In 1979 John Lasseter and Steve Jobs created Pixar as part of the Lucasfilm computing group known as the Graphics Group. After being let go of Disney Animations John Lasseter set up Pixar in February of 1986 with funding help from Steve Jobs, the creator of Apple. Pixar went on through the years developing animation in a never before seen way. Fully 3D. The company started with small 3D short films and then in 1995 "reached for the sky" with the first ever fully 3D animated feature film Toy Story. The quality they began with was somewhat questionable, and this section talks about how the 3D animation industry has improved over the years.
For me Pixar sets the bar for the animation industry. Year after year they turn out the most amazing films and despite any negative press or slight disappointment their films are inarguably incredible. From time to time a story may not be as strong ie. Cars 2 or Toy Story 4 but my word are they still stunning films to look at. The visual development over the years is one thing but the characters created are the next.
We as an audience are made to fall in love and get attached to cartoon creations on a screen and it works every time. Oh how my life will be complete when I create a character or idea that is taken in and adored by millions. Each year these characters get better and better. The details and precision over the years astounds me. From 1995s Toy Story to 1999s Toy Story 2 is an incredible technology leap for character animation and the difference is huge. Not to mention the improvement of characters over the years eg. The Incredibles 1-2. The details and difference in animation quality is night and day.
One of the things I adore about Pixar the most is the fact each film has something new. Each film upon evaluation looks like a trial project. The studio takes risks and time and time again pull it off. Avoidable obstacles aren't thrown aside they are instead challenged and conquered. Below is a list of problems and hard animations the studio decided to tackle head on in a new feature film rather than test on the side.
For me Pixar sets the bar for the animation industry. Year after year they turn out the most amazing films and despite any negative press or slight disappointment their films are inarguably incredible. From time to time a story may not be as strong ie. Cars 2 or Toy Story 4 but my word are they still stunning films to look at. The visual development over the years is one thing but the characters created are the next.
We as an audience are made to fall in love and get attached to cartoon creations on a screen and it works every time. Oh how my life will be complete when I create a character or idea that is taken in and adored by millions. Each year these characters get better and better. The details and precision over the years astounds me. From 1995s Toy Story to 1999s Toy Story 2 is an incredible technology leap for character animation and the difference is huge. Not to mention the improvement of characters over the years eg. The Incredibles 1-2. The details and difference in animation quality is night and day.
One of the things I adore about Pixar the most is the fact each film has something new. Each film upon evaluation looks like a trial project. The studio takes risks and time and time again pull it off. Avoidable obstacles aren't thrown aside they are instead challenged and conquered. Below is a list of problems and hard animations the studio decided to tackle head on in a new feature film rather than test on the side.
1. Toy Story (1995)- This was Pixar's first film so they had to really make everything amazing. The hardest thing to complete was realistic humans. Most human shots in the film are done from angles that doesn't require a full body shot, models were reused and hidden in dark areas to hide the incomplete characters. This can be seen in scenes like Pizza Planet, Andy's Birthday and more populated scenes. Shots were taken more from a toys perspective and body shots were blocked. The Pizza Planet truck driver is the key example for this.
2. A bugs life (1998)- A bugs life was a technically challenging film, the studio firmly decided to keep all elements of humans out due to lack of experience and quality seen in Toy Story. They shelved ideas of Monsters and Fish due to their technical challenges and instead focused on bugs. Now the study of bugs was tough and small obviously but the real challenge came when trying to determine how to make bugs look cute and friendly rather than creepy crawly...bugs. They also had to find a technology to allow easy animation of large number of ants in a colony, and how to get their computer systems to handle the more complex models and textures required by this film. Cute and friendly bugs were difficult for two different reasons. For one, they are bugs, which don't have a track record of being cute and cuddly. Two, the Pixar rendering systems were still not capable of creating soft looking, textures, but only hard, shiny, plastic surfaces seen in Toy Story and the early short films. For example if an ant looked plasticky it would seem fake yet if they made the ants look like ants, the less friendly and likeable they seemed. The same was for all of the insects. Scaling of the characters to surroundings was also an issue in this context. They had to create semi realistic bugs, after all bugs having giant cartoon eyes is creepy! The animators sat down and gave each insect a personality and human attribute to work on and build on their human characteristics. This allowed animators the freedom to give the characters life and allow a good story to be told. One example of this is how the preying mantis looks like he's wearing a robe and the fact the ants all stand on 2 legs rather than 4.
