How does a large animation studio like Pixar maintain consistency when dozens of people with varying artistic tastes are working on a single project?
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It’s a little easier now with all digital animation. One person builds a model of a character, another builds the set, then the animators take those and set up the lighting and cameras. A director will use a storyboard to establish how the characters should look in each shot and where the camera will be.
As for making sure the characters each have the same style, that is typically a smaller team who works together every day based off concept art.
How does a resturant maintain quality despite having too many meals made at one time for a single chef to make them all. Then to make it worse they have multiple shifts a day and are open 7 days a week.
There’s no way the same chef or even team of chefs can make every meal. But they maintain quality.
This goes for most businesses that are big enough.
You hire good staff and train them to do things the way you want them to.
How does a resturant maintain quality despite having too many meals made at one time for a single chef to make them all. Then to make it worse they have multiple shifts a day and are open 7 days a week.
There’s no way the same chef or even team of chefs can make every meal. But they maintain quality.
This goes for most businesses that are big enough.
You hire good staff and train them to do things the way you want them to.
It’s a little easier now with all digital animation. One person builds a model of a character, another builds the set, then the animators take those and set up the lighting and cameras. A director will use a storyboard to establish how the characters should look in each shot and where the camera will be.
As for making sure the characters each have the same style, that is typically a smaller team who works together every day based off concept art.
It’s a little easier now with all digital animation. One person builds a model of a character, another builds the set, then the animators take those and set up the lighting and cameras. A director will use a storyboard to establish how the characters should look in each shot and where the camera will be.
As for making sure the characters each have the same style, that is typically a smaller team who works together every day based off concept art.
For visual consistency – art director, production designer in the visdev and character/costume/prop/sets creation stage. Dept supervisors for each dept ie animation, layout, cfx, fx, lighting, etc
Vfx supe and prod designer for lighting (along w lighting dept supes)
And director of course although the director relies on each individual dept to maintain consistency although they have final buy off.
Here’s a good place to get a brief rundown of the process at Disney animation (Pixar is prob similar but different in their own ways):
https://www.disneyanimation.com/process/
For visual consistency – art director, production designer in the visdev and character/costume/prop/sets creation stage. Dept supervisors for each dept ie animation, layout, cfx, fx, lighting, etc
Vfx supe and prod designer for lighting (along w lighting dept supes)
And director of course although the director relies on each individual dept to maintain consistency although they have final buy off.
Here’s a good place to get a brief rundown of the process at Disney animation (Pixar is prob similar but different in their own ways):
https://www.disneyanimation.com/process/
For visual consistency – art director, production designer in the visdev and character/costume/prop/sets creation stage. Dept supervisors for each dept ie animation, layout, cfx, fx, lighting, etc
Vfx supe and prod designer for lighting (along w lighting dept supes)
And director of course although the director relies on each individual dept to maintain consistency although they have final buy off.
Here’s a good place to get a brief rundown of the process at Disney animation (Pixar is prob similar but different in their own ways):
https://www.disneyanimation.com/process/
In short, master style guide documents. A small number of people will be involved in making these documents, and then everyone else who is working on the project ends up working within the parameters they have.
Further, a most of the aspects of the design get assigned to smaller teams, so you might have a group of three or four artists working on sets, five or six on character design (with your main characters and filler characters being separate sub-teams), two or three people on just lighting, four on large body animation, another four on facial animation, a few on virtual camera movement, and so on.
As you get more things blocked out into place, you can have even more people working on more specific things which don’t overlap enough for your brain to be able to tell if different artists working in slightly different styles did them as long as they work to the master guide. For instance, with *The Incredibles* you wouldn’t be able to tell if Edna had a different artist working on how the fabrics she wore specifically looked as opposed to Kari’s fabrics. Or rather, your brain would make the assumption that any differences were actual differences in the fabrics
A lot of people talked about how it works, but I want to talk about places where it’s ignored and that works too.
Something like Adventure time has many writers and directors who keel their particular episode on rails and in a style but AT doesn’t have rhe same unified look or story telling style. Instead, you can find different writers, directors, or story board artists who all bring their own flavor to the mix. For example, some are more likely to include a song or have particular characters or utilize ultra close ups or push the envelope for the styles of story telling they use. The show still works and feels unified in voice direction and absurdity even while into a non uniform art direction.
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