Interview: Mac Whiting on Rotoscoping the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special

ComingSoon spoke with lead animator Mac Whiting about creating the animated scenes for The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special with Stoopid Buddy Stoodios. Whiting talked about the rotoscoping process and the character he would like to animate.

"In The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, the Guardians, on a mission to make Christmas unforgettable for Quill, travel to Earth in search of the perfect gift," reads the synopsis. "Marvel Studios' special presentation stars Chris Pratt, Dave Bautista, Karen Gillan and Pom Klementieff, with Vin Diesel as Groot and Bradley Cooper as Rocket, Sean Gunn and The Old 97's with Michael Rooker and Kevin Bacon."

Spencer Legacy: For people who may not know much about animation, can you give a brief summary of the process of animating these sequences?

Mac Whiting: Absolutely. This particular project was truly unique in so many ways, as I'm sure you can tell by the final product. James Gunn and Marvel first reached out to do this animated section of the special. They were already planning to do a rotoscope style. They wanted to go back to the Ralph Bakshi movies of the 60s and 70s that used that kind of approach. For those of you viewers or listeners who don't know, rotoscope is basically the process of drawing on live footage. The initial process was a test that I animated using B-roll footage of Yondu from the original Guardians of the Galaxy movie provided by Marvel, and through that process I explored a lot of character design and style and general appearance. be.

Marvel dug this. Talking to them, we all agreed that the only way to do it authentically was to film the whole sequence in live-action. So they took Seth Green and Matt Senreich, the co-founders of Stoopid Buddy, and myself to a stage in Georgia Sound, where we got to shoot the sequence with James Gunn, Sean Gunn – who plays Kraglin, and then they had a child actor replacing young Peter, which was really cool, obviously an amazing experience. Marvel edited that footage and provided us [with] that edit to base our animation on. Then at that point, after producing the test, it was clear [that] I wasn't going to be able to animate all of this on my own. So we called on the talents of Studio Moshi in Australia, and they helped us with the complete production of the piece. It was just a really cool, cool experience.

I wanted to ask about Studio Moshi. Was this 24 hour schedule difficult, because even though no one is working 24 hours a day, the project is still going on in different time zones?

Yeah, that was unique. It was a labor of love. It was a lot of work. it was a lot of drawing. So I found myself staying up until odd hours of the night working on it. So ironically in some cases there was an overlap where I was still on Pacific Standard Time while they were working, but they were incredibly collaborative and very accommodating of that kind of weather. We were doing regular checks and reviewing things and giving notes and so on. Then they would do their thing and then we would get together again. So it worked much better than...