Pixar: A Magical World of Creativity, Collaboration, and Imagination
A rat that can cook. A clownfish who wants to go to school. A boy who dreams of becoming a musician. Real-life struggles seamlessly expressed in animation. Full of creativity and collaboration, Disney’s Pixar never fails to create a multi-cultural, sensory world, full of relatability, homey-ness, and love.
Although a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Studios, Pixar has been consistent in its production of heart-warming, relatable movies, and its ability to preserve authenticity in the portrayal of different cultures. While Disney’s golden age of success seems to be an era of the past, Pixar has maintained the originality necessary to survive in the industry, the key to their undying success being their creativity and collaboration.
While many think of creativity to be the work of a single individual, Pixar insists on fostering creativity from their myriad teams, all of whom are a crucial part of the creative process. From the animating team to the writing team, every Pixar employee adds a unique perspective or personal story, which makes Pixar movies appealing to both children and adults. In an interview, Adrian Molina, a co-director of the Pixar film Coco, said, “When we were making Coco, I found myself calling my parents every weekend and asking about family stories. They make their way into the film, and hopefully, when you watch it, you feel that reality and that love, and it affects you”. A character designer for Coco told the writing team a childhood memory of how his Mexican Abuelita would never hesitate to whack someone with her chancla whenever she was disrespected. This personal story ended up being added to the film and has been praised for its level of relatability from others who grew up in traditional Mexican households.
How Pixar Movies Are Made
The creation process of a Pixar film begins with the writing team, who collectively draft out unique characters and a plot alongside the storyboard team. For movies set in real-life locations, Pixar writers and directors often travel to those places to understand the culture of the people and to steer away from any cliques with character personalities. In an interview with Pixar, a member of the storyboard team explained, “There’s a whole world out there where kids don’t see themselves. We all go through it. We are hoping to make those kids feel seen”. This universal goal of Pixar’s is what makes their range of characters diverse and relatable.
Once the storyboard and writing team have developed a plot and basic characters, they sketch out simple drawings and transform the storyline into a comic book-style frame. Meanwhile, production designers begin designing a fictional setting and start making more elaborate sketches of the main characters. Once the storyboard and writing teams have developed their final storyline, they take their comic book-style sketches to the editorial team, who make fine-tuned edits, write dialogue, and add music and sound effects. After the cast of the movie records all the dialogue, the editorial team strings all the rough sketches together into one long chain and inserts the recorded dialogue. Next, the sculpting team creates 3-D sculptures of every character out of clay, so that animators are able to view 3-D versions of the characters before animating them to appear that way.
In the next few phases of this creative process, more math and science elements are tied in, as technical directors add joints to online 3-D character models so that characters can move in their digital world. This team works to ensure that each character’s body language matches their vocal tones and emotion. Other members of the technical team focus on ensuring that the physics depicted in the movie are accurate. For example, if a character tosses a ball, the technical team will make sure that the upward motion, force of air resistance, and force of gravity, are all accurate in the animation, so that it looks realistic in the movie. This was especially interesting to learn because it showed me that there are multiple real-life applications of things we learn in school in a variety of industries. The next step of this process is creating the virtual set for each scene of the movie. In Cars 2, the set design team built a virtual set of the entire city of London for a scene where Lightning McQueen and Mater race through the city. They learned how to make the buildings appear realistic and how to add detail to well-known landmarks, such as Big Ben. Once the set is virtually built, the characters are filmed moving through the set with the use of virtual cameras, which take shots from different angles, similar to how live-action movies are filmed. Virtual cameras have different sized lenses, much like regular cameras, and are used on a computer to zoom in on certain characters in different scenes.
After the scenes have all been filmed, animators start bringing the characters to life by adding clothes, hair, fur, textures, and all other assets that are necessary to make the characters look believable. Once the animating is complete, the lighting team adds light from different angles into each frame so that it comes from the direction of light sources in the movie, such as the Sun or a lightbulb. Every beam of light in a movie has to be manually added by the lighting team, who add shadows as well. The final step to completing a Pixar movie happens with a machine called “The Render-Farm”, which is used to string all the frames together to complete the movie. Every scene is composed of a series of images, or frames. There are roughly twenty-four frames every second, which makes it look like characters are moving smoothly. The rendering team finishes this lengthy process of creativity by bringing all the art, math, science, and writing together to make the final movie.
Creativity and team collaboration have been seamlessly incorporated into the culture of Pixar, and remind us of the importance of building trust and camaraderie with the people around us. By focusing on real-life struggles, Pixar movies elicit emotions that are buried within everyone, which is the reason viewers walk away with the satisfaction of being seen. Whether you’re an overly protective parent, a kid trying to make new friends, an artist who feels weighed down by their heritage, or a teenager struggling with the transition to adulthood, Pixar’s determination to shed light on human struggles builds a connection between the audience and the movie. For other groups looking to Pixar as the epitome of creativity and collaboration, former Chief Creative Officer of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has a single piece of advice, “The unpredictable is the ground on which creativity occurs”.
For anyone interested in learning about the behind-the-scenes of how a Pixar movie is made, Khan Academy has collaborated with Pixar to create an incredible interactive experience called Pixar In A Box, where you can learn how to do animation, rendering, lighting, character modeling, use virtual cameras, and more, all through the use of coding and simulations. You can access the link here.
