Watchmen: Chapter I Brandon Vietti's Animated Film Insights

Hey, I'm Allison with FlickDirect, and I am here with Brandon Vietti to talk about Watchmen Chapter One. Hello, how are you today? Hi, Allison. Good to be with you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So we have an HBO series. We've got a movie. We've got a video game. Why do we need the animated film? I hope because you still love Watchmen. I hope too, because, you know, I think we have, as humans, a long history of adapting the greatest stories are adapted over and over through time.

I mean, whether it's, you know, Shakespeare or, or I don't know, John Carpenter redoing the thing, right? Like, you know, your favorite cover song from one band covering another. I mean, through time, it's what we do as artists when we find material that we really love. And I and I hope what people value in our movie is that we're not just doing it for the sake of the movie.

We're doing it for the sake of the another artistic interpretation that will, I think, be different than every everything that you've seen before, whether you've read it, read the book, and you've envisioned certain lines being read certain ways or envision the world a certain way. You've got an amazing motion comic, you've got an amazing 2009 movie directed by Zack Snyder that showed you the world in a different way, actors that performed maybe differently from the book.

And we're bringing something different to the table with the animation meeting. That was the big challenge, I think, for all of us was, number one, finding our own way into the material. But then through the adaptation, like how can we embrace the unique voice of animation in adapting this material that is so fitting for a comic book page. But in that adaptation process, I think is the entertainment and finding a different voice for material that you're familiar with.

And I hope that will be real for our audiences for this movie. I hope so too. You mentioned about adapting it from a comic book. I did see the animation process a little bit feature that talked about still giving it that comic book feel, but making it animated. So talk a little bit about the difficulties, the complexities of doing all that. Sure. You know, I think one of when we began, we really wanted to do 2D.

I really wanted to do 2D. Part of the adaptation was we wanted to make it feel as close to the comic as possible. The book came out in the 80s. The book is the story is set in the 80s. I really wanted to make this feel, this movie feel like a product of the 80s. You could watch it today, feel like it was something that came out in the 80s when the book originally was printed.

So we explored the idea of 2D animation. But the barrier there is the amount of line work and Dave Gibbons style. Adapting Dave Gibbons art was just, you know, no question we were going to bring Dave's art into animation. But Dave's art is known. The signature is a lot of hatch lines. 2D animation does not like this. This is very difficult for a human to track all of the human animator to track all of those, those Gibbons lines as we as we called them through the design process.

So we did some testing. We talked to many studios that do 2D. And for our ability to make this movie, it was just not going to work out. It would not have been a pleasant visual experience. The lines jitter and move all over the place. But what we were able to do is like really go into I mean, I think you saw this is we could look at Dave's lines, we could see the ragged edge to the line that could only happen when you draw a pen across Bristol board.

We could, you know, map those lines on the 3D characters and do all of these other tricks trying to capture the lines. And then we could also try and capture traditional media non Photoshop art direction, because that was not around in the 80s. And try all these tricks to sort of cut against the 3D ness, if you will. And again, try to help this movie feel like it's something that could have come from the 80s.

And it does. Absolutely. Quick question. Very last if you could be one character in the story, who would you be? Oh, boy. One character. It certainly would. Oh, my gosh. You stumped me on that. Because I think that's that's the beauty of the thing is like, there's no ideal character. Everybody is saddled with problems and complexities that feel very real world.

So while you want to go for the rich guy or the powerful guy or the guy with the cool flying ship, like there's also that other like, oh, but he's got issues and he's got this other issue. So it like prevents you from like, really, you know, wanting to fully take on. So yeah, it's very difficult to answer. I'm sorry. I failed you. Thank you.