3. Toy Story 2 (1999)- Toy Story 2 allowed Pixar to show off the development of their 3D human characters. This is why we see an awful lot more human characters and get to properly explore the characters now they can stay prominently on the bug screen.
4. Monsters Inc (2001)- The biggest challenge here is pretty easy to guess... Sully's fur. 5.4 million hairs make up the big blue monsters and then a couple million more for the sequel. Pixar had to invent a software called "Fitz" to allow for 40% more control over creatures and humans with hair. Most prominent strands of hair had to be individually animated but Fitz allows for realistic hair simulations. Whether this be in weather, movement or just general movement.
5. Finding Nemo (2003)- Another guessable challenge. Water. More specifically an 80% underwater film. The animators had to do extensive research by sending animators diving to study the fish, lighting, area and habitats. The team worked to build a convincing underwater world by using shaders, light effects and a lot of varied colour tones. Light underwater is also a huge challenge for anyone as it runs very differently to on the surface so this too had to be studied in depth.
6. The Incredibles (2004)- The Incredibles was Pixar's first fully human cast so this was a huge challenge in itself. It was also their first use of big scale FX like explosions and their first multi environmental film. I.e.. Rainforest, volcanos and cities etc. But the true challenge in this film was Violet. Her disappearing act was cool and hard to animate but the true problem lay in her hair. Mainly due to the length, Violet is one of the very few animated game or film characters to have long hair. This is because long hair its so hard and time consuming to animate. Especially at the time of the first film.
7. Cars (2006)- Cars was the next film in line and Pixar really had a challenge in this film. Not only did they have to make cars human like and believable with facial features and emotions but they also had to work hugely with a material and surface barely touched in the industry. Metal. More specifically reactive metal, a surface that would reflect lights, look convincing and hit all of the features a regular car would have. They pulled this off so so well but it took a lot of playing around with surfacing and lighting to get it correct. jus look at the details in each scene in terms of lighting and metallic reflection...
8. Ratatouille (2007)- Ratatouille for me saw the start of the 2nd phase in the Pixar films, the new era if you will. The change in animation was crazy and the hardest thing to animate was funnily the littlest of details, food. Pixar successfully created food that not only looks realistic but also appealing and delicious, as if you would reach into the screen and eat it for yourself. This is hard to achieve and not a single dish looks fake, and as a food lover I am all for that.
9. Walle (2008)- Walle was a gorgeous film created to allow humans to connect and love robots and to warn them of a darker future. One of the biggest challenges in the film came in the emotion of the robots. The robots don't have human facial features and this was intentional. But due to this Pixar landed themselves the challenge of portraying emotions without relying on facial features or dialogue. To do this they followed in the footsteps of Luxo Jr, Pixar's first short film. In this it shows a large lamp communicating with a baby lamp playing with a ball. The two lamps, much like the robots in Walle, have to give emotion in their movements rather than faces or sounds. They employees also met with with NASA and other robot scientists to study robots an their movements.
10. UP (2009)- Up is undoubtedly a Pixar great... the hardest thing to animate would be fairly easy to guess but to save the struggle I shall explain. The rainforest was a big challenge for Pixar but the true challenge came in the form of 30,919 animated balloons. 10,297 in all shots of the house and 20,622 in the lift off sequence. All with their own life and animations. A huge bundle of balloons caused a long animation time for the poor animators in charge of these scenes. These balloons have to have realistic characteristics a it gives the house its character and presence, the balloons also all have to follow realistic physics to create realism.
11. Toy Story 3 (2010)- So ToyStory 3 is a stand out film due to many reasons, the story and quality being two notable ones. But strangely the hardest thing to animate came in twos. Rubbish (trash) bags and rubbish seen in the dump scenes. The hardest animation comes in the furnace scene there are millions of individual small moving sections of rubble and ground up rubbish, all with designs, textures and materials of their own. Obviously hundreds of thousands of small individual objects is self explanatory as to why it was hard to animate.
The second hardest is garbage bags. The consistency and feeling of rubbish bags is very strange, a stretchy solid like rubber that is so wrinkly, see through and has mass with the objects inside. The rubbish bags also react to light realistically but the truth is, they don't really react to light. They move funny and roll strangely when moved, so when lots fall out the back of a dump truck it can be seriously hard to study and animate.
12. Cars 2 (2011)- Cars 2's hardest thing to animate has never really been revealed. The only thig that had improved is the quality of animation and the reflections on the cars themselves. The film is visual stunning and includes crazy locations and cities. For me I believe the hardest thing to be is the cities. This includes Porta Corsa in Italy, London in England and Tokyo in Japan. These places are huge and to correctly design these areas must have been painful!
