Digital Nation by Gary Dretzka

Three months ago, at ShoWest, the folks at Disney agreed to fill the Tuesday-night banquet void with a pair of preview screenings of Finding Nemo. Before the movies opened, exhibitors were introduced to key executives of the co-producing studio, Pixar, and members of its creative team.

It was an auspicious occasion for at least two reasons.

One, the two animation giants were - and still are - enmeshed in some very public negotiations over the terms of a new distribution agreement. And, two, it was essential for exhibitors to get excited about what could very well turn out to be one of the summer's biggest hits.

Once the lights in the Paris' showroom were lowered, however, the only thing that really mattered was the movie itself. Ninety minutes later, few doubts were left about Finding Nemo being entertaining enough to meet everyone's lofty expectations.

One other thing was in play that Tuesday night, though.

The mere fact that Finding Nemo -- which combines millions of 1s and 0s to delightful effect -- was being projected digitally to this crowd of exhibitors could only be seen as an undisguised nudge for them to get with the program. Simply put, movies created in a computer are best displayed in a theater equipped with a digital projector.

This was the same message that was delivered to exhibitors one year earlier by emissaries of George Lucas, only in less intimidating terms.

"The ShoWest exhibition was intended to push exhibitors closer to moving toward digital projection," said writer-director Andrew Stanton. "We live in the digital-projection world in our own studio, and you get spoiled."

Absent the financial support of distributors and production studios, it will take a whole lot more than a terrific movie to get exhibitors to embrace digital projection. They're ready to cooperate, but not if it means spending $80,000 of their own money to upgrade a single auditorium.

For audiences, watching a digitally projected Finding Nemo, Episode 2 or Spirited Away can be a revelatory experience. The advantage to seeing live-action pictures digitally projected, however, typically is measured by the absence of the tears, scratches and other debris typically seen on prints after a few days of constant use.

Because there are only about 150 fully digitized theaters extant in the world - and Disney isn't pushing the issue - most ticket-buyers will be seeing Finding Nemo via traditional projection machinery.

"We worked very hard to capture the animation as best as film will allow," Stanton explained. "If you watch it on film, and are ignorant as to what it would look like on digital, you'll still be wowed. There's something about the CG medium, where there's considerably more visual impact in going digital, than when live-action is upgraded to digital and the images become just that much more crisp and clear."

Moreover, Stanton argues, "Everybody will benefit when it comes out in DVD. Like it or not, the digital format is where your movies live for most of their lives.

"They're on the screen for a very short time, so we take great care to make sure what you see in your home is the best possible version of the movie. That's where people are going to see it over and over, again."

From a purely technical point of view, the greatest achievement of Finding Nemo may be in its ability to make cartoon water look and perform like H20 as it's seen in nature.

Until Jacques Cousteau came along to push the envelope on underwater photography, directors of live-action features avoided fickle currents and murky backgrounds by shooting in giant water tanks and wave pools. Before the introduction of computer graphics imaging, animators mostly relied on hand-drawn bubbles to alert viewers to the fact that the characters were interacting in a liquid environment.

In 1998, the CGI artists at DreamWorks created a shimmering, hyper-realistic surface for the Nile River that flowed through The Prince of Egypt. Two years later, The Perfect Storm captured the fury of the ocean by melding computer-generated waves with those filmed both in the Atlantic Ocean and in a 22-foot-deep tank inside Soundstage 16 on the Warner Bros. lot.

Finding Nemo trumps both of those groundbreaking movies by creating an underwater world that - minus the talking fish and digitally choreographed crustaceans -- actually resembles something a scuba diver might encounter on the Great Barrier Reef. If it were any more realistic, audiences would be advised to wear a wetsuit to the theater.

It didn't come easy, though.

"Before I even had the story completely figured out, I knew I wanted to do the movie under water," recalls Stanton. "I'd grown up by the ocean, loved going to aquariums and watched enough Jacques Cousteau and Discovery Channel shows to understand there was something special and unique when you're looking at things under water. I was fascinated even then about why I knew we were under water even if there was nothing discernable there to identify the environment."

Real fish don't blow bubbles nearly as often as cartoon fish, so Stanton asked the technical team at Pixar to come up with other ways to convince viewers of the movie's verisimilitude. They came up something that captured the motion of the ocean and lighting provided by the sun.

"I was able to break it down, but couldn't put it into technical enough terms to pass it off as an assignment for my guys to do," Stanton adds. "It really came down to five or six elements that, when combined, give you the illusion that there's some substance between camera and character, while under water."

These elements included caustic lighting, which creates the kind of dancing patterns seen at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day; fog beams, those straight shafts of light that appear to break through the water's surface; particulate matter, or the "crap in the water" that moves with each surge and swell of the current; the "murk" that causes things to disappear in a sort of fog; and the changes in color vibrancy that occur when an object moves away from the eye of the beholder.

"Individually, all of those things were fairly easy to solve technically," said Stanton, who's played a key role in all of Pixar's pictures. "The huge challenge for us became finding the right combination of ingredients needed to bake the cake properly. We were spinning our wheels, and it became very frustrating."

Near the end of the first year of production, recalls technical director Oren Jacob, "Andrew picked out four video images he took from various Discovery Channel stuff and Jacques Cousteau specials from PBS. He asked us to match them as closely as possible, and we did.

"It not only demonstrated to Andrew that we could replicate the video images, but any ocean surface he saw in the whole world ... an angry ocean, a little more chop, whitecaps."

Suddenly, Stanton interjects, "you couldn't tell the difference between our shots and the real thing. People were elated."

Coming up with the right software for the job required the animators first to agree on a common vocabulary to describe the sea's many moods and faces. This required a trip to Hawaii, and visit to coral reefs off the Kona coast.

Hey, someone has to do the dirty work.

Jacob had been diving since the early '90s and, as a youngster, surrounded himself with salt-water aquariums. Before earning their diving certificates, the closest most of the other Pixar executives and designers had come to living, breathing fish was in a Chinese restaurant.

"That shared experience was infinitely helpful, because we could look back on it and recall certain things we all saw under water ... how the water looked under specific conditions," he explained. "We were able to reference the memory and I could tell them exactly what kind of look I wanted."

Like divers who take precautions against the bends, the Pixar animators knew that total digital immersion could have negative side effects, too.

"If we mimicked too closely what it was like to be under water from personal experience, audiences would get seasick," Stanton allowed. "We needed to look at footage that had actually been shot by underwater cinematographers and learn from them. Then, we actually screened the footage for people who were prone to seasickness, so we could see how people would react."

Beyond that, Stanton points out that, "everything in life is math," and digital imaging requires nothing more than the proper alignment of ones and zeroes.

"So, the goal of the technical guys was to figure out the math," he said. "We even hired a guy whose whole background involved the study of waves. He knew the math, and we used his papers as a how-to book.

"Once it was explained to us, we saw how deceptively simple it was. It seems so random and organic, but it's not."

Finding Nemo never was intended to be some kind of animated undersea documentary, though. It's fun, fanciful and heart-warming, as well as visually credible.

"I'm sure everyone in the audience will be able to recognize some of the fish species, but we did take some liberties," Jacob admits. "We had hundreds of background fish, with different colorizations and patterns. Most of the lead characters are legitimate species you'd recognize from a reef off Australia.

"If you look into the background, though, you'll find a few we cross-bred ourselves."