Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed

Special Effects

See our review here

Effective enhancements

An unassuming business park in the upscale beachside community of Marina del Rey, California, is an unlikely home for Rhythm & Hues, one of the preeminent producers of visual effects and character animation with more than 75 movies to its credit, including Babe (which was recognized with an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects), X-Men 2, Daredevil, The Cat in the Hat, Elf, Garfield: The Movie, Scooby-Doo and its sequel Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. But maybe the mellow, unpretentious atmosphere is the company’s key to ongoing creative flow and productivity, even when its employees are in the midst of painstaking, time-consuming work.

Kind of like what they’ve been doing as of late on Scooby-Doo 2, one of the primary projects that has been keeping Rhythm & Hues working around the clock in 2004. According to Rhythm & Hues Visual Effects Supervisor Betsy Paterson, at the peak of production, they had 325 employees working on post-production special effects in Scooby-Doo 2, or about half the company’s employees.

And no wonder. They’re responsible for creating and enhancing some of the more high profile CGI elements in Scooby-Doo 2 including the film’s top dog, Scooby-Doo, who’s had some work done since the last film.

This includes a more realistic look by adding fur, as well as more gloss to it and some of Scooby’s other features – like shinier eyes and a wetter nose. This is partly due to the substantial effort spent on lighting Scooby.

“We wanted to make Scooby more of a physical presence. So we worked a lot on how the light interacts with him. Environmental lighting has improved quite a bit since we made the first Scooby-Doo film, which we also used it in, but not as well as we could have. For Scooby-Doo 2, we brought an HDRI (High Dynamic Range Imaging) camera and attached it to a regular stills camera, so with every shot, we’re also taking a spherical picture of the whole environment. And then we used those shots to light Scooby from real lights on the set and that helps a lot to add to the realism of his look,” she describes.

Despite the frantic rate at which she’s worked to make her deadlines, Paterson, who worked on both Scooby-Doo films, appears relaxed and understanding of even the more challenging aspects to her work on Scooby-Doo 2.

“You can’t really say ‘no,’ but I have to warn [director] Raja Gosnell ahead of time if something is going to be really tough. Usually he wants to do it anyway,” she laughs.

Among the “tough” things are making “the interaction between the live-action and CG characters seamless,” according to Paterson. She admits that certain actors are better at it than others, describing Matthew Lillard, who plays Scooby’s inseparable buddy Shaggy as “very good,” a fortunate thing considering he spends most of his time with the various CG characters.

“Matthew is great at keeping an eyeline. He was even very good in the really long scenes where he’s just walking across the set. You’ll notice that he always looks down and he’s always thinking about Scooby being right next to him. That gives us a lot to work with when we go to animate Scooby because we can play off of the interaction. Every time Shaggy throws him a look, we make sure that Scooby looks back up at him,” she adds.

It’s also been challenging for Paterson to find the right “balance in Scooby’s look between animation and live-action because he’s not a flat, two-dimensional character, but at the same time, Scooby can’t be too real because he has to do things that a real dog can’t do, like jumps and flips.”

Two-dimensional character animation is something that Rhythm & Hues Animation Director Leon Joosen is quite familiar with. That’s how he’s been animating since the beginning of his career, during which he’s worked on films like The Little Mermaid and the first Scooby-Doo.

However, Scooby-Doo 2 is done in three-dimensional animation, which is what most of the industry has recently converted to because of the added depth and realism. For Joosen, the biggest challenge has been “trying to define what Scooby as a 3-D character was going to be compared to a 2-D character.”

Despite the challenges, Joosen says 3-D animation definitely has its advantages including the fact that he can take an image, “and rotate it, so [he] can actually see what it looks like from different angles.”

But he gets quite nostalgic for 2-D animation. “2-D animation has become a novelty, but I don’t think it’s ever going away – like movies never went away when television came in – but it definitely is a second runner to 3-D,” he admits.

Scooby-Doo 2 is no exception to this shift in animation style. In fact, with the film’s plot centering on the return of classic ghosts who appear in the original 1970 television series on which the Scooby-Doo films are based – Tar Monster, 10,000 Volt Monster, Pterodactyl Monster, Captain Cutler’s Ghost, and Black Knight Ghost among them – it was instrumental to bringing these monsters back with a modern-day twist.

One, or make that two, of the monsters who audiences in test screenings have responded most positively to are the Skelemen – twin skeleton-like creatures with one large eye – which Rhythm & Hues was also responsible for, although it wasn’t in their original plan book.

Because of the immense work that creating one of these animated creatures takes, several different companies are responsible for the various monsters. Rhythm & Hues, who was originally assigned Scooby and the CG backgrounds only, were working on a slope chase sequence where Scooby’s chased down by the Skelemen. “It would have been too difficult to split that up into two different studios. So we got the Skelemen, giving us total control over the interaction between them and Scooby,” Joosen explains.

He further explains that part of Skelemen’s popularity can be attributed to the fact that they have “a natural comic aspect to them,” modeled after classic comedy duos like Abbott & Costello or Laurel & Hardy. “One’s the little guy and the other’s this big buffoon. And that’s what we patterned the Skelemen after – one is smart and he has a red eye and the other one is stupid and he has a green eye.”

Similar to the balancing act they had to do when enhancing the CG Scooby, Paterson and Joosen and team had to find a balance between danger and silliness with the Skelemen. “The biggest problem was that they had to be scary enough, otherwise, they’d be completely ineffectual, but they couldn’t be too scary for all the children in the audience,” Joosen concludes.

He seems satisfied with the end result saying that “the balance that we reached was quite good.”

And despite the fact that, because of ever-changing technology and time constraints there will always be a “little polish work” that she could go back and do, Paterson agrees, “I think we did a really good job…it was nice to get a second chance to do everything you wished you had done the first time.”

Send us your feedback on this article or anything else in The Blurb