Tuesday, February 28, 2006

We take no position on paper

Blogger Harry McCracken has a post about a recent visit to Pixar held as a benefit for San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum. Lucky guy.
Unlike the earlier benefits, the bulk of last night's presentation was done by one guy--Michael Johnson, a Pixar technical guy who's also a board member at the museum. That was fine; he did a great job, giving a talk that was about both Pixar's film-making process and its perspective on the world.


I find some bits of that perspective really inspiring.

He began by stating three Pixar rules of success:

1. Casting, casting, casting. (ie, nothing is more important than the team you hire)

2. Hire people smarter than yourself.

3. Art as a team sport. ("51 percent is plays well with others.")


* Johnson said that all Pixar productions begin as 2D ideas. Some of the artists who work on ideas like to use real-world art materials; others work digitally, using Wacom's Cintiq tablets. That's fine: "We take no position on paper."

* He showed a great little film about all the work that went into giving The Incredibles' Violet plausible long hair. It had never been done before and was a huge technical challenge: "Violet's hair brought this production to its knees."


* Random quote: "We don't want real-looking humans--they're kind of creepy...reality is just a useful measure of complexity."


Tell it, brother.

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