Press - Rough Draft Studios

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They say you can't go home again, but when it comes to Rough Draft Studios' work on Matt Groening's Futurama, all bets are off.

The studio, which produced all 72 episodes of the 1999-2003 animated series, returned to animation duties on a series of four direct-to-DVD features, starting with the release of Bender's Big Score on Nov. 27.

Producer Claudia Katz says returning to Futurama is a pleasure, given the unceremonious ending to the series. "I don't know if we were ever officially canceled. I think we were just never picked up," she says. "We were thrilled to have the opportunity to work on it again because we never felt like we said goodbye properly."

Katz says there was talk near the end of the series among Groening and co-exec producer David X. Cohen of a feature film, but what really spurred the return of the series was strong ratings on Cartoon Network's late night Adult Swim Block. As with another Fox toon, Family Guy, interest was strong enough to warrant a return. Katz says Comedy Central's purchase of the next cable window and rights to any new episodes put the DVD projects over the top.

But a lot has changed technically in animation in the years since Futurama went off the air. Kats says Rough Draft is employing new technology in producing the features, while trying to retain the look of the original. "Our hope is they look as good or hopefully better than they did in the show," she says. The most important changes for the features are they're being produced in HD using a 16x9 aspect ratio.

Scott Vanzo, Rough Draft's chief technology officer and director of CGI, says the studio operates mostly the same way it did back on the original series, with a close affiliation with its overseas operation, Rough Draft Korea. Software has switched, going from Alias PowerAnimator to Autodesk Maya, and rendering with Mental Ray.

"The goal is to make the same kind of cel-based, integrated look that matches the 2D animation," he says. "We can just do a lot more complicated work now."

Rough Draft has kept its camera department in house, allowing animators to more easily fix shots on the back end than if they had to communicate with an overseas operation. The move to 16x9 aspect ratio and HD was one of the major challenges. Katz says many of the designs and models from the original series had to be converted or rebuilt because they couldn't be simply brought over.

Vanzo says it also affected things like the opening title sequence, which was originally created for 4x3 and had to be redone. "It's not only retooling the models, but also figuring out how to deal with the aspect change, which in animation is very significant. There will be standard definition and 4x3 versions made as well, as each DVD feature was written so they could each be broken up into four half-hour TV episodes.

"That's a little challenging for the directors and the artists because they have to keep the fielding in mind," Katz says. "I think we prefer to just work in 16x9, but it's something the producers really wanted to protect for in case they decided to air them in 4x3."

The advances in technology allow the studio to do more with each shot more than save time. "It just allows us to pull off some shots we couldn't do previously or couldn't produce as gracefully before," she says. Technology also has made it easier to work in HD. "Everything has sort of caught up with HD," says Katz. "We're able to work at this resolution, which is four times greater than standard definition and it's not slowing us down at all. "Production schedules on each of the four planned Futurama features run just under a year, with production starts staggered by about 16 weeks. The first film was begun last August and delivered in July.

"With the exception of the director and the assistant director, there's pretty much the same crew working on each DVD movie," says Katz. "The crew drops down when they're done with one and starts work on the next one. "The crew totaled about 60 or 70 people, including storyboard artists, designers, layout artists, timing, CG model and animation artists, compositors, various production people, and an on-site editor.

"From an artist's perspective, instead of getting four crews up to speed and waiting to get the benefit of that, we had to get one crew up to speed and everyone gets to benefit from that," Katz says. Vanzo says Rough Draft used Toon Boom Harmony for compositing on The Simpsons Movie, but went back to a software called Toonz for Futurama. "Basically, it gives you a lot of versatility in how to composite elements in the computer."

Autodesk Maya was used for animation, with Shake used to do some previz work. All sequences were rendered out in HD and edited in Avid. Rough Draft provides a "director's cut" to the producers, who use it as the basis for the final cut, Vanzo says. Adrenaline HD is used to finish the project.

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