精灵鼠小弟 Stuart Little (1999)【完整台词】

and how he feels about Stuart here.

One of the things about cats
is you can rely on them...

to do exactly what they want to do.

And cats as actors...

are no different than the cats
that exist in people's homes.

And as a result,
you'd go into a scene...

I had the good fortune
to shoot the second unit material.

You'd go in with one idea
of what the cat should do...

and the cat had a different idea
of what the scene was about.

And you'd end up spending
a fairly large amount of time...

trying to get the cat
to do something simple.

Stuart, you too.

Okay, Mom.

This sequence here, actually...

George and Stuart's
first morning together...

this was a big push for us
to complete very early on.

But the studio was able to look
at this and really get a feel for Stuart.

And we got a huge reaction out of,
you know...

the possibilities here.

Because up until this point,
nobody had really seen him.

We'd shot all this footage without
any examples to show the crew...

or even Geena and Hugh,
what their costar looked like.

So for many months we just looked at
dailies of empty plates and things.

When we completed this sequence...

it really showed everybody
what Stuart was gonna be like.

Actually, his teeth,
if you notice, are modelled...

Stuart's teeth are modelled after our
vice president of animation, Barry Weiss.

So Barry loaned them to us...

and we made a duplicate.

Okay.

One of the things about Stuart...

is along with making him look real
as a mouse character...

we had to make him work
in all of the environments.

Which means that he has to deal
with things like water.

Not only the fur, but the cloth
also have to deal with moisture.

It was hard enough coming up with just
a fur look and a look for the cloth...

but now he had to, you know...

We had to deal with the wetness.
What do clothes look like...

when they're damp,
when they're half wet?

We also had a problem of keeping
Stuart looking cute, even when wet.

You've probably all seen
what animals look like in water...

and they're not as cute.

And so since he is a movie star,
we had to work pretty hard...

at making sure
he still looked appealing...

after he's been dunked in water.

Honey, shall we talk to George
before you go?

- About what?
- About Stuart.

He hasn't exactly
embraced the situation.

Snowbell! Thank goodness you're here.
I'm locked in the washer!

This is interesting, because we got
a mix here of real water...

that the clothes are in.

And then computer-generated water
that is flung up onto the glass...

and the distortions
on the surface of the water...

where the mouse is standing in it
were also created on the computer.

Traffic, yawn, lick myself.

And believe me, that could take hours
if you do it right. Ciao!

Are you sure that Stuart
is happy here?

The shot of him against the glass...

was added actually months
after we finished the sequence.

Rob wanted to go back and add
more peril to Stuart's situation.

He wanted to have the water
almost up to his neck.

The thing that's interesting to me...

coming from a background
of conventional film effects...

is that it's true that there's nothing
that's impossible now.

Used to be that visual effects
supervisors had to be the naysayers.

You'd read the script
or you'd be on stage...

or you'd be talking to people
about what was possible to do...

and you'd say, "We can't do that...

because the shirt is blue,
or you can't move the camera."

And in fact, with contemporary
digital technology...

there's virtually nothing
that you can't do.

And as a result what we have...

is a real focus on the quality
of the product...

as opposed to the process involved
in the creation of the product.

So on set before,
we used to say no all the time.

Now when we're asked if we can
do that, we kind of shrug and go:

"Yeah, okay. Yeah, I guess we can.
We'll give it a shot."

This is a shot where our character
is an animatronic.

That's a little model of Stuart
in the bed back there.

Actually, in this one you'll see
Stuart in Geena's purse...

and he's actually a little puppet.

Come on, George. This'll be fun.

- I don't wanna go shopping with Stuart.
- George!

Maybe you should...

An animatronic is a character
that is animated by mechanical means.

And he's really in the shot, as opposed
to the character that we created in CGI.

CGI meaning,
"computer generated imagery."

And that character, the Stuart
that we created in the computer...

was built from whole cloth,
a pixel at a time.

Come on, George.
You have a boat, a beautiful one.

It was hard to make
an animatronic for this...

because of how small
you had to construct.

If you had a life-size Stuart,
an animatronic at 4 inches tall...

it's very difficult to make
the mechanical components that small.

The miniaturization isn't
sophisticated to handle that.

And it's difficult to get really
lifelike movement out of it.

So to give us more flexibility...

we started doing
a lot of these shots digitally...

once we found that we could
accomplish almost any performance.

When we started the film,
we started out with all options open.

We looked at doing motion-capture...

meaning putting sensors on a human
and having them act like a mouse...

where we could
capture their motion...

and using that
to actually animate Stuart.

At the same time we pursued
conventional animation technique...

which involved the creation
of this specialised interface...

for traditional animators working
with a three-dimensional character.

And we also looked
at this animatronic issue...

the creation of a puppet that was
mechanically operated off-screen...

which would give us the motion
of the mouse on camera.

The problem with
the animatronic character...

was he had to be
a clockwork component.

He was only 4 inches tall,
so his wrists had to turn...

his fingers had to move,
his head had to move.

He had to smile.
His eyes had to move.

And it just became a far too difficult
mechanical task.

What we ended up with was a little
mouse who was 4 inches tall...

who was on a rod, attached to a box
about foot square...

with about 100 feet of cable
coming out of it.

And it wasn't too practical.

The 1 -foot square box that weighed
100 pounds wouldn't fit in Gina's purse.

So we used in that case
a more static version of Stuart.

Not so much an animatronic
as a puppet.

Our strategy for the puppet
was basically a stunt double.

If he was in the distance,
we would use him.

Now, Stuart was key-frame animated.
He was animated...

basically in a traditional manner
in the computer.

He was not motion-captured.

Little hey, Little ho!

We come bearing gifts
for young Stuart.

Yes, where is my new nephew?

One of the things about traditional
animation is that for many years...

traditional animation consisted
of a series of still photographs...

where the subject went
through a progression of moves.

One of the things that the computer
has allowed us do...

is to take the animator's art
of frame-by-frame...

definition of the motion,
and add motion-blur.

That's the blur that occurs when you
move the subject during photography...

which is the way
real photography works.

That motion blur
goes a long ways towards making...

the animation of the character
not have any steppiness to it...

which is an important part of our
character. He moves fast sometimes.

We'd like to introduce you
to someone.

Obviously, the motion blur also helps
the reality of Stuart.

It makes him appear more real, as if
he was photographed in the scene.

The end goal here is the audience
needs to feel like he was really there.

So... Which makes the integration
of the character more difficult.

I mean, after we create the character
in the computer-graphic world...

we then have to apply him
to this photography.

And we do that all
in the digital composite.

Oh, Stuart, look.

Look at that.

Coming up, I think,
is a shot here where we refer to...

the character as a DOS,
which is "dot on screen."

Climb on up here, son.

That's where he's so small...

that you can't tell
whether he's just a white speck...

or whether he's
an animated character.

The tough thing is, all these
actors here, when we shot this...

are looking at nothing.

So they're trying to be convincing
in their appreciation of Stuart.

May I say something?

That's the most amazing laser
dot I've ever seen.

We used to tell fairy tales...

of finding our families
and having a party like this.

A party with cakes and presents...

Yeah, we had a comic actor
named Jim Doughan who was on-set...

and he would read Stuart's lines
for everybody to interact with.

And he was very funny.

He often had the actors
cracking up so much...

they'd have to cut.

There was the dot on-screen.

Fairy tales are real.

These shots are very wide.

He's in a lot of these shots,
he's just very small.

Because he's part of
the action here...

he has to belong in every shot.

The cats have some of the best
lines in the movie.

The cat,
in order to make him talk...

they had to create an actual physical
model of a cat's mouth...