Friday, January 06, 2012

New and Different?

Gore Verbinski and his creative group worked for twelve months on story reels for Rango. Then they handed the reels off to Industrial Light and Magic so the studio could work its magic.

"Gore talked to ILM's animators as if they were actors. He let them embrace a character and own it." ILM learned to think in terms of entire sequences, not just individual shots ...

I donno. I must live a sheltered life. Because I recall Woolie Reitherman talking to animators like they were actors, back in the day. And I remember working in sequence format. Off in the olden times. I believe it's been done that way for a few years.

Like since 1936.

But it's great that ILM has learned to think in sequence format, now that the format is ... oh ... seventy-six years old.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is the counter-argument to Andy Serkis' claim that all animators do is connect the dots from his brilliant acting.

Moe Capp said...

Point well taken, Steve. Of course we traditional animation people know that's the way it's been done since Walt's day. But ILM has primarily been a VFX facility. Maybe Rango really was the first time the ILM animators have been respectfully treated like "actors with pixels" ... although I think the live-action folks who are dabbling in animation flatter themselves if they think this was something that the animators at ILM didn't already understand. (way ahead of you there, guys) But nice of them to openly acknowledge that character animation IS acting, as much so as some guy in a mo-cap suit (whose performance can't really be used on screen until other actors/animators fix it )

Anonymous said...

We learned about "sequences" a long time ago, thank you very much. Another great and well researched article.

Anonymous said...

Looks like Disney is putting their Indian studio to good use. Doesn't have the polish of a feature, but is at least as good as their work on the Tinkerbell videos.

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