Mouse in the House
Computers bring a walking and talking mouse to life in Stuart Little

When a movie's title character is a live mouse that wears clothes and talks, a production team can't rely on casting to find a suitable actor. For this reason, the production team for Stuart Little turned to computers to create the perfect mouse.

In execution, the character of Stuart Little is a huge leap forward in computer animation. Not only is Stuart, from the tip of his pink nose to the tip of his furry tail, entirely generated on computers-he lives and breathes in a real human world and interacts with actors such as Geena Davis and Hugh Laurie, and even real-life cats. "We couldn't find a trained mouse that could wear clothes, walk on two feet and deliver lines," jokes Jason Clark, the movie's executive producer. "So we had to come up with a way to use technology to tell the story."

"First, you study mice and what they really look like, and then you extract from that a kind of caricature which gives personality to the creation," says Rob Minkoff, the movie's director. Animation Supervisor Henry Anderson, who is best known for his Coca-Cola polar bears, was responsible for creating the facial expressions and the library of emotions that Stuart would perform in the movie.

To do this, his animation team obtained reference actions from a mime. "We needed to find different ways of exaggerating what seems natural about a mouse, without falling into the trap of being too cute," adds Minkoff.
If the mouse didn't look real, or audiences couldn't relate to him, the movie wouldn't fly. "Stuart needed to be totally believable, in terms of both his look and performance," says Jerome Chen, the movie's visual effects supervisor.
"We had to use techniques to bring his photo-realism to a level where the audience completely accepted him and wasn't distracted by the notion that he was created through visual effects.

"Creating Stuart's fur and wardrobe presented a tremendous challenge," adds Chen. "The technology necessary to create this type of imagery was in its infancy when we began this project a couple of years ago." Stuart's head alone consists of some half a million computer-generated hairs. The animators not only animated Stuart himself, but had to create clothing that bent and crinkled realistically, no matter how he moved. To achieve the desired effect, animators who specialized in animating digital clothing took classes in sewing and tailoring.

And once the visual team had their Stuart, they had to virtually "light" him in ways that would match the lighting in the film. To do this, the team created software that "illuminated" the character's hair and even created a realistic sheen. "We photographed a silver ball that had a reflection of the set in it," says John Dykstra, the movie's senior Visual Effects Supervisor. "We used that reflection to accurately position the lights for the mouse, right down to the reflections in his eyes.

To help the actors talk and interact with a mouse that didn't exist during the shooting, the crew created a laser pointer that indicated where Stuart was standing in each scene. This laser pointer was sequenced to turn on whenever the shutter of the film camera was closed. Thus, the actors could see a continuous laser pointer that never appeared in the final film.

In the end, producer Douglas Wick felt that computers let the production team do everything that they wanted to do with the Stuart character. The end result is truly amazing. We've all seen mice who walk and talk in animated cartoons, or pose for photos at theme parks, but until now there's never been a walking and talking animal that's as realistic as Stuart Little.

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