Brave's director tells us about the massive work that went into Princess Merida's wild mane
Mark Andrews: "Our technical team, our TDs, we worked with some very incredibly smart people. This was a huge technological challenge..."
During our visit to San Diego Comic-Con Málaga, our Spanish editor David Caballero met several interesting people from both the gaming and film industries, and it's in the latter category that we find Oscar-winning animation expert Mark Andrews, who co-wrote and directed Brave, among other things.
The old Pixar classic from 2012 received a lot of attention for Princess Merida's fiery red hair, which seemed to have a life of its own. In our discussion with Andrews, the conversation turned to this very topic, and he said:
"It all starts with the character design and what story we're telling with the character. That big, red, vibrant hair that's exploding is her soul, is her spirit.
"Her mother or society at that time wanted to contain it and put it under the headdress or tie it up in some way. So we needed that big, bountiful hair. But now we're in animation and we need to move it. What is that going to take? Is it straight hair? No, it's this big, curly hair."
This obviously required a great deal of technical expertise, as hair is difficult to animate, especially such a voluminous... let's call it a hairstyle. Andrews explained the challenges:
"Our technical team, our TDs, we worked with some very incredibly smart people. This was a huge technological challenge because we had done hair before, but we hadn't done anything this big. What does it take?
"That was millions and millions and millions of strands of hair that we had to tell the simulation programme, how does that behave? We studied hair, we looked at hair, we got wigs, what happens when it's wet, what happens when it's dry, how bouncy is it? We write our own programmes and tweak those technical knobs just to dial it in so that it just looks natural."
And that was apparently the stated goal. The hair may have been voluminous and unruly, but the idea was still that it should feel authentic:
"My concern was just be natural, just look natural, just have gravity affect it the way it's going to look at it. If the hair falls into the face, it falls into the face because that's what happens. We wanted it to feel organic and look alive by itself.
"Every single shot that Merida is in with her hair, that was a triumph to get on screen."
Check out the full interview below. How did you react to Princess Merida's wild mane of hair when you first saw Brave?