When an animation studio like Pixar has multiple dozens of people, all with their own styles, working on a project, how do they keep everything uniform?
In: 10205
My son’s an animator and tech director for a big animation studio, he works on a bunch of Adult Swim content; his GF is an animation Art Director. Her gig is to set the tone and style and look and so on, based on what the director/client is looking for.
In movies, prop directors, set designers, costumers, hair and makeup – they’re all part of a hierarchy where an overall art director and the film’s director approve choices and (hopefully) set a consistent tone, and all those choices often “say something” about characters or the overall sense of time/place and the mood of the story. Things like bright red doors in “the Sixth Sense” were planned little easter eggs, to subtly give you clues about what was really going on (watch for red doors in the flick for and see what’s going on). So all kinds of thought goes into it.
With gigs like Pixar, where the animation isn’t drawn – everything is a 3D model and textures, colors and so on are all designed sort of like the motion-picture hierarchy, but those elements all exist on file servers. So if your gig is to animate scene #253A, all the visual stuff already exists and it’s more about lighting, camera angles, and character motions and facial expressions. And much of the character work is done with motion capture, actors in suits with tracking markers and helmets with facial capture – the director directs those performances, but then that data is translated to the 3D models – so the points of, say, an actor’s smile have to be translated to the geometry of the 3D model, and again, that translation, amplifying or modifying movements, translating a normal human form’s motion points to something like a “Shrek” model – all of that is tested and directed for conformity and the director’s vision for the scene.
Latest Answers