{"id":139,"date":"2006-02-26T10:36:07","date_gmt":"2006-02-26T14:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.harrymccracken.com\/hgr\/?p=139"},"modified":"2006-02-26T10:36:07","modified_gmt":"2006-02-26T14:36:07","slug":"another-visit-to-pixar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/2006\/02\/26\/another-visit-to-pixar\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Visit to Pixar"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Saturday night, San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum<\/a> held a benefit at Pixar in Emeryville. (This was the third such event; I wrote about an earlier one here<\/a>.)
\nOnce again, I was in attendance–and once again, I had a good time.<\/p>\n

This one was a bit different than its predecessors. The last Pixar night was held shortly before The Incredibles<\/em> premiered, and was in part a preview of that film. This time, we got to see a brief trailer for John Lasseter’s Cars<\/em>, but that was it as far as stuff relating to the next Pixar feature went. (The art show from Incredibles <\/em>which we saw last time was still up.)<\/p>\n

I don’t think this was entirely because the studio doesn’t want to talk about Cars<\/em> yet, since I’ve been to two public events (the less-than-spectacular Wondercon panel mentioned by Mike Barrier<\/a> in a recent post, and an earlier session at an illustration conference, which dug into the film in some detail).<\/p>\n

Unlike the earlier benefits, the bulk of last night’s presentation was done by one guy–Michael Johnson<\/a>, a Pixar technical guy who’s also a board member at the museum. That was fine; he did a great job, giving a talk that was about both Pixar’s film-making process and its perspective on the world.<\/p>\n

He began by stating three Pixar rules of success:<\/p>\n

1. Casting, casting, casting. <\/strong>(ie, nothing is more important than the team you hire)<\/p>\n

2. Hire people smarter than yourself.<\/strong><\/p>\n

3. Art as a team sport.<\/strong> (“51 percent is plays well with others.”)<\/p>\n

One interesting thing about these three rules: They’re really one rule, since they could be summed up in one four-word one, namely Hire a smart team<\/strong>. Which sure seems to work for Pixar, and which is souund advice for any sort of creative or corporate endeavor.<\/p>\n

Johnson showed some good clips as part of his talk, including several minutes of Andrew Stanton pitching Finding Nemo<\/em>. (He was fabulous, and watching him in action made me wish that footage survived of Walt Disney in action during 1930s story conferences). <\/p>\n

Brad Bird did about 3,000 drawings simply while reviewing work on The Incredibles<\/em> (sketching with an electronic pen on top of CGI frames), said Johnson; he showed us a rapid-fire selection of those quick Bird drawings.<\/p>\n

Other tidbits:<\/p>\n

* Johnson said that all Pixar productions begin as 2D ideas. Some of the artists who work on ideas like to use real-world art materials; others work digitally, using Wacom’s Cintiq tablets. That’s fine: “We take no position on paper.”<\/p>\n

* He showed a great little film about all the work that went into giving The Incredibles<\/em>‘ Violet plausible long hair. It had never been done before and was a huge technical challenge: “Violet’s hair brought this production to its knees.”<\/p>\n

* The DVD editions of Pixar movies are produced at the same time as theater ones, and are actually separate renderings composed for a TV’s aspect ratio. “We do it because we can.”<\/p>\n

* Random quote: “We don’t want real-looking humans–they’re kind of creepy…reality is just a useful measure of complexity.”<\/p>\n

* Another random quote: Effects animators “animate what the animators don’t want to animate.”<\/p>\n

* Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton like to work with a traditional movie script; “John Lasseter, not so much.”<\/p>\n

After Johnson’s talk, we saw One Man Band<\/em>, the new Pixar short which will run with Cars<\/em>. It’s fun and funny, with a storybook-like look that’s quite different from other Pixar work–and has, in a little girl character, one of the best actors ever to appear in CGI. Like all Pixar films, it also has sound that’s as rich, clever, and carefully thought-out as the visuals.<\/p>\n

We then heard from co-director Mark Andrews and animator Angus McLane, and then we saw the short again.<\/p>\n

One notable Pixar issue barely came up during the formal presentation: the little fact that it’s being acquired by Disney. But the evening ended with the Pixar staffers hobnobbing with attendees, and many of the questions focused on the merger.<\/p>\n

Johnson said Pixar does want to make some sequels to its films, and that the studio, which is still a fairly small operation, will likely grow. He said he’s having fun talking to counterparts at Disney; Pixar is by necessity a secretive place, and he thinks it’ll be nice to have more colleagues to discuss things with. (But just how much sharing of technical know-how between Pixar and Disney will happen is yet to be determined, he said.)<\/p>\n

(Side note on Pixar secrecy: Before we were ushered into the studio’s theater, we were wanded…and a guard examined my pen, presumably to make sure it wasn’t some sort of spy device.)<\/p>\n

He said that Ed Catmull and John Lasseter have no plans to leave Northern California, but will likely spend a couple of days a week in LA. He also said that he fully expects to be at Pixar ten or twenty years from now: “As long as this place stays the same, this is where we want to be.”<\/p>\n

If there’s another Cartoon Art Museum benefit, it’ll presumably be at a Pixar that’s an arm of Disney. I sure hope that there is<\/em> another benefit, and that I get to go to it–and that the place still feels like Pixar. Much more important, I hope that the studio remains a place where people like Michael Johnson want to work for twenty years–and beyond. Time will tell…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Saturday night, San Francisco’s Cartoon Art Museum held a benefit at Pixar in Emeryville. (This was the third such event; I wrote about an earlier one here.) Once again, I was in attendance–and once again, I had a good time. This one was a bit different than its predecessors. The last Pixar night was … Continue reading “Another Visit to Pixar”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harrymccracken.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}