13. Brave (2012)- Meridas hair. Obviously this was a challenge. Unlike violets hair that is straight, Merida had long bouncy curly hair. Infact Pixar created an entirely new software to allow the characters hair "react more realistically to the movements and surroundings of the character". The hair had 1500 individually animated hairs, all with distinct points and 3D spaces that are programmed to bounce and interact with her. The result is gorgeous. Pixar say they don't plan on releasing the software to anyone yet.
14. Monsters University (2013) Monsters University caused a lot of technical problems rather than experimental problems. There were twice as more computers running now as years prior and so much detail and quality was being produced. 29 hours were spent on each individual frame in MU and you can tell. The viewers were becoming more aware of quality change an the Monsters Inc film from 2001 just wasn't going to cut it quality wise. Something that looked amazing 12 years ago and the beginning of animation days, like the fur on Sully, doesn’t look as good compared to work produced today. In his final form, Sully had 5.5 million individual hairs in his fur coating, where as in the 2001 film he had a fifth of that. In Monsters Inc, it was impressive to create one simulated garment with realistic, cloth-like behaviour ie. the shirt on the character Boo. The prequel on the other hand had 127+ simulated clothing types, and the hair and cloth simulator had to be re-coded from scratch. It took more than 100 million computer (CPU[works twice as quick as a human]) hours to render the film in its final form. If you used only one CPU to do it, it would have taken about 10,000 years to finish.
15. Inside Out (2015)- Joy. Joy is a character who is glowing. Literally and physically. This character, designed to bring happiness and well...Joy to our screens was achieved in a very clever way. Instead of just giving the character a bubbly personality, the animators also gave her a radiant glow around her body. People think that the speccy looking hair and sparkly fluffy characters were hard to make. They would be correct. But constantly animating a character that glows from all angles was a challenge. the ray of light had to be the same and also light the surrounding area of the character. This was hard but the end result is gorgeous.
16. The Good Dinosaur (2015)- The aesthetic in The Good Dinosaur is second to none. This film is visually stunning from star to finish. The most underrated film by far. The story is emotional and the visuals are insane... The hardest thing to animate in this masterpiece was the clouds. Pixar have never work directly with clouds before and as you can see from the picture on the left they didn't make a lack of experience noticeable. These fluffy shapes are incredibly accurate and the animators made this scene that much better by putting them in. The study of clouds and movement was of course needed but since The Good Dinosaur they have been able to use this technology to create clouds in other smash hits.
The other very notable phenomenon is the water. The crystal clear water is absolutely insane. It looks like some crazy illusion for a water feature in a tropical paradise. The water in the film is just incredible. The elaborate scene when the flash flood occurs is crazy enough but the constant water visuals is something never seen before. We have seen work underwater for Finding Nemo but not overly above. Imagine the tech when the two combine.
17. Finding Dory (2016)- The two combined. The water visuals in this film as expected are gorgeous. The colour and water variation in the sequel builds so much on the first film but the water is not the true devil to this film. Water has been mastered. Instead the challenge came with a new character. Hank he Septopus. It was really key to have a realistic and anatomically correct character. This was very important for Hank, since he has a jelly like body shape and can shape-shift and change colours (just like real octopuses, who have the ability to squeeze through any opening bigger than their hard beak). The team studied footage of octopuses in the wild and visited places like the Monterey Bay Aquarium, to watch real octopuses. A painstaking process was taken to allow Hanks unfurling of his tentacles to look realistic. Not everything was accurate – Hanks mouth was far from it. If Hank was 100% accurate, he would have had a beak in the middle of his body, which isn’t exactly conducive to dialogue with other characters. An animator stated “There are a number of issues after animation has finished a shot with Hank, that still need to be addressed,” “Ground contact is one of them. When Hank is sitting on the ground or a portion of the set, what we want to make sure is that the suckers contact the very top of that surface, and don’t interpenetrate with it, and we also don’t want to squish out the suckers to convey a sense of weight.” (there are over 350 suckers on Hank.) Mike Stocker, who was one of the supervising animators for Hank, says that a shots early in the film when Hank meets Dory “took six months to do.”
18. Cars 3 (2017)- Cars 3 gave some gorgeous settings including sand and dirt but this films challenge came in the form of mud. The mud in the demolition derby scene was very hard to animate. There were so many textures and consistency's of the mud. It's wet. It's gloppy. It slips and spatters against the cars. There were around 160 mud shots in the film, and to prepare, the visual effects team spent six months just experimenting with the mud to work out its physics and movements.
