Animation- Institutional research

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Brief History

Pixar Animation Studios,is an American computer animation film studio based in Emeryville, California. The studio has earned 26 Academy Awards , seven Golden Globes, and three Grammy Awards, among many other awards and acknowledgments.Pixar began in 1979 as the graphics group, part of the Computer Division of Lucasfilm before it was acquired by Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs in 1986. The Walt Disney Company bought Pixar in 2006 at a valuation of $7.4 billion; the transaction made jobs the largest shareholder in Disney.

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Key films/creations

Toy story 1995, Director: John Lasseter. Stars: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen and Don Rickels. Once the animators had a model, articulation and motion controls were coded, allowing each character to move in variety of ways such as walking talking and jumping. Woody was the most complex as he required 723 motion controls including 212 for his face and 58 for his mouth.

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Bug’s life 1998. Directors: John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton. Stars: Kevin Spacey, Dave Foley and Julia Louise-Dreyfus. The technical artists created crowd simulation, allowing the film makers to create over 430 shots with over 800 characters in frame without having to animate every single ant. The animators would only animate 4-5 groups of approximately 8 individual universal ants. Each one of these universal ants would later be randomly distributed throughout the digital set. The program also allowed each ant to be automatically modified to subtle ways, for example, different eye colour, different skin colour, different height , different weights etc.

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Monsters INC 2001. Directors: Pete Docter, David Silverman. Stars: Billy Crystal, John Goodman and Mary Gibbs. One of the major breakthroughs of Monsters, INC was the simulate movement of Sulley’s fur and Boo’s shirt. The animators would animate the characters “Bald and Naked” and once the animation was finished a computer program aided by the Simulation Department would apply the hair and cloth onto the characters. If Sulley moved the would react to the movement just like it would in nature.

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Finding Nemo 2003. Directors: Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich. Stars: Albert Brooks, Ellen DeGeneres and Alexander Gould. Pre- production of the film took place in early 1997. Stanton began writing the screenplay during the post-production of ‘A Bug’s Life’. As such, it began production with a complete screenplay, something that co-director Lee Unkrich called “Very unusual for an animated film”. The artists took scuba diving lessons so they could go and study the coral reef.

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Key character

Andrew Stanton is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, and voice actor based at Pixar Animation Studios and Sony Pictures Animation. His film work includes writing and directing Pixar’s ‘A Bug’s Life’ as co-director, Finding Nemo and WALL-E, and his first live-action film, John Carter. He also co-wrote every film of the Toy Story franchise, Monsters INC and Monsters University. Finding Nemo and WALL-E earned him two Academy Awards for Best Animated Feature. He was also nominated for three Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for both and Toy Story.

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Key Technology

Pixar uses computer graphics which is ‘Renderman’ to make the characters in most films, it’s very fast, reliable and gives good range of styles and effects to use. Pixar uses it exclusively, the software has already been pushed to extreme so it can render anything that they can throw at it. They use it to create any look that they want to make that character and can make it 2D or 3D which will make a hole new generation of design.

Tuesday, 1 May 2012

Reference(s)

http://www.wikipedia.org

http://www.imdb.com

Tuesday, 1 May 2012