Interview with Angus MacLane

Here's an interview with Angus MacLane, who was Directing Animator on WALL-E (not Supervising Animator, as the article erroneously credits). Enjoy!

WALL-E breakdown

WALL-E's been out for over a week, so hopefully you've had a chance to see it. It was a really fun show to work on for me. Because there was so little dialog, the animators had a lot of leeway for adding acting beats and ideas to help further develop the characters visually. Very often I would end up adding time to my shots (sometimes even doubling the length) and really indulging a moment. Here is a breakdown of most of the work I did on it:

-------------SPOILERS AHEAD!---------------

"Day at work" - I did the shots of Wally opening the twinkie and the roach jumping in. Then Wally boxes up, parks in his shelf and rocks himself to sleep. The rocking thing was something I had done in a test animation and Andrew liked it so he had me add it to this scene. I also did the next scene where Wally wakes up, batteries low, and tries to put on his treads. At the time we had a newborn baby, and I wasn't getting enough sleep, so I was involuntarily doing lots of research for the scene.

"Eve arrives" - I did the stuff of Wally coming home, then seeing the red laser dot and starting to chase it down the freeway offramp.

"Courtship" - The scene of Wally watching Eve scanning from atop a reactor, then boxing up as she zooms by and shuts down.

"The plant" - The loooong scene where Eve tries to shoot the Big Mouth Billy Bass, then Wally starts handing her objects to play with: eggbeater, bubblewrap, lightbuld, Rubik's cube, etc. Then she pulls the tape out of the VHS tape and he freaks out. He rewinds the tape and puts it in the machine. It plays back and he presents the video to Eve. She scans it.


"Eve vigil" - Wally and Eve, sitting on the bench. He pries her arm open to hold her hand, it clamps down on his hand, he tries to free himself and falls off the bench. This is a scene that I added a lot of time to, and Andrew let me "go for it".


"Spacewalk" - I did the initial stuff of Wally flying around with the fire extinguisher. He and Eve whiz past each other, then he slowly works his way back to her and sprays her with it. She says to get going, and he instead uses the extinguisher to spin himself around and fly away. The sequence was changed after I finished my shots, so some were omitted and others were reworked a bit.

"Garbage airlock" - I did the shot of Eve staring at the plant for a while, then tossing it and offering her hand to Wally: "Directive".

"Showdown" - My only human scene on this film. I did the stuff of the Captain hotwiring the video system and taunting Auto: "Look what I got, Auto! That's right, the plant! Oh, you want it? Come and get it, Blinky!" Then he yanks the cables out. The cable rig was really hard to work with, so I animated the Captain first pantomiming the action, did some 2D animation of the cables on top of the 3D, then match-moved the 3D cables to the 2D motion on 1's. It was hard.

"Back on earth" - I did the stuff of Wally rebooting after he has just been repaired. Eve tries to jog his memory, but he doesn't recognize him. He cubes some of his souvenirs, then exits, squashing the roach. Eve watches him from the doorway of the trailer, devastated.

-------------END SPOILERS---------------

That's all I can remember off the top of my head. This is definitely the most work I've done on any film so far. Including the Superbowl commercial, I think I did about 7 minutes of footage. I was involved very early in animation (I was on for 2 years, total) and this list doesn't include the test shots I did. When the DVD comes out around Christmas I'll post a reel. Thanks for reading!

Cruise News

I got back from my vacation last Tuesday, and am finally caught up on (most of) my email and stuff. On board the Disney Magic I got to present WALL-E at a midnight showing, and I did two presentations: one about Pixar Animation in general, and one about the Making of WALL-E.

I would estimate that about 80-100 people showed up for the first talk, and overall it went very well. I had expected that it would be open to general audiences, and had therefore included some sillier, kid-friendly material, but it turned out that these events were limited to adults. Nevertheless the audience was receptive to the silly stuff as well and the more sophisticated stuff. This was a Disney cruise, after all! My prepared material for the first talk lasted for exactly 45 minutes, as planned, and then I opened it up for Q&A. They had plenty of questions, and I was prepared to run longer than 15 minutes. At noon on the dot, my microphone cut out and the captain came on the PA to start making some announcements in a droning voice. It was annoying, but funny, and after about 5 minutes I got my mic back and could finish the last few questions.

My second presentation was at 1pm the next day. I expected everything would go smoothly, since we had worked out the tech setup the day before. Of course, that was not to be the case. Around 12:15 as we were setting up my computer crashed, and my Keynote presentation file got corrupted. I could no longer launch my presentation! I tried for about 20 minutes to resurrect the data, but with no success. Luckily I had burned a backup copy to DVD before we left home, so I ran back to our room to grab it. In the time remaining before the presentation started I was able to update the backup with most of the changes I had made over the past week. Always back up your data, kids! From there the presentation went off without a hitch. I think I had more people in the audience this time, and there were many repeat visitors from the previous talk.

I was also happy to see that people didn't seem upset by the portrayal of the human cruise-liner passengers in the film. I'm sure you can appreciate the irony of this venue. Everyone seemed to have enjoyed WALL-E, so it was a friendly and fun experience.

I'm Back

I finally got back home yesterday. I'll post some details about my "press junket" as well as my work on WALL-E very soon, but in the meantime, here is a cool interview with director Andrew Stanton.

Out To Sea

Ahoy Land-Lovers,
I am composing this blog post from onboard the Disney Magic Cruise Liner. I'm on the ship to promote the premiere-at-sea of WALL-E on June 27, and to tour the Mexican Riviera as well. Tough job, I know.

I'll be back home next week, by which time WALL-E will have premiered on land in the U.S., and probably elsewhere. I hope you get a chance to see it (and that you like it)! I worked hard on it for about 2 years and I'm very proud of what we accomplished. You'll also get to see the short film, "Presto", which is worth the price of admission by itself. It has some hilarious and astonishing animation, and is directed by legendary animator Doug Sweetland.