19. Coco (2017)- Coco is a visually stunning film. It is emotional too. Some of the most creative story telling Pixar had done in a long while. The story sees a boy Miguel in love with music but forbidden from playing, travel to the land of the dead to find his musical ancestor, Ernesto De La Cruz, Miguel finds out he's not as ancestral as he once thought. The films big story arc is guitar and music. The animators worked tirelessly to bring the magic of music to life. One scene sees Miguel play a complicated guitar riff quickly on his guitar. This riff is not only pleasing to the ear but the animation s 100% accurate. The timing matches, the notes and speed he plays matches too. This was very hard for animators to create and required a lot of extensive research into guitars and the movements seen on screen.
Pixar's RenderMan tackled some of the most complex rendering scenes yet attempted by the studio. The main city of the Land of the Dead in the film is based on the real world city, Guanajuato in Mexico.The team visited during pre-production. One of the hardest things in Coco was the sheer amount of lighting used. 29,000 lights were used in the train station scene. The cemetery had 18,000 lights and the City of the Dead used 2,000 practical lights in RenderMan. The studio team used the RenderMan API to create 700 special point cloud lights, which, when expanded, is equivalent to 8.2 million lights. (click the picture for the link to a video). There was over 50 hours that went into each frame! Although ’50 Hours per frame’ does not mean that one frame literally took 50 hours to complete. It refers to the time it would have taken if the frame was not rendered and created on Pixar’s Render software but instead was rendered on a single machine. Eg. 50 machines would render the frame in one hour. The team did solve the problem. They worked out a new "point cloud" lighting system. The new software is equipped with filtering, and also ignored lights that, due to position, could not give any direct scene lighting. After 6 months the Lightspeed and RenderMan team had a system that gives the effect of millions of lights and took the render time on the shots down from 1000 hours to 450 hours. The team then manages to reduce this further to 125 hours and finally 75 hours a frame. With some additional work on the way the production team worked with the lighting in shots, the final per frame time at the end of production was just 50 hours per frame.
“Over the year we’ve spent so much time and research figuring out our human characters and how their skin squashes and stretches, so this totally broke the rules for us. We knew with skeletons that all of a sudden, those boundaries of something organic are gone — the skin, the muscles, the tendons. And if there’s nothing holding it together, what can you do with bones? And we realized, we can do all sorts of things.” This is a quote from a supervising animator on the film. Bones required a deep study into anatomy, all animators have a knowledge of anatomy but not necessarily every single bone. So for Pixar to create characters 100% made of bones was challenging, they had to study the colour and ageing. They had to study the movement and facial expressions of solid bones. One key design decision that helped make the skeletons believable was to fill those usually-empty eye sockets with big, expressive cartoon eyes and then have those same sockets stretch, bend and squash to act instead of eyebrows. But hardest of all they had to create an entirely new software to allow clothing to be put on bones. Pixar found themselves creating characters where their meshes got stuck in the clothing they wore. The problem came when using the clothing simulator. The simulator just didn't know how to make clothes lay on characters made entirely out of thin objects like bones rather than built up surfaces like layers of skin. “We spent three years revamping our collisions system so that we could be able to have robust collisions between the skeletons and what they were wearing" a animator named Grover says, adding "that the new system kept the characters' bony nature prominent even under fabric.""We tightened all the clothing,” he explains. “We cinched it around the spines and tightened it around the rib cages so you could really feel the ribs underneath.” (taken from a Wired interview)
20. Incredibles 2 (2018)- Incredibles 2 features the same superhero family that thrilled audiences in 2004. But, my gosh, have they had a makeover. The sequels plot starts directly where the first one left off, but in the first seconds its very clear how technologically advanced computer-generated animation has become in 14 years since the first film was made. Previous sequels show improvement but this film shows just quite how drastically. Firstly the characters’ faces are more detailed, the action sequences more crazy and choreographed, the designs are richer and brighter and the settings more layered and detailed. The first hardest animation was the improvement on VFX and explosions. Getting more realistic means getting more technical and nothing can be more technical than a scientifically accurate explosion.
Incredibles wouldn't be The Incredibles without a complex hair animation in the form of Violet. This time the animators took the original software for violets hair and just simply made it better... They added scenes to show off this flowing hair animation and showed it off to maximum capability.;
21. Toy Story 4 (2019)-This films quality change is impeccable... The difference 24 years makes is very clear. The detailing of the characters is a start. The character creation is out of this world, you can see fraying on the fluff and clothing of toys, scratches on Buzz from ageing play and Bo Peep actually looks like a china doll now! Another example is Forky, the scratch marks on the face which identify him as an old eating utensil as well as the glitter for his eye glue.
