Projetando Um Filme Da Pixar

Designing a Pixar Film

At Pixar Animation Studios, we think our entire filmmaking process is a design process,

alternating iterations of planning and implementation, all centered on storytelling. Like a

painter, imagining the brush stroke is planning, and actually painting it is

implementation. Like a painter, we view both as risky creative acts, both a part of our

design.

Manufacturing is something we do not do — that happens when the single finished print

of the film leaves our building and goes to Technicolor for reproduction.

Our films require us to design worlds, and characters to fill them, and stories to take place

in those worlds. We are world builders, who must first imagine everything in the world,

and how it differs from the world we all know and why it differs and how much. We are

character creators and must imagine characters that live beyond the frame and framework

of the film, dimensional characters with desires and wishes and will. We are storytellers

who must find an engaging way to bring the story’s problem to life on the screen,

presented as action, not description.

We emphasize freedom in the planning part of the process because of the nature of

animation, which means building each frame of a 120,000 frame film. Later on in the

implementation process we will have a lot less room to improvise and discover, so we

need to get in as much of that as we can while our focus is on planning, when the cost of

exploration is low.

Our design process is based on a few simple approaches. Our films are visually

developed, meaning our process is one that celebrates ‘show, don’t tell.’ We use

traditional skills, like drawing, painting, sculpture and storytelling, low-tech not hightech,

in our planning process. We develop our ideas slowly, using an iterative process

that attempts to add value to the work of others, to ‘plus.’ We work on our films as a

team, collaboratively.

Part of our ability to collaborate comes from a design process that involves the routine

exchange of our design products between the designers. These design products are

recognizable in many cases, like designs for characters and settings, and unique to our

process in others, like model packets and shader packets.

Pixar Animation Studios Designing a Pixar Film

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Pixar Planning & Implementation Pipeline

Some of the designers add incrementally to the art they are given, collectively creating

their results. A character design bounces between story and art as the character is

iteratively defined by their shared work. The character designer draws the final image,

informed by the back and forth of a process that involves numerous contributors.

Other designers use the art as a reference to produce a new product, using the completed

character design as the starting point for the creation of a model packet, essentially the

blueprint to allow a computer artist to sculpt the character digitally.

Pixar Animation Studios Designing a Pixar Film

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Pixar Animation Studios Designing a Pixar Film

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Buzz Lightyear Character Designs and Finished Image

Our design process takes advantage of several traditional design techniques:

decomposition, abstraction and approximation. We use decomposition to break the whole

into parts that can each be designed separately. The core separation into world, character

and story is a good example of our most fundamental decomposition. Experts in

environments can concentrate on discovering the rules of the world. Character specialists

can make believable actors from bugs or lamps or toys. Storytellers can concentrate on

what happens and why. Each process informs the other, inspiring a new environment

with a story point or a different way to see a character against a fresh background.

Another technique is abstraction, removing less critical details to focus on more

important ones. In our colorscripts, a product of our first year of design, we remove time

and detail to represent the entire film as a sequence of simple color images, in pastels,

gouache or collage, so we can concentrate on the emotion of the film as it is represented

by the colors of each scene.

Pixar Animation Studios Designing a Pixar Film

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Toy Story Colorscript

Another is approximation, building rough draft representations of the finished product

that allow us to see the whole, rather than its parts. The story reel is a good example of

approximation. We make a very rough film version of our work in progress, using the

storyboard drawings to stand-in for the animation. The story reel is a vehicle for

substitution

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