WATER WORLD BLACK AND WHITE AND WET ALL OVER, SURFING PENGUINS SHOOT THE CURL.

Byline: Bob Strauss

Film Writer

Sony Pictures Animation wants us to believe that the board-and-'berg riding penguins of their new cartoon feature, "Surf's Up," are way gnarlier than any marching, dancing or otherwise entertaining flightless birds you may have seen recently.

And they've got a few good arguments to back the idea up. To start, there's the voice of this year's movie It Boy, Shia LaBeouf, as impatient Rockhopper penguin Cody Maverick, who leaves his Antarctic home of Shiverpool to compete in a big surfing competition on the south sea isle of Pen Gu.

Some innovative new approaches to computer animation also make this something more than just another talking-animal cartoon.

Here are a few reasons why penguin backlash may not be called for just yet.

DOCUMENTARY CAMERA

In a nondescript computer animation studio at Sony Imageworks' Culver City headquarters, an obsolete videocamera with a sensor device on top rests on a tripod.

"It was actually bought on e-Bay," "Surf's Up's" head of layout, James Williams, says of the camera, "since Sony didn't have one anymore."

But that state-of-the-art sensor, aimed at a grid of LED lights embedded in the ceiling, enables anyone handling the old camera to affect the framing of the animated penguin movie in exactly the same way a real-life camera operator would. This creates an organic visual effect we'd associate with documentaries and reality TV shows. And since the conceit of "Surf's Up" is that it's all being filmed by a small doc crew, this easy-to-use technical breakthrough not only reinforces that idea, but creates a whole new look for CG features.

"We can take this system off the tripod and put it on our shoulder, so I can walk around, zoom in and out, just as I would on a real location," Williams demonstrates, while a video monitor shows the corresponding effect of each move on a line of marching cartoon penguins.

As for the believability bane of all mock documentaries, the filmmakers had to judge, just like a Christopher Guest or the producers of "The Office" have to, how feasible it would be for imaginary documentarians to be rolling during intimate personal or physically improbable moments.

"It was a fun exercise to try to limit ourselves to the kind of shots that you could naturally get," Williams notes.

As for whether a talking penguin would say that, "Surf's Up" co-director Ash Brannon reveals, "You watch 'Survivor' or other shows like that; it does seem like the people on them are willing to say almost anything. It's hard to believe that they're aware it's going to be nationally broadcast.

So we felt like we had some liberties."

WAVE ANIMATION

The toughest technical challenge for the animators of "Surf's Up" was its waves. Not making them, which is a simple enough computer mesh of polygons. But breaking them as they crash toward the shore was one of those things that digital animation had never quite gotten right before.

"You're turning a solid-looking surface into particles that break apart in millions of pieces," explains Brannon. "No one at Sony Imageworks was sure they could pull it off to the point where it looked real or had a good aesthetic quality."

Much experimenting and programming later, convincing tools that could be controlled by animators were perfected.

Professional surfers Kelly Slater and Rob Machado, who voice penguin versions of themselves in the movie, also added their experienced eyes to the process.

"They'd come in and look at the waves, maybe draw over a little bit, say, 'This would shoot out more,' or, 'Oh, you guys are using that wave

from Tahiti' or 'from Maverick's up north,' " co-director Chris Buck 

("Tarzan") reports.

That convinced at least one surfing actor to lend his voice to the project.

"What really got me on board was seeing this animation of the waves, the water," L.A.'s own Jeff Bridges confesses. "The fact that they enrolled Kelly Slater, the great surfer, to give them tips on how to make the waves look more real, impressed me. They managed to make the waves look so real, and yet not photographic. It does a wonderful thing to your brain while you're watching it."

RECORDING ACTORS TOGETHER

Most animated films record busy movie stars' voice tracks separately over a period of months. "Surf's Up" endeavored to get all of the actors in a given scene into the recording booth at the same time, enabling them to riff and, hopefully, get a more natural speaking rhythm going.

"I think what it really is is that we're not as good as past voice guys who really know how to act without the other actors around," jokes Jon Heder, who voices spaced-out yardbird Chicken Joe in the movie. "We have to work with each other.

"No, it's very different and it's cool. Because the movie relies heavily on improv and of-the-moment type situations, they had to put us together so we could work off each other's energy and try to create it organically. A lot of the script was just a subject line; there was no hard-core dialogue, we had to just make it up as we went."

The resulting, more natural sounding dialogue proved both helpful and a challenge to the character animators.

"It's easier because there's real emotion going on," asserts producer Christopher Jenkins. "Our animators are able to connect on that fundamental level far more clearly."

"(The animators) had to be extra observant of human behavior," co-director Brannon ("Toy Story 2") notes. "Especially how people act when they know there are cameras around."

And ad-lib vocal sessions generate words that aren't supposed to be heard in PG cartoons designed for family audiences.

"You're just having fun," key penguin player Shia LaBeouf says of the recording booth sessions. "Sometimes you're in there for awhile and it's really monotonous. You want to break the ice, so you say a couple of F-bombs and you're back on track."

"A couple?" Heder asks rhetorically. "Try, like, a bucketful."

"Yeah yeah yeah," LaBeouf acknowledges. "Paragraphs full."

MORE PENGUINS

Does the world really need another penguin movie?

Of course not. But the folks responsible for "Surf's Up" insist that their Rockhopper cartoon is way different from "March of the Penguins," "Happy Feet," "Madagascar" and all other species of tuxedo bird entertainment.

They also claim that they didn't know anything about the other penguin projects until several years of development had gone into "Surf's Up."

"We didn't think there would be a glut of penguin movies," says Bridges, who voices Big Z. "Who woulda thunk it? Five years ago, when we started this, there wasn't a penguin in sight."

When they found out what was going on, the production team tried to take advantage of the situation.

" 'March of the Penguins' came out while we were working on this, and we kind of used that for reference," Buck admits. "It was great footage."

That said, the main characters were far more anthropomorphized than the cartoon birds of "Happy Feet."

"We didn't set out to pay attention to the penguins as penguins," claims Brannon. "They're characters, they're people in a way. And I kind of theorized that the guys who leave Antarctica to go surfing march to a different drummer anyway."

"They surf," chicken-portrayer Heder declares of his flightless feathered film friends. "And they're in a hot, tropical environment. And they're cool. And they don't sing, or dance around to the ramblings of Morgan Freeman, y'know?

"Just kidding," Heder adds. "He's a beautiful person."

Bob Strauss [phone]

[e-mail]

CAPTION(S):

8 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) WAVE LENGTH

'Surf's Up' rides CG to new heights

(2 -- 3) no caption (penguins)

(4) MAKING WAVES

In the beginning there was the computer mesh graph. And ultimately the mesh morphed into an animated wave. Here are some of the steps in between.

A wire frame model of the wave's surface has no shading or high-frequency detail.

(5) The wave is shown with whitewater and lip spray elements only.

(6) Here the wave surface is depicted without dynamic effects.

(7) Arcing animation control rings can be turned independently to evolve the wave's animation. This illustration shows the transition from animation control to final quality rendering.

(8) The final composite image shows whitewater, lip spray and board spray effects as a penguin rides the wave.