Animating the Perfect Wave in "Surf's Up"

Jun 06 2007 / Los Angeles, CA

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Surfing Penguins.  Yep, that seems to pretty much say it all.  But despite a pretty straightforward premise, there's a lot more to "Surf's Up," the new animated film from Sony Pictures, that opens up in theaters nationwide this weekend. 

Led by a cast including rising star Shia LaBeouf ("Disturbia," this summer's "Transformers"), Jeff Bridges, James Woods, Jon Heder ("Napolean Dynamite") and Zooey Deschanel, the surfing film also taps eight-time world champ Kelly Slater, Rob Machado and ESPN announcer Sal Masekela to help bring some authenticity to the film's surf action.

PHOTO GALLERY    Check out a gallery from the film... See the gallery... >

The story is about a teenage penguin named Cody Maverick (LaBeouf) who is followed by a documentary film crew as he travels from Antarctica to Pen Gu island to compete in the Big Z Memorial Surf Off.   After a few missteps, he finds himself over-matched by the reigning nine-time world champ Tank "The Shredder" Evans (voiced by "Office Space's" Diedrich Bader) and in need of some guidance.  He finds it in the form of the legendary Big Z (Jeff Bridges), who had been thought long dead.  Where the story goes from there, one can guess, but it's not a stretch to think that there's a big showdown in the Surf Off.   Slater, Machado and Masekela all appear as themselves in the film.

Video Clips   Watch a feature about how the amazing animation was done in "Surf's Uo."   Kelly Slater and Rob Machado talk about the waves in the movie...   Kelly Slater talks about working with the animators on the film.   Sal Masekela talks working with Kelly and Rob in the film.

Even though today's technology allows animation to achieve much more detail than ever before, this film still pushed the limits.

"Animating a surfer is inherently tricky, because you have to take those moves and put them on top of a moving environment, often chasing the surfer through the wave," senior animation supervisor David Schaub says. "Everything the surfer does is driving the surfboard and the surfboard is tracking on the wave but the wave is moving through space. So, there are a lot of variables."

To help the crew feel more tied into what they were working on, most also took surfing lessons and shot hours of reference video. Visual effects supervisor Rob Bredow even took a trip to Cortez Bank, the famous big wave spot 100 miles out in the ocean from San Diego, California.

But it took someone who has basically lived on the ocean the last decade to really give the final stamp of approval. 

"I could see it for two seconds and tell it fits properly," Slater says of the finished product on screen. "There are things that you have a feeling for, and if you see it and it's wrong, you'll know it feels wrong even if you can't understand why."

So how did they do?  As far as Masekela is concerned, pretty well.

"This is really where the perfect waves are," he says.  "The most perfect waves I've ever seen are in this movie."

Aside from the visual aspect, there is the lifestyle... and there it helped that Bridges, the voice of Big Z, is a long-time surfer. 

"I surfed quite a bit in high school,” says Bridges. "Then I stopped for about 20 years. I’ve just started to take it up again. I’m fair; my chops are coming back."

Even with that gap, there's no doubt Bridges has remained tied to surf culture, having agreed to narrate last year's surfing documentary "Chasing the Lotus" after only seeing the initial footage.

Whether or not "Surf's Up" is a smash at the box office like that other penguin movie remains to be seen, but surfing fans who make it to the theater to watch should leave impressed with the look and feel.  And if they are well, hey, there's always the official video game (again, supported by Slater and Machado).