Pixar Cinematographers Deconstruct Onward
Short but insightful video where Sharon Calahan and Adam Habib walk us through the cinematography of some of the sequences from Pixar’s latest movie “Onward”.
Category: Cinematography
Giving dimension to a sequence
“Asterix and the Mansions of Gods” by French directors Alexandre Astier and Louis Clichy has become my bedside table movie this month, trying to adapt to cartoony animation and as I was analysing a sequence, I just realised something.
Slow motion shots are fun aren’t they but we have to recognize that they do stand out a little bit too much those days and might come across as lazy editing especially in animated feature so how one can avoid them?
First we should have a look at the way the action has been cut in this sequence to highlight the amount of frames being borrowed from shot to shot. Usually we accept that it takes between 3 to 5 frames for the eyes to adapt to a cut and therefore borrow that amount of frames from the preceding shot to make the action look seamless over the cut. Here are the start and end frame of each shot just so we can see the amount of overlap.
This established, have a look how they cleverly edited the sequence. Instead of using the overused and boring slow motion, they used several cuts on the same action, borrowing just enough frames from the preceding shots to give more dimension to the sequence! Very very clever.
That’s it for today, I hope you enjoyed this post.
Schoolism – Designing with color and light
[update] Well the class sold out in probably less than two hours, this should give some ideas to other online schools like CGMA/CGMW (I can never remember the name, but I highly recommend the storyboard and character design class). CGMA has a 2 hours live class with the mentor every week, Schoolism doesn’t. Come on CGMA, there are plenty of great Feature Animation Vis Dev artist out there.
Check this out, Bobby Chiu’s Schoolism just announced a pretty awesome online class titled “Designing with Color and Light with Nathan Fowkes”.
I have been following Dreamworks visual dev artist Nathan Fowkes for a bit and I had to rush to book the course, granted I will have a slight issue compared to other students, I am slightly colour blind. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue, some people say Van Gogh was also colour blind and this is why the palette he used seems so vibrant to non-colour blind people.
Schoolism has also a bunch of other great classes from Zbrush to Storyboarding (with Kris Pearn) I would encourage you to check out
If you enroll to one of the courses and you want to support Animation with a Moustache, please give them the following promo code 75qs0
I should use this opportunity to thanks the two people who refereed me and I would like to hear which courses you took and how you found them.
I just found a 12 minutes introduction video to an other workshop he helds in L.A. that should give an idea to what to expect from his course.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32rLWfMzHTs[/youtube]
Related search:
Schoolism
The 180 degree rule
Few weeks ago, Karim my younger brother from an other mum and dad, reminded me that Mark Andrews (aka Mandrews) and Ted Mathot had been interviewed by Andrew Gordon for a great Story Splinecast back in 2007.
I had completely forgotten about that one and was surprised to see that I even left a blurb in the comment section 😉
With the release of Brave which Mandrews directed, I HAD to listen to that interview again and I certainly had forgotten all the great gems it contained and how different Mandrews profile is compared to other Pixar directors. Well we didn’t know he would go on directing a Pixar movie in 2007 and I expected him to go on directing live action instead.
The little gem I wanted to shed light on today is the one where he talks about the “180 degree rule”. Some directors Mandrews worked with would never break it but others seem to be a bit more partial. Check it out
“Mark Andrews 180 degree rule”
I would recommend you to listen to the entire Spline cast.
Story Spline Cast with Mark Andrews and Ted Mathot
Zoom vs Truck in
Sorry for the lack of posts but I am addicted to internet and Social websites so the last remedy I found to be more productive is to cut off my internet connection. I do post some WIPs on Twitter once in a while though.
Right, since I am doing a lot of research in Storyboarding and Layout those days, I have decided to add a new Cinematography tag to my blog and “Zoom” vs “Truck-in” will be my first post.
“Zoom vs Truck-In” is something I have had to deal with a lot lately and I found a great example in the first iteration of Kung Fu Panda and the awesome bridge sequence. It is not very often that you find the two concepts applied on two consecutive shots but they did it, starting with a Truck-in and followed by a dramatic Zoom on Tai Lung
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/47750317[/vimeo]