Lighting and Animation

I stumbled across an interesting Ted Talk about how lighting plays a very crucial role within animation. In the Ted Talk, Danielle Feinberg discusses her career at Pixar and how her work at Pixar has made her dream of having art as a career possible. She speaks in depth about how lighting has the potential to drastically change the feeling of the film as well as bring a scene or character to life. Lighting is such an important characteristic to not only cinema but animation as well and I suggest you all take a peek at this Ted Talk, it is around 12 minutes but I promise it is very interesting!

The Good Dinosaur

Pixar Studio's newest feature film is arriving in theaters this Thanksgiving, and it will be the first pixar film to be released in the same year as another (ie. Inside Out) Pixar is also not slowing down. In 2016 we'll be getting Finding Dory, the sequel to Finding Nemo, followed by Toy Story 4 and the brand new property, Coco, in 2017.

Either way, Pixar is one to always push the envelope in terms of technical achievements. In Good Dinosaur, the focus was on Environmental Effects. For example:

A Look at foilage from Bug's Life (1998)

A rainy shot of procedurally placed foliage in The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Also Water has seen a whole new breath of realism, using a new algorithm to calculate fluid mechanics. Notice how in Finding Nemo the Water looks to be made more of plastic that the more real photorealistic water from The Good Dinosaur:

Marlin looks for his son in Finding Nemo (2003)

Arlo gets whisked away in photorealistic water in The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Lastly,The film's settings are unlike anything seen in a Pixar movie until this point, with a focus on large and extremely accurate open areas. The film's environments were created using terrain mapping technology to capture the actual geometry of several areas found in the American wilderness and then using that data to recreate photorealistic landscapes for huge areal shots.

The Terrain from Up (2009)

Procedurally Generated Terrain made for The Good Dinosaur (2015) 

With all the added hype surrounding this new feature, and the suggestion to work on title sequences for upcoming films I've decided to try creating a title sequence for The Good Dinosaur. I think creating a Title Sequence from scratch without having a preexisting idea of what the original looks like, I will have much more creative freedom to create my own!

ELI5: The Pixar Theory Part 1

It's been widely rumored for years the all the Pixar movies are actually in the same universe, but at different points in time. Pretty awesome, right? So let's get started!

The first film in the theory is none other than Brave. Brave introduces us to Merida, a red-haired princess in the Dark Ages of Scotland who tries to change her fate with the help of a witch. The witch helps Merida change her fate by turning her mother into a bear. What help that is. It's easy to believe that the witch had practiced turning humans into animals starting with Mor'du, the villain in Brave.

It's important to note that this theory is based off three groups all fighting for control and power: humans, animals, and machines. We see animals coming to their rise over the next three films, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille and Up.

Finding Nemo is about a clownfish that is able to swim across the ocean and back in search of his son, Nemo. What makes this so important is that he saves his son from humans.

In Ratatouille, Remy is an amazing chef, a job that only humans have. He actually does his cooking by controlling a human. Humans are also starting to see that animals are a lot smarter than they first thought. Also, Remy's ability is so incredible that word of his skill travels all the way to Charles Muntz, the villain in Up.

Charles Muntz, in his search for a rare type of bird (you would know it as Kevin), takes what he knows about Remy and invents dog collars that can let dogs speak with humans. We're also introduced to BnL, or Buy n' Large, the company that tries to buy Carl's house in the beginning of the movie (it's also the company that makes batteries for Buzz Lightyear).

That'll do it for this part. If you're interested in this theory, you can check out these two great videos that sum up the entire theory by SuperCarlinBrothers and Bloop Animation.

Finding Dory: 2016

The sequel to the very successful Pixar film, Finding Nemo, will be coming out on June 17, 2016. It is about the friendly-but-forgetful blue fish, who learns things about the true meaning of family.

It is titled Finding Dory, and I am skeptical but looking forward to it.

Here is Ellen Degeneres, who voices Dory, announcing the movie on her show:

Stop-Motion Animation

When someone mentions animation, the first ideas that come to mind are works by famous companies such as Pixar and DreamWorks. Movies like How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek, and Finding Nemo have illustrated the power of graphical animation by developing complicated and concise fictional worlds. But, animation doesn't just stop with cartoon movies. Stop-Motion Animation provides an alternative approach to animation that utilizes all forms of media to create a polished project: still images, sound, video, clay figures (actors), set modeling, and the story-boarding process. One of my favorite stop-motion films, as a child, was Aardman Animations' Wallace and Gromit. Not only did the British stop-motion comedy consist of four short films, but it also included one feature-length film. The academy-nominated relationship, of the two main characters, grows over the course of the series as Wallace's new ideas are constantly met with Gromit's "unimpressed" body language and humorous facial expressions.

