Hey everyone, Pete Docter was here in Kansas City and gave a talk about animation and the process Pixar goes through when making a film. There were some interesting things that he showed that I thought I'd share with you.
One of the first things he did was show this commercial to show why animation works.
Even though it has no animation in it, it shows that people are always personifying things and that half the work is done with them just walking into the theater.
He showed another video of a study with salamanders and video images of crickets and rectangles. They put the salamander in front of the computer screen with various videos which had the cricket moving in an abnormal way and the rectangle moving in a way the cricket would move and each time the salamander would follow whichever object moved like a cricket, regardless of what it looked like. This example stressed how important our jobs as animators are! Also he was making the point that characters can be as stylised as we want, rather than completely life-like, and as long as we include movement that we can relate to it will work.
I couldn't find the video for this but I did find a pdf over the study.
http://jeb.biologists.org/cgi/reprint/205/2/241.pdf
This last video had to do with lip sync. He said that many animators think that they have to have perfect lip sync but the fact is that you need to have the body working properly and performing proper body language for that situation.
He also showed Pinocchio's "I've got no strings" pointing out the lip sync wasn't there at all really and just basically an open and close puppet mouth.
