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Fun facts about this shot- I had an actual phone convo with FRANK THOMAS about deer animation, set up by a mutual friend. I was stymied by the antlers when the deer turns his head in the closeup https://twitter.com/Stu_FX/status/1285579264172204037
It seemed impossible to keep all four prongs solid in perspective. My buddy FRANK THOMAS said actually no one could do it with more than two prongs. “Milt couldn’t do it!”
(For the unobsessed Frank Thomas and Milt Kahl were two titans of animation, leads on Bambi)
We wound up making a CG model and frame-by-frame matching it to my animation. This is actually the same thing they did on Bambi for deer with multi-prong antlers- they had a physical model hung on wires, matched to the animation backlit and traced off frame by frame
He later left a message on my answering machine at Warner’s claiming to be a wildlife officer who heard I was murdering deer. I still have it on a cassette tape somewhere!
(Those antlers caused me so much stress I had a recurring nightmare that Tony Fucile gently broke it to me that the studio decided they wanted a female deer and I had to go back and erase all the antlers)
While I’m on memory lane, this shot is a good example of one of the things that makes Brad Bird such a brilliant director- it was initially much shorter, but animating it I really wanted that pause you get feeding a squirrel and they hesitate and you hold your breath..
I very nervously broached to Brad the idea of extending the shot- this is a huge, HUGE as in 2d animation where every frame is costed. He considered and said, try it.
*ask* that should say. Anyways I put it it in and they kept it. MONTHS later at a test screening, that shot came up and the whole audience held its breath at that moment. Brad turned around, somehow found me in the crowd, and gave me a thumbs up. Magic.
Here you go, production art! My deer designs for Giant (Tony Fucile, mensch and genius, did the final model)