Update

Hello Dear Readers,

Obviously I haven't posted in a while, for which I apologize. For the last couple of months I've been hard at work on some Cars interstitials for the Disney Channel. I have been co-directing these with story artist Rob Gibbs, and of course we're receiving plenty of good guidance from Mr. Lasseter. The clips are set to premiere in the Fall. More info as I am allowed to relate it. This directing business is extremely time-consuming, as you can well imagine, so I haven't had a lot of time or energy left to post stuff here. It's a lot of fun, though, and I'm really enjoying being involved in all the different parts of production, from story to voice recording to art, modeling, shading, lighting, and of course, animation. Working on a small team is a nice change from working on a behemoth production like WALL-E.

Speaking of which, tomorrow night (June 1st) is the Pixar wrap party for WALL-E! Woohoo! I'm looking forward to getting blitzed and doing "the Robot" on the dance floor.

Animatronic WALL-E spotted in L.A.

Wall-E Spotted in LA! from Blink on Vimeo.

This is about as "on-model" as it gets, folks! A little more info here.

Aardman saves the planet

More brilliant work from my second-favorite animation studio, Aardman. Here are a series of spots for Animal Planet promoting green solutions to help solve our environmental crises. Look for all the hallmarks of Aardman animation: Simple, clear staging? Check. Appealing characters? Check. Charming Brittish accents? Check!

Brad Bird on fostering innovation

An in-depth story on GIGAOM features nine important lessons on fostering innovation in animation from renowned director Brad Bird, who helmed such hits as The Incredibles and Ratatouille. The article focuses on how Bird managed to encourage his crew on his various films to do their best work, and insists that the better the morale of the animators, the better the film will be. He also strongly advocates taking risks when telling a story. “You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail,” Bird explains. “That’s what gets you up in the morning.”

Team Fortress 2 Character Trailers

I don't know how long these have been around, but I just discovered these little vignettes for the characters in the game Team Fortress 2 (which I would definitely play if I still played video games!). The design, animation and execution are top-notch, and the writing and voice acting is hilarious, too! I love how specific every character is. You know generally where in the world they are from, what their outlook on life is like, and their personality quirks all within moments of meeting them. The design, voice and animation are all working together brilliantly to create characters that are clear and appealing. Makes them all that much more fun to kill.

Meet The Heavy (Team Fortress 2)
by nofrag

Team Fortress 2 engineer
by minutemed

Team Fortress 2 soldier
by minutemed

team fortress 2 demoman
by ElectronicArts

Meet The Scout (TF2)
by nofrag

"The Pixar Story" on TV tomorrow

Tomorrow (April 22nd) you can catch this in-depth documentary about the origins of Pixar on the Starz network at 10pm EST/PST . Set you TiVo's! The Starz web site also has some bonus footage that's not in the documentary, involving the infamous "Love Lounge" and Pixar University.

Goodbye Ollie Johnston

Two days ago we lost the last of Disney's Nine Old Men. His contribution to the art of animation was undeniable, and I'll leave to those better qualified to speak about the man. In particular, there's a great piece by Brad Bird on Cartoon Brew.

Here's a photo of Ollie with the Pixar animators taken a few years ago:

Irma's Car

Here's a nifty bit of animation from Crew 972, a studio led by my old buddy and former Pixarian Alex Orrelle. Nice mix of 2D and 3D. Enjoy!

Edit: If the above link prompts you to log in to Facebook, you can use this link instead.

Romain Seguad's new site

One of my favorite indie animators, Romain Segaud, has updated his site. There's loads of great content, both old and new, all with a very unique style. Be sure to check out his short film, "Tim Tom", and the music video "Bip Bip", as well as some of his recent commercials, such as the new "Islands" spot. Vive Romain!

"Final" WALL-E trailer is up

You probably already new this, but the third and final WALL-E trailer is available online. You can find all the trailers (and the Vacuum Vignette) in assorted flavors here. Enjoy!

Cool Stratastencil Animation

It's always fun to see a new kind of animation pop up. This is by animation Javan Ivey at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyan, and you can see how he did it on his site. How long do think it will be until we see this technique used in commercials for banks and cell phones carriers?

Philip Seymore Hoffman Rocks.

Warning: lots of profanity in this clip. I haven't seen Charlie Wilson's War, but I saw this clip of Philip Seymore Hoffman during the Oscars and I had to chase it down on YouTube. First off, the shape of his head is amazing. But that's not his choice. Second, he's an amazing actor. But you probably know that. Third, check out the energy in this clip, especially around 1:15. He's so angry - his gestures hit hard and rattle his torso, his head shakes back and forth quickly, almost vibrating. His attitudes are so clear. When have you seen this kind of energy in animation? I can't recall if I have, but I sure want to try it the next time I have to animate an angry character. Maybe you guys will beat me to it!

Congratulations Brad Bird and Ratatouille!

I almost forgot to post: Ratatouille takes the Oscar! Big congrats to Brad and all those who worked so hard to make Ratatouille the Best Animated Feature of 2007! Here's Brad with the animation crew:

CarlosBaena.com

When you get tired of my blog, cruise on over to see Carlos Baena's site! He's a fellow Pixar animator and one of the founders of AnimationMentor.com. He's also a crazy Spaniard with a passion for animation and filmmaking. He's been posting tons of interesting stuff lately (unlike me) so check it out!

WALL-E is back...

...Mostly. The HD version of the Vacuum Cleaner vignette that I animated is now available on ComingSoon.net (scroll to the bottom of the page). I'm not allowed to repost the thumbnails yet, for various reasons. Sorry for the tease!