I officially envy today's generation of little aspiring animators. Over the past few years, Pixar and the Boston Museum Of Science collaborated on an exhibit showcasing Pixar's technical processes, and the result is 'The Science Behind Pixar'. I visited the exhibit at the end of July, and oh my God.
Where to begin?!? Literally! When the doors opened, my mouth fell open at how expansive it is. There are individual sections of the exhibit devoted just to modeling, rigging, animating, surfacing, camerawork, lighting, rendering, the list goes on!
The first thing to note is that Pixar's purely artistic side is omni-present in the exhibit. Production may be technical, but technical decisions are rooted in artistic decisions made in pre-production. Gorgeous, blown up pieces of concept art are everywhere, storyboards are showcased, and there are even original sculpts you can get up close and personal with!
The greatest accomplishment of this exhibit is its interactivity. Kids have a chance to learn how CG animation works by actually trying it themselves with simplified versions of real programs. In CG modeling, there are three major X-Y-Z transformations: scaling, rotation, and position, and families can experiment with all three using simplified but recognizably Maya-like programs. At Pixar, crowds and extras, like the background robots in WALL-E, are built by changing one relatively small set of robot parts into infinite combinations of mechanical appendages, and kids can take build numerous toy robots with just a few of these parts. And actual animation of a character is usually finessed in a graph editor, and kids can grasp the concept of easing in-and-out by getting Mike Wazowski to wave his hand in different timing setups!
I learned a few things myself! For instance, while I new that the emotions in Inside Out are made up of thousands of energy particles, I did not know that those were actually added during the surfacing stage, and that animators treated their skin like solid surfaces! And with regards to rendering, I never stopped to realize that when a clump of pixels in one section of one frame has almost the same hue, it renders faster than a subject in the frame with lots of different colors. That's why background vehicles in Cars are actually very simplified models, because they render faster and no one will notice they are not geometrically complex because they occupy such a small percentage of the pixels in a frame.
My favorite section of the exhibit by far illustrates the entire technical process from beginning to end: in a circular, 360-degree room, you see individual screens showcasing the progression of a scene from Inside Out: Story - Layout - Animation - Simulation - Lighting - Rendering. It's a glorious testament to the process of CG-animated filmmaking as a whole, and they were smart to use their most recent feature as an example, as that would be the one that's freshest in audiences' minds.
I went with a few friends who are studying filmmaking, and one of them was followed around the whole exhibit by a young girl who kept asking her questions about everything she saw. At the end, the girl asked my friend if she did this for a living. My friend said yes, and the girl said that she really wants to do it as well. That one exchange validates the purpose and potential of this exhibit: to inspire a new generation of artists, technicians, and visual storytellers.
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