Last week, I went to the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco for a five-part series seminar about the basics of animation. The first class was about story presented by Ronnie del Carmen, an animation story artist and designer who first became known as a director for a Warner Bros animated television show, Freakazoid.
He explained the story process is often moody, temperamental and messy. This is partly because every writer writes his or her own story differently. You can look it up online and see charts and graphs or read books about the process of writing stories, but it does not define what exactly goes on into making one.
"Stories create experiences." Ronnie told us that when writing stories, our lives work themselves into the stories we work in. Even the littlest events that happen in our lives are somehow implanted or symbolized in the plot because they are the most important stories we tell. Authors and directors do this many times in their books and movies. We did a fun exercise where we told our partner next to us a story of a time the person got lost.
In animated movies, stories are told through storyboards, which were invented by Walt Disney. Walt said, "In our studio, we don't write our movies. We draw them." Story is probably one of, if not the, most important aspects in movies. Animated movies may have a great cast and animation, but, if it does not have a good story, it's not going to be a good movie. If the audience does not feel connected to the story or relate to the characters, they won't understand the movie and it will be just plain boring.
There is no particular path on how to become a story artist. We all come from different backgrounds; we each have our own story. So, Ronnie told us his story:
Ronnie del Carmen is a Pixar storyboard artist. He was born on December 31, 1959 in a small town in the Republic of the Philippines with his parents and two brothers and sister. He was not doing regular things boys do like playing sports; he was constantly drawing (even on the walls) and reading comic books at an early age. He loved watching Disney films (especially Fantasia and Bambi) and cartoons (especially Donald Duck), sci-fi and monster movies, Alfred Hitchcock, and reading Carl Banks comics; he was influenced by Disney animator Ollie Johnston and artist Mary Blair. He was always sick due to the bad weather, but he loved watching the rain at the window by his bed, which he incorporated into a short animatic film he showed us. When he was a child, his father, who was praised for his handwriting, despised Ronnie's. With a