Pixar ey?

EXCITING NEWS. I have met/listened to a real life Pixar animator. ''Michal Makerewicz' How?' - You may gasp in wonder, but it is indeed possible, even from Birmingham. He came down to the Millenium point building and did a talk on 'Wall-e' the lastest of Pixar's animations. Would you like to find out what i picked up from this talk? Good, i shall begin then....(If not, just stop reading, its easy.)
The general upshot of it is that a hell of a lot of work work goes into these films, they take about 5 years to make, and Michal basically went into quite abit of detail about the processes the film must go through before we see it at the cinema...

Development- The team will work with the director to get a rough idea of the story, characters etc.
Story- The basic storyboard will be created, this will be thousands and thousands of sketches which will then be played on a screen so the director can get a feel for how the film might be. If the director likes it temporary music and sound will be added.
Art- This department deals with characters and all the research behind them. For 'Wall-e' they looked into the previously animated film 'Robots' but came to the conclusion that they wanted their robots to appear less human. The robots in 'Robots' even had eyebrows and were extremely similar to humans and this wasn't the look Pixar were after. So instead they focused their attention on machinery that existed and operated in the real world, they also went on location to tips for set research.
Modelling
Set Dressing
Shading Dept
Layout- Layout camara in computer.
Animation- LOTS AND LOTS OF RESEARCH. In order to be able to emote and bring characters to life! Some animators act in front of a mirror to see what their own expressions look like. Some use thumbnail sketches.
Fx (effects)
Lighting- Starts with colour scripts
Matte Painting
Rendering

And so you can begin to understand how it takes 5 years to make one film. For Wall-e there were 130,000 frames rendered, 445 models made and 41 sets produced.
As you can imagine we then asked a range of questions about how we might present ourselves if we were interested in working at Pixar sometime in the future. This is just from my notes again.

Basically for you demo reel, keep it short and sweet, no longer then 4 mins really, use your best work first, use work/dialogue that means something to you in your work, have a range of work- physical, dialogue, subtle, out there, etc. Don't back it with techno music.
Its not just about polished animation, the ideas are important.

I got an autograph and doodle of eve too :)