

and kept his face sharp
so you could still see it...

and it still works.

Coming up is a sequence where
we spend a lot of time in Central Park.

And it's a very, very dark sequence...

inasmuch as it's at night.

During the course of production,
Kodak came out with a new film stock.

And we had shot the first half
of our work, or not half...

maybe 30 percent of our work,
on an old print stock.

And that stock was lower contrast
than the new stock.

And we ended up having to switch
from one type of stock...

low contrast, to another type,
high contrast...

in the middle of the production.