WALL-E Animation Thumbnails

SORRY, I've been asked to pull these images off for now. I'll post them again later when I get the green-light.

As promised, here are some of the planning drawings I did for the Super Bowl ad. I planned about 80% of the shot on paper and figured the rest out in the computer. WALL-E is really simple to pose and quick to animate, so I often experiment more in the computer than I would normally.

The Full WALL-E

SORRY, I've been asked to pull this clip off my site for now.

Here's the full-length animation of WALL-E that I did for the Super Bowl, minus the Buzz and Woody scenes.

Watch the WALL-E Super Bowl ad online

As expected, the WALL-E commercial for the Super Bowl is available online now in glorious HD and other flavors. The spot is 1 minute long, and I actually did a full minute of WALL-E animation, though they had to cut a lot out to make room for the Buzz and Woody bits. Hopefully they will release the uncut version on the web. We had a very short time to produce this ad, so there are some rough edges, but I think it turned out pretty well. I had about 4 weeks to do the WALL-E stuff from start to finish, and I had some help from Don Crum, Wendell Lee and Sarah Mercey. Luckily robots are much faster to animate than humans and rats! The hardest part was probably animating the vacuum hose. The power cord was simulated, thankfully. I'll post some planning thumbnails when I get the time.

In the meantime, you can check out the official WALL-E web site, which has just been updated.

WALL-E Super Bowl Commercial

If you weren't going to watch anyway... Tune in to the Super Bowl on Fox this Sunday to see a brand new commercial for WALL-E. Game begins at 3pm PST, and rumor has it the ad will run around the beginning of the 3rd quarter. I'll try to post a link here once the ad is online. I did most of the WALL-E animation myself, so I hope you like it!

Congratulations to Animation Mentor Class of '08!

This past Saturday I had the honor of attending and presenting at the graduation ceremonies for Classes 5 and 6 of Animation Mentor. It was a lot of fun to meet many of my students in person and hang out with the other mentors, as well as the founders, Bobby, Shawn and Carlos. I got to present the Student Choice Award for Walk Cycle With The Most Personality. You can get a much better description (with photos) on Bobby Beck's Blog. If you haven't already, be sure to check out some of the graduates' work in the latest AM showreel.

New Miyazaki Interview

Hayoa Miyazaki discusses his upcoming film on ghibliworld.com - they are not using any CG in this production.
Here's an interesting quote:

I always tell my staff that if they don’t like to draw by hand deliberately, then they should give up animation. It’s easy to distinguish if pictures are drawn by machines or human hands. If we give up the tough way, we will lose the richness in our art.

New WALL-E Trailers Online!

Head over to RottenTomatoes and IGN for the new WALL-E trailers. There are two versions, the domestic and international. You can also read Harry Knowles' take on the 15 minutes of footage he screened at the Butt-Numb-A-Thon 9 last week. Enjoy!

Ergonomics

I interrupt this blog to bring you an important public service announcement. I've had a few inquiries lately about the foam tubing that I put on my Wacom stylus (people saw it in my 11-Second Club critique and one of my AnimationMentor.com lectures), and that got me thinking that I should use this blog to spread some more ergo knowledge. It's important to take care of your bodies, kids, if you want to be animating for the long-haul! It's not enough to buy an "ergonomic" mouse; you can have all the fancy equipment in the world but you may still get RSI if you don't have proper posture, alignment and work habits.

I first learned about Repetitive Strain Injuries when I started at Pixar in 2000, and wouldn't you know, I got it working on Monsters, Inc. Before that I had worked for 5 years on computers and never had a problem. Self-fulfilling prophecy, Pixar curse, or just a matter of time? Either way, after some physical therapy, accupuncture, ergonomics lessons and regular stretching I'm back to working pain-free. If I push myself too hard the pain returns, so part of the solution is to learn how much your body can take.

There are many kinds of RSI, the most publicized being carpal tunnel syndrome. Mine manifested more in the muscles in my shoulder and neck rather than the nerves in my wrists, but it's no less serious. I found that for me yoga and swimming are really effective in relieving the soreness and stiffness. I was lucky in that I work for a company that is very proactive about preventing and treating RSI, and we have people on staff to help us set up and use our workstations. You may not be so lucky, so please try to educate yourself. Below are some links to articles written by my friend and former Pixar Ergonomist, Shelby Cass. I hope you'll give them a read and evaluate your own work habits. Stay healthy out there!

