747 in Honolulu

©Disney
I would like to supplement my friend Marcelo's posting on his blog regarding the 747 on Lilo & Stitch. The whole sequence was just completely done when 9/11 happened. Then the directors called for a layout meeting. They announced that we have to redo all the city shots and skycrapers and turn them into mountains. We have to abandon the first part of the sequence where Stitch is suppose to climb on-board the 747 cockpit and scares the pilots off the plane. Instead, we added a shot of Jumba reactivating his spacecraft "parked" in the jungle. Brian Jeffcoat, (which in fact, the one who patiently taught us how to do Maya in layout and one of the best I've worked with) redesigned the plane and turned it into Jumba's spacecraft keeping the prominent shapes and size of the 747 in order to reuse the existing animation. The challenge for us in layout is to make the new mountain bgs work with the existing 747 animation. So next time you watch the chase sequence, replace the mountains with skycrapers and the spacecraft with 747. Even the shot of the guy with the ice cream come is the same. But he was supposed to be crossing a busy street in downtown Honolulu with towering scycrapers around him when the plane comes by and hits his ice cream. They promised that this sequence would be in a special boxed DVD which until now we're still waiting to happen.

The artwork I have here (fig. 1) is when the 747 already landed and settled on the beach. It was a key backgound layout for the beach sequence with the aliens. The second one (fig. 2) is a screen grab from that sequence.