Hello!
It has been a busy day at FMX09 and TrickFilmFestival here in Stuttgart. Sad news…Unfortunately, we did not win the Bosch pitching forum prize. The “compot collective” and their “Father” animated documentary project took first prize. It looks like a very interesting project and i wish them all the best!
Moving on, I had a blast yesterday,watching a lot of cool conferences (“directing in the 21 century”, “plankton invasion”…),but first i have to give a big thumbs up for the new film by Adam Elliot called “mary&max,” a claymated feature film from the creators of the Academy Award winning short animation HARVIE KRUMPET.
At the FMX09 one film presentation caught my eye. This was the presentation of the upcoming feature film by toons´n´tales called Jasper the pinguin. Its and 8 million euro production based in Germany. The film is for small children so it is a bit slow, but the visuals are really great. They have managed to produce an innovative and unique 3d look.
Besides this, the Pixar presentation of the cinematography for Wall-e was very interesting. It was packed, everybody went- and i was there as well. Danielle Feinberg from pixar talked about the crazines of the pixar people:) What else can you say for people who track down directors from films they liked as reference for their new project, and ask them what lens they used in a film 10 years ago, so they can replicate this detail…The look they wanted was an 60’s and 70’s science fiction. Besides this they wanted to have a documentary feel for all the shots on earth. As Danielle sad, a “found film”- like something you stumbled up in one of the garbage towers. This they achieved with replicating the camera settings and feel of these movies- One of the things they noticed was the depth of field blurring. They felt it had something their computer replicated camera lacked. The tech guys said this was not true-their cg cameras had all the parameters of the real camera.So in true Pixar style, they went and build a set with a plastic Eve, shot some live footage and gave this to the tech guys.
The difference was visible, so they went and fixed that.You will notice in the movie that the camera is not following the action perfectly. This was done to create a documentary feel to the camera movement. In this way you dont get a staged feel to the scene. Again, in true Pixar style the moved the classical cg camera pivot from the center of the camera to the bottom of the camera, to replicate how someone would hold a real camera- See if you can notice this:)
An interesting bit of information-In the first stages of the film making, Wall-e was thinner and more elegant, but they decided that he was too wimpy and would not survive 700 years alone, so they beefed him up in the final version.
What pixar changed in the way they approach film making in this movie, was in the animatic and rough layouts. Usually the animators would get rough layouts with no lightening. In Wall-e they would setup the light much earlier in the process in order to give the animators a better sense of how the scene will look in the end. In this photo the upper image is from the layout phase and the bottom image is from the finished movie.
Well, hope you found this little overview interesting!
Today im flying back home, so this is my last post!