Monday, February 18, 2008

Pixar Worship

From the Pixar Visit:

Dylan’s Animation Workshop:

  • Take as many acting classes as possible if you want to be an animator! It will teach you about yourself and how to act through your character.
  • Bad acting is presenting: it doesn’t tell anything about the character or build their performance.
  • Modern Acting is all psychology
  • The nice poses come AFTER the acting. Everything is motivated by that connection.
  • The line doesn’t matter. It’s all about the SUBTEXT. *Listen to the line and write down all the subtext for the character, scene, atmosphere etc.
Tracking Character Arcs across a Sequence:
  • 6-10 animators will work on any given sequence. There needs to be a plan beforehand about what is happening in all the shots together, so that you don’t mess up your plotlines.
  • *Status is important – who’s in a dominant position in the narrative.
  • Character Arcs – the development of a relationship between characters. [Ex: Linguini and Collette as she teaches him to cook.

On inspiration:
  • Whatever speaks to you – go after it. Don’t go after other peoples’ dreams/muses/ambitions/inspirations etc. T
  • Trust yourself. It’s what matters to you that counts.
  • 2D requires more discipline because it takes more thought to create a moving/living character in 2D than 3D. So learning a lot of things from a traditional animation and art will strengthen what you do virtually.
  • Look through lots of art – find things you like and then figure out WHY you like them.
  • Find what speaks to YOU!
  • Distill down the fundamentals of any scene you’re animating. Nail those fundamentals and you’ll be successful – what causes it, what comes after it, etc. Think big picture but simplify.
  • You will (probably) never nail a shot in one try.

On getting into a studio:
Show your personality in your animation. Animation without soul is worthless. Pixar can teach you mechanics.

And a warning:
With success can come complacency. TAKE RISKS! Do NOT become complacent.

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