A couple of weeks ago I went to one of the best animation talks that I have been lucky enough to attend. As a part of the annual GRAPHIC Festival, Lee Unkrich (Director of Toy Story 3) came to Sydney on behalf of Pixar to give the audience a rough overview of their process in the making of an animated feature film. In what ended up being closer to 2 hours than the original 90 minutes he managed to do just that in brief (yet thorough) detail.
I was blown away by how much he covered and the fantastic approach to how he presented - little-to-no technical jargon, even when going into detail on topics such as their latest technology Wonder Moss (developed to enrich the landscapes of Brave) were explained in such real world terms that I don't think anyone in the audience would have walked away without an understanding of the what the technology offered. We had inside glimpses of rarely seen and unseen material that is usually only seen internally at Pixar. Such as voice actor 'auditions' where they took audio from a film their potential actor featured in and animating to that as an example of whether or not they voice will fit the character. As examples we watched Tom Hank's audition (Turner &Hooch audio) and Billy Crystal's (When Harry Met Sally audio). Although Crystal did turn them down (which he later regretted) he did ultimately voice Mike in Monsters Inc - so it all worked out! These and some hilarious animation reference footage;
Which was their reference for this scene from Toy Story 3 (sorry you've got to scrub through a bit.);
Some in depth explanations of the audio editing process revealed that one single line of dialogue was taken from about 10 takes, a single word ('Andy') in said example was comprised of 4 different takes!Some other cool bits and pieces included the explanation of their color scripts and the evolution of their story boarding technique when Brad Bird came on board for The Incredibles. We were also lucky enough to meet the man (briefly) as he signed our books which had been hurriedly purchased 10 minutes prior.
Excellent day which was followed up by lunch in the rocks and a trip to check out the Little Black Jacket exhibit down in an old warehouse on the pier in Welsh Bay.
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