How Paddington Was Made: TOP 7 Visual Effects

We found an interesting breakdown of the film "Paddington in Peru" showing exactly how the graphics were created in the movie.

You, our audience, definitely understand that the bears in the film are 3D, but there are other techniques in the movie that we'll tell you about in this post.

0:15 and 0:23 — illustration of the "character performance reference" process. When creating animation, it's difficult to invent all character movements from scratch (how do his paws move? how does he flinch? etc.).

So that artists have material for inspiration, actors perform all scenes live. Without sets, makeup, and costumes — just movements, emotions, and dialogue.

0:25 — example of cleanup and background addition with subsequent color correction of the frame. It's hard to find the perfect location, so filmmakers usually choose one that fits key parameters — for example, an authentic house, and draw everything else — mountains, waterfall, and so on.

In our project we changed the entire background behind the knights in the same way.

0:39 and 2:02 — here the situation is reversed: the location is perfect (a river in Colombia), but bringing the film crew with equipment there is very difficult — it's hard and expensive to get there, organize accommodation, provide electricity, and other nuances.

Therefore, shots with the characters are filmed in a separately built set and composited onto wide shots of this complex location.

1:30 — a location made entirely in 3D. What you see in color is the final frame, the gray frames show how the location looks in 3D before adding textures, color, and lighting.

1:40–1:45 — shooting backgrounds for the boat scene. The boat itself, as you'll notice later, was filmed on a moving platform against green screen. And then instead of the green screen, a specially shot background for these frames was substituted.

1:53 — you can notice the use of practical special effects — splashes and wind are created by a fan and a "hose."

2:16 — example of concept art. Before the script is given to the graphics studio, concepts of key locations and scenes of the film are created. After all, the script simply says "bear village." But what should it look like? 3D experiments would be expensive and time-consuming.

Artists sketch illustrations in advance with variants of how it might look. And the approved drawings are then passed to both set decorators (who prepare the real location) and the graphics studio (who model the remaining elements or create everything from scratch).

We took the breakdown from the Framestore studio channel, where, by the way, one of our podcast guests worked (you can listen to the episode at the link).