As above the difference in animals too is crazy. The same features can be seen on Ducky and Bunny. On the left is Sid's dog Scud from the first Toy Story. Badly built and textured this smooth, fake looking dog does not do half as much justice to the FULLY ANIMATED realistic cat seen on the eight. The skeleton, the model, the fur, the lighting. Everything about how Pixar has improved is absolutely incredible.
The Antiques Shop
Second chance antiques is the home to many props. Well 10,000 digitally created props if we are being exact. Not a single shot in the store doesn't include an Easter Egg (reference to other Pixar film) and it is said if you pause it at any time the scenes look completed.
Bob Pauley, the production designer of the antique store said "it is vast and filled with thousands of objects". "We did a lot of research," he says. "For Ratatouille, they went to Paris. For Up, they went to Venezuela. But for Toy Story 4, we visited local antique stores. We discovered a lot of charming, interesting and fun people running them, and many visual similarities from store to store. There's often a stoplight, a jukebox, sometimes a big plastic Santa and of course lots of collectibles and real antiques. There are many lights and lamps illuminating all the items throughout the store—lights connected to lots and lots of extension cords and power strips. The front desks are always interesting, small notes, little curiosities, extra tags, and refreshingly low tech: they laboriously hand-write 20 receipts and chat about your purchase. There's also a cat or two that have the run of the place, so we incorporated one to help tell our story." The shop is full of old things filled with cobwebs. Cobwebs hadn't yet been dived into in Pixar history so, to help make the cobwebs look realistic and not over the top, Pixar developed a computer program that contained artificial spiders that were programmed to weave webs in a way an actual spider would.
- The Antiques Store was established in 1986, the year Pixar was founded. Its address is also 1200, the same address Pixar is located in Emeryville.
22. Onward (2020)-Pixar films have taken place in some pretty interesting locations. Onward, which is set in a suburban fantasy world, is one of the craziest yet. The first film not to feature a "planet earth" setting but instead another world influenced by man. A suburban fantasy world. For the Onward creators, placing the film in this setting helped them create a film that was both magical and familiar to the audience.
After several redesigns, the team decided that fantasy world would become a style that was 70% familiar and 30% fantastic. Oftentimes, the 30% was easy to achieve, as the team soon realized that by simply placing an elf or a troll in a scene, they would instantly meet that criteria. It was balancing that out with the familiar that proved to be more difficult. They didn't want it too humanly after all and wanted the story to still have meaning. To get inspiration for the familiar feelings, the team took a research trip to Los Angeles, where they studied houses in the neighbourhoods of Los Feliz and Frogtown whilst studying simple everyday things like parking and power lines.
Another major challenge for the team was determining exactly what magic would look like in the film. There's a lot of magic in films and the studio wanted to create their own sense of magic to ensure uniqueness. Together with director Dan Scanlon, they determined the three essential components of a spell:
Using these criteria points as a guide, the team was then able to move on to more features of the magic, like what a spell should be named and what magic should look like. When dealing with the look, the team considered many things, including the colour of the magic, the mood and power, how someone's confidence and mental state can affect the shape and style of the magic, and how much space a piece of magic should take up on the screen. These all came together to create the final version seen in the film.
- 1. Heart’s Fire – This is the passion you bring to a spell that makes it come to life 2.Magic Decree - Used in the more intermediate to advanced spells, this is the specific state of mind you need to be in to cast the spell and 3. Assist Element - An ingredient necessary for the most advanced spells, without which your spell would be rendered useless. In the case of the Visitation Spell attempted by Ian and Barley to bring back their dad, the assist element is a phoenix gem.
Using these criteria points as a guide, the team was then able to move on to more features of the magic, like what a spell should be named and what magic should look like. When dealing with the look, the team considered many things, including the colour of the magic, the mood and power, how someone's confidence and mental state can affect the shape and style of the magic, and how much space a piece of magic should take up on the screen. These all came together to create the final version seen in the film.
Lastly came a very hard character to animate. Dad. The character of Dad was a challenge. “With Dad, we really had to ask ourselves, how can pants communicate and express emotion?” said directing animator Allison Rutland. Before the actual animation even began, the animators did several green screen exercises with Scanlon to test how a pair of trousers would do things like sit down, be pulled by a leash, or perhaps even do a high-five. (For that, a leg would lift to tap a hand much like dogs doing paw)
others to follow