Berkeley Rep Blog: "...it was awesome!
Over the years, we in the Berkeley Rep costume shop have had some interaction with the tailors at Pixar. Kathy, our tailor, has an excellent book on tailoring odd bodies that they took guidance from during Ratatouille. Needless to say, a bond was formed between our shop and theirs."
14 comments:
This article brings up a good point about the similarities between animation and theatre. We talk a lot about how the transition between theatre to tv/film has less of a learning curve, but with animation there is a whole other aspects that we do not deal with or think about. While TV does have computerized special effects animation is solely confided to computers. This limited resource will bring up many interesting challenges that people from a theatre background will not expect.
I never would have thought that Pixar had tailors! i'm still a bit confused what they're backgrounds are, but i think the article was implying that they are animation artists who focus solely on clothing. I was recently watching Cloudy with a chance of meatballs, (not Pixar, but animated none the less) and I noticed for the first time that many of the crew in the credits were listed as hair and cloth. I found this odd, since it was animated, but it made me think about how complex those things really are. As a culture, we expect some realism when it comes to movies, animated or not. This article showed how many people really go into making this the case.
This sounds like a very cool way for someone who is interested in math and costuming to work. It's an interesting medium to think about. True we discuss movies and tv shows as other businesses to go into, but there really lots of places in which design can be utilized.
This is so cool! I wasnt really sure what this was about but I really enjoy pixar so I wanted to read it. Like the author of the article I had no idea how complicated and research needed it was to do something like put clothes in an animated feature. I remember seeing something on television, for Ratatoullie as well coincidentally, and they were showing all the steps that they had to go through to put in the sound in a certain scene. And it was really interesting because lets say for instance they needed kitchen sounds they had to replicate all the sounds in a studio and then lay it in accordingly. Regardless, I have great respect for the people who work in such fields, because it seems very compicated to me, and I can just say how cool it is and how much I like it.
I never really thought about it before reading this article, but it completely makes sense now that I do. When making animations, of course the artists want their characters (and the things that their characters wear) to be as realistic as possible. I can just imagine all of the work that goes into making things look just right with the way they move and react to other objects. Like Sonia said, it seems incredibly complicated to me, but it is really very cool.
Before you can animate anything at the level of Pixar and the like you first need to understand how it works physically, then after that you need to design how you want it to look and mix the two so it will appear to be what you're trying to model. It reminds me of several years ago when realistic hair was the huge breakthrough - computers had finally become powerful enough to model hair as something that can move on its own, not just as a colored blob on top of a character's head. Now the same seems to be being done with clothing to increase the realism in animation that much more.
That is one of the coolest things I've heard in a while. I always think of animated films like drawing cartoons, really old fashoned. One guy hunched over a drafting table with a single light bulb in his tiny, cramped apartment. When the credits roll at the end of an animated movie I'm always lost as to why there are so many names listed, hair, makeup, clothes. But this makes much more sense. For movies as beautiful and complicated as Pixar's there have to be lots of artists.
I find it very interesting that Pixar takes the time to consider all of the complexities of animation like this. Never would I have guessed that such thoughtful planning was put into each character, and his or her interaction with the rest of the animated world. The integration of science and art really strikes me too--that since animation is done in a very cut and dry manner (it is numbers and figures after all) and yet can be applied to something like costume design is really neat, and something I'd like to look into
I have never thought about the costuming in animated movies, but I guess tht they really truly need costumers because....well...they wear costumes. I think that this was very enlightening because I now see the endless need for techicians in movies like that, like lighting designers, props designers, and scenic painters for example. I feel that overall this article has dramtically nlightened me to the world of computer animated movies.
Pixar's commitment to accuracy again astounds me. It makes me so happy that they have actual tailors to design the costumes for "actors/drawings" of different shapes. This kind of thought is what sets them apart from other CGI companies that will just have the clothes essentially glued to the bodies of the characters. Pixar will be the leading company in CGI because they care about every detail. Even from one of their older movies, Monsters Inc., the amount of attention they payed the fur and scales was astounding.
What's interesting is that Pixar turned to theatre for creative help. You would think with a company like Pixar, in buisness with Disney and friends with lots of Hollywood hots shots, that costumes shops all over the town would have been at their disposal. Perhaps there is something more personal in how a theatre costume shops handles outfits as oppose to a hollywood studio. I don't know. It is merely further proof that theatre is the findamental basics of entertainment. It's also interesting to see just how much detail goes into the computer design productions.
I think that this article has really opened the eyes of quite a few people of how closely tied all elements of design are to every single type of entertainment there is, including animation. Pixar is a relatively small, intimate company, but the video game industry is another example of where designers can find work. Every visual element in a video game or animated cartoon has a someone who functions very similarly to a scenic designer, someone who works as a costume designer, and there are definitely lighting designers who all translate their ideas in a digital format. The USC film school has just started to incorporate "interactive entertainment" (ie-video game design) into their curriculum because it is so similar to film in many ways. We could do a lot of interaction with ETC in terms of how to translate designs into digital formats.
This is totally cool. If you watch the credits at the end of a pixar picture, you see that there are set designers set decorators, lighting designers, hair and make up artists, and basically a corresponding position for every role in a traditional movie. It makes sense that the best person to create lighting (even if it does not actually exist in reality) is a lighting designer. Therefore the costume people are a necessity. I honestly never thought of that. in addition there are so many odd shapes and weird animated characters that need clothes that would never exist in real life. As for the math element, I really only see that as a way of controlling the drape and hand of the fabric in question. Anyway sound like an interesting and complex job.
The fact that Pixar has tailors on staff is one of my favorite things about the company. So many computer animated projects suffer from absolutely terrible, terrible clothing rendering. For some one as attuned to cloth and the way it behaves as I am, it takes me out of the moment. One of the reasons I love the Shrek series so much is because of the attention they showed to replicating different types of cloth before it was common in computer animation. You can tell Fiona's dress is velvet and brocade and that Shrek wears burlap. In contrast, older computer animation just slaps a texture on something with little or no respect for thickness of cloth, weave, or how the fabric would react with light. The computer generated fight scenes in the second and third Matrix movies are perfect examples of hyper-realistic animation with no attention shown to clothing. Sometimes the clothes aren't even rendered with seams.
Cloth animation is actually a huge deal in the computer world. There are companies now who specifically deal with cloth. Superman's cape in the 2006 Superman Returns was outsourced to a specific animation studio whose sole job was to make it move and reflect light realistically.
To me, this is a wonderful example of how one can have a foot in the world of technology and the world of theater at the same time.
Post a Comment