Home has two main characters: Tip, a 12-year-old girl searching for her mother, and Oh, a six-legged alien outcast. But, there’s also a third character: the flying car they travel in.
"It was very complex," says Mahesh Ramasubramanian, visual effects supervisor. "We had controls so that anyone on the pipeline could turn off parts or move something. Layout could turn off a windshield to put a camera there."
Oh's race, the Boov, control gravity and use bubbles as weapons. With that in mind, it makes sense that Oh could modify a standard car using a slush-making machine as an engine.
"The slushy machine magically runs the car," Ramasubramanian says. "Streams of bubbles fly out of the exhaust. It looks really pretty and plays well in 3D. We can follow the bubbles all the way to the car."
One of Ramasubramanian's favorite sequences takes place when Oh and Tip become friends.
"As they fly along, we create the transition from scene to scene with bubbles," Ramasubramanian says. "We went from one shot to another without a hard cut, using the bubbles to make the transition. It's a beautiful sequence."
Barbara Robertson (
BarbaraRR@comcast.net
) is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for CGW.