Are You Ergonomically Correct?
What is Ergonomics?
Shelby's Web Site

Freaky Francomation!

The students at Supinfocom in Arles, France always put out good work, and this latest one, "Musicotherapie" is no exception. Really original style and, uh, story. I don't know where they come up with this stuff...

James Baxter's work on "Enchanted"

Beautiful stuff. What else can I say? Kind of embarrassing to have my own drawings so near these gorgeous ones in my blog. I should have put some blank posts in between to separate them more!

More on planning

There have been a few questions about my thumbnail post below in the comments and by email, so I thought I'd elaborate some more here.

Hans Brekke asked:

On a few of the pages you mention that you used other movies for inspiration, like the shining. I thought that was very interesting and its an approach I haven't tried before. How do you make a scene, that is from another movie, relate to your scene, and what do you look for in those scenes? It would be very helpful to hear how you plan your scenes by using material from other movies.

This is a good question. Let me start by saying that I'm not looking to steal someone else's performance for my scenes. Rather, I'm looking for ideas that I wouldn't have thought of on my own. I can only go so far on my imagination; pretty soon my characters will all start to move and behave like me! Therefore I find it important to look outside myself for inspiration and reference, be it in other films or in real life. When doing research for a character I try to find live actors who resemble the character somehow, in personality and/or physiology. In the case of Syndrome, Brad Bird had suggested several actors, including Jack Nicholson. Nicholson's performance in The Shining is over-the-top, perhaps even cartoony, so I thought I might find some interesting ideas in there. I was looking for poses, facial expressions, gestures, bits of timing, anything I could find to make Syndrome more creepy and threatening (and a jerk). For the scene where Syndrome says "I'll give them heroics; I'll give them the most spectacular heroics anyone's ever seen!" I drew inspiration and reference from The Shining, Paul Gleason in The Breakfast Club, Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective, and of course, my own imagination.

Jonathan asked:

Maybe this is too in depth, but how do you decide how far to take a thumbnail? I mean, many times I have very loose thumbnails, and i wonder if it is better making them more refined. Like, even the stick figures have all of the motion etc defined and of the correct proportions for the character.

The purpose of a thumbnail is just to communicate the important facts about a pose. For instance, the angle of the hips and shoulders, the curve of the spine, the placement of the feet, etc. Some rudimentary facial expressions may also be in order, depending on the shot. As long as you can clearly communicate these things to yourself (and anyone you may need to show them to) that is far enough. I think it's also important to convey the basic proportions of the character you're animating, otherwise you may draw poses that the model can't really achieve. That said, as someone who likes to draw I often find myself embellishing my thumbs with more detail than they need, just because I enjoy the process!

Jorge "Jay" Garcia asked:

Once you get your boards, how close must you follow them when planning and thumbnailing?

It depends on the story boards. Sometimes they're very specific and indicate exactly what the director wants, so I try to match them as best I can. Other times the boards are loose and just suggest the main beats of the shot, so I try to make it my own. The director and I will discuss the scene before I begin planning, and he'll let me know what he expects and how closely I need to follow the boards.

Animation Thumbnail Gallery Added

I periodically get requests from students and others to see some of my planning drawings, so I've put together a little gallery of some of my favorites from past projects. They're not meant to stand alone as good drawings, but you might find them interesting as an example of the thinking that goes into my work at Pixar and AnimationMentor.com. I've included a bunch from my one Ratatouille shot, which I linked in a previous post.

More on the Great Debate

There's a good article on the AP website that further explores the debate about motion-capture as animation. You can read the full article here. Below are some quotes that I found interesting.

The creators of "Beowulf" don't call it animation, nor do they intend to replicate real life.

"It's a new art form that is performance-based," producer Steve Starkey said, echoing comments Zemeckis made about his 2004 effort, "The Polar Express" (a performance-capture movie that had many traditional animators shuddering for its characters' lifeless eyes and stilted movements.)

"If one were to call it traditional animation, I think it would be a disservice to the brilliant animators of the like that worked on 'Roger Rabbit,' that brought those characters to life. I also think it would be a disservice to the performers like Ray Winstone, whose performance lives on-screen."