                 

This stop-motion graphics artist (below) decided to take the "Wallace and Gromit approach" a step further. With the recent release of Warner Brothers' The Lego Movie, YouTube user, "cheesybricks," takes a stab at his own version of stop-motion animation with the Lego theme in mind. In this short video, watch as the artist "paints with lego."

                     Video Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxy1fkrXmCI#t=85

This video really opened my mind to the possibilities that one can achieve in animation as a field of study. Perhaps, it will be something that I will pursue in the future. But for now, I'm just going to enjoy its prestige!

Pixar Easter Eggs

I'm sure that this has been mentioned somewhere on the blog before. Who doesn't love to find easter eggs in movies? Pixar has gotten into the habit of leaving hidden goodies in their films, to the point where I found a 10 minute long video of a collective list of them.

Like I said in my last post, I love when the extra effort is put in for viewers to explore and connect the different movies. I didn't realize how many of them that there actually were until I watched this video. Some of them may even be a bit far fetched (or very far fetched) but that's the fun of it. It also makes me want to go back and watch older films such as A Bug's Life. After just having watched Finding Nemo in another earlier class today, I definitely want to refresh my memory with all of the magic that Pixar has created over the years.

Creating an Underwater World

     Finding Nemo is easily in the top five of Disney Pixar movies. The team that created the movie spent a lot of time creating the underwater world of Finding Nemo. Executive producer, John Lasseter, believes that  "No matter what the subject matter is, you can not to enough research". John also says that early in the production of the movie he told members of the crew that they must get certified and must scuba dive to get a real sense of how the ocean floor should look.
   

     The next task set was for the animators to take the shots they got and try to recreate them through animation. There was one problem. . . they did too good of a job. They said they want the the viewer to feel like this world could exist, but that it should still be clearly a make believe world. The team still used there diving experience in every scene in Finding Nemo to make sure that type of water fit the setting that was in the movie. The things that they had to take into account are the way the water moves and it's effect on undersea plant life, particles that float around the water, where the murkiness of the water should start to have an effect on color, the way the sun lights the ocean floor, and the way that beams of light can be seen while under the water. This wasn't a once and done task however. The team had to recreate the and alter these effects for each different setting of water in the film.

The water has a very different look in the reef, than it does in the deep ocean water, and that has a different look than the water in the Sydney Harbor.

Rodrigo Blass' Alma

I found this short film, Alma, that is directed by Rodrigo Bass. After 10 years in the animation field, this is the first film that Bass has directed. The one thing that stands out in this short is the incredible attention to detail. In the beginning, the detail in the cobble stone alley is very realistic, with snow separating each stone with slightly varying color and shape. From all angles, we see individual hairs of our main character, Alma. The tiling of the floor is like a mosaic, with each piece a unique shape and size. I was very impressed with the detail in this short film and felt like Bass took the time to to make sure every element in this short was just right. A painstaking process? I should think so. Notice at the end of the short the number of people listed in the credits for this 5:25 length piece.

Rodrigo Blass (or Rodrigo Blass Nacle) has worked on various well known animation films including Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, WALL-E, The Incredibles, and Up.

Finding Nemo - Photorealistic Underwater Animation

Finding Nemo has always been one of my favorite animated films.  It’s a fun movie for anyone to watch but do people ever think about how much thought went in to creating the complex underwater world. When the film came out in 2003, water was one of the hardest things the animators had to do was create the look and feel of being underwater in most of the film.

I found this article explaining how the animation team was able to create photo realistic underwater scenes. Supervising animator Dylan Brown talks about all the elements needed to create photo-realistic water, “You have a murk that is like a fog underwater. You have particulate matter that is like little bits of dust floating around the water. You have the caustic lighting coming down that dances all over the ocean’s floor. You have light beams, and you have surface images.”

If you watch the opening scene you can really see how all these elements come to life to make you feel as if you were rally underwater.

I also thought this video was a clever way to explain to kids how the film was made.