We recently took the boys to the Boston Museum of Science. There is an exhibit now on "The Science Behind Pixar". It discusses the incredible amount of research that goes into creating the wonderful movies Pixar produces.
The exhibit shows the entire process of moviemaking from the original idea to the first sketches to the animation to the final finished product. Behind it all is incredibly sophisticated technology that at its root relies on a combination of standard film processes merged with powerful processing using extremely complicated mathematical models.
Interspersed throughout the exhibit are video interviews of the team members who work in each of the various disciplines. I found their stories inspirational as a way to show how an education in science and technology can actually be merged with an interest in creative arts to come up with an entirely new career.
The team at Pixar also does an enormous amount of work behind the scenes. They research their subjects in painstaking detail. This helps provide the films with grounding in the basic science of the real world. The exhibit gives some of this background in a variety of multimedia displays. This article in Wired also helps explain some of their work.
Pixar is as much a research firm as it is an animation studio, and a new exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City does an expert job at showing us how. For Pixar: The Design of Story, the movie studio supplied Cooper Hewitt with 650 renderings, mockups, illustrations, and storyboards of its characters and landscapes, along with background. Taken together, these artifacts illuminate the painstaking level of research that goes into the creation of every character, right down to the folds in an old man’s jacket sleeve, or the texture of the curls in a heroine’s hair.
Take Carl Fredricksen’s house in Up. The residence is as central to the movie’s plot as Russell, the dog Dug, or Carl himself, and Pixar’s designers treated it as such. It’s based on a Victorian-style home in Berkeley, California, and an annotated diagram on display at Cooper Hewitt shows where the designers specified nearly microscopic details like patina’d copper at the base of the chimney and the scale and frequency at which cracks in the paint would appear.
“When the house floats up and you’re looking at the infrastructure, it was really important that pipes connect in the right way, so if a plumber was watching the film they wouldn’t go, ‘oh, they took a lot of license,’ ” says Cara McCarty, curatorial director at Cooper Hewitt. Same goes for designing something as everyday as water: “In Finding Nemo the water is so incredible, but it’s hyper-realistic,” McCarty says. “If it’s too realistic, like a realistic painting, it almost becomes dead. They find ways to tweak it so that if someone who knows a lot about water is looking at it, and they’re already seduced by the movie and along for the ride, they don’t think, ‘it’s so phony.’ ”
Keep all of this in mind the next time you watch your next Pixar film.
Here is the link to the full article: Perfecting Pixar's Movies Takes a Crazy Amount of Research | WIRED
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