Wednesday, August 27, 2014

At the Hat

I was at the Hat Building on Riverside Drive during the afternoon, and it seems that the company was promoting a new picture.

... Disney-Pixar chief John Lasseter, [Big Hero 6's] producer Roy Conli and co-directors Don Hall and Chris Williams teased the movie Wednesday by revealing 25 minutes of footage at a gathering of Oscar bloggers at the Disney Animation building in Burbank. ...

Hero is the first film made on Disney's new high-powered, patented rendering system, which produces images of a greater photo-realistic quality than has been possible before. It is also the first time ... that Disney animators have dipped into Marvel's comic-book library, where they discovered the new movie's eponymous six superheroes — or "supernerds," as Lasseter called them. ...

Lasseter summed up the movie as "a simple story" with real "emotional heart." Hall said of adapting the comic-book series, "We kept the title and we kept the character names, but we basically remade the story." (I'll just say that one should prepare for a lot of "How to Train Your Robot" references, since Big Hero 6 and How to Train Your Dragon both deal with humans bonding with nonhumans in moving ways.) ...

Meantime, I wandered around the first and second floors. The lighting department is still working full-bore to get its part of the movie finished. I was informed there's three weeks left on the schedule, then it will be tweaks and color corrections and getting the Moving View Master version readied. (The wrap party is slated for the month of October. Release is in early November.)

Animators told me there work is done, and it appears to be true. Several of them were happy to chat for a long stretch of time. Usually they're too busy to give me much more than the time of day. A couple of staffers echoed the news story above: The storyline is emotional, the robot comes across winningly, and one lighter told me: I tear up every time I see it. The story works."

Which is good. Because I know they were wrestling to get the story right late last year.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

"photo realistic" does not necessarily equate to "quality." Especially when it comes to animation. It can be very limiting, since it more often than not equates to "faster and cheaper" in the business. Which it is also not!

Justin said...

Change the word "photo realistic" to "natural". The renderer allows the artists to achieve much more complex and better looking lighting with less effort and less data management.

Steve Hulett said...

We can see what the picture is going to look like. There are trailers out which give you a good idea of the "realism".

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