My One Shot on Ratatouille

I only animated one shot on Ratatouille. I was working on Cars promotional material and WALL-E during most of Rat's production, but I begged them to give me a shot on the film because I knew it was so special (and I wanted to work with Brad Bird again). I figured they'd give me a simple acting shot or some little gag, but instead they gave me a full-body shot of humans on rollerskates! It was pretty challenging, and I did most of the work on my own time. I did a lot of research and worked out some ideas with my wife (who used to skate competitively), but I ended up throwing most of that out and going from my imagination, because the shot was so short and needed to be broad. The only direction I had was that Colette is a bad skater, Linguini is a good skater, and they need to exit frame right. How this happened was pretty much up to me. I'm happy with how Colette's spin and fall worked out, but I think the weight of Linguini lifting her still needs work. Ah well, animation is never finished, only abandoned.

"The Pixar Story" screening in SF again

"The Pixar Story" will be screening in SF, this week:

NOVEMBER 13-15, 2007

San Francisco
Lumiere 35
1572 California Street
San Francisco CA 94109
415-885-3201

Daily Screening Times:
November 13, 12pm & 7pm
November 14, 12pm & 2pm
November 15, 12pm & 2pm

Sample eCritique at the 11 Second Club

I'm sure you're familiar with the 11 Second Club - a monthly animation competition that follows in the footsteps of the late 10 Second Club. The prize for this month's competition, sponsored by AnimationMentor.com, was a critique by a professional animator, in this case, me! Here you can get an idea of what an "eCritique" looks like for students who enroll in AM's animation courses. Every week the mentors review the students' assignments in this fashion. It's a pretty neat setup, allowing the mentors to analyze students' work frame by frame and even draw on it. Students and mentors can be anywhere in the world (that has an internet connection), and there is also a weekly Q&A conducted live via webcam. Hope you enjoy the eCritique!

The Rat vs. the Dragon Slayer

The film "Beowulf" has been approved for submission for the Best Animated Feature Oscar by the Academy. You can read more about it here. I haven't seen Beowulf, and I usually keep my negative thoughts off of this blog, but I find this a disturbing development.

To my mind, submitting a motion-captured performance as "animation" is akin to submitting a heavily retouched photo as a "painting". Let me back up a bit and say that I'm not wholly opposed to motion capture (or "performance capture", as Mr. Zemekis would have me call it), just as I'm not opposed to Photoshop and digital collages; these technologies have their places. The fact that I have yet to see a compelling or life-like performance created with motion-capture is beside the point. The question becomes, "what is animation?" I'm sure that many animators worked on Beowulf to clean up the capture data, massage performances and animate non-human characters elements. But does this extra work beyond the raw capture data make it animation? Where do we draw the line between recorded action and creative animation? Between the retouched photo and the painting. The more I ask myself this, the more I realize that these are the wrong questions to ask, because the answer require a level of semantics that distracts from the more important question: "Which is the best film?"

As visual effects and digital cinema become more advanced the term "Animated Feature" loses its significance, at least when judging the merits of a story, because the line between performance and visual effects is becoming blurred. I believe the category of Best Animated Feature should not exist, because it creates an arbitrary distinction between mediums and ultimately ghettoizes animation into a separate category so that it can never compete for Best Picture. If you want to make distinctions, do it by genre, not by medium. Ratatouille is the best reviewed film of the year, but it will never compete directly against the year's live-action films because the Academy has it squarely seated at the kids' table.

But wait, there's MORE!

Going to be in the San Francisco area this Thursday, November 8th? Check out the new documentary, "The Pixar Story" at the 2nd SF International Animation Festival. It's a great film and an intriguing look at the genesis of Pixar. Yours Truly is the first face you see in the doc! Woohoo!

Director Leslie Iwerks will introduce the film and participate in a Q&A.

Screening Times:
6:45PM and 9:30PM

Location:
Landmarks Embarcadero Theater
One Embarcadero Center, Promenade Level
San Francisco, CA 94111
(415) 267-4893

More details and ticket info: www.sffs.org/events/index_series_sfiaf07.html

Oh, and by the way...

Cars is out on Blu-Ray today, too!

Ratatouille on DVD and Blu-Ray today!

Go get yours! Includes the short film "Lifted" and an new short, "Your Friend The Rat", which includes 2D and even some stop-mo animation!


Also available today, "Pixar Short Films Collection, vol. 1" on DVD and Blu-Ray. Start your Christmas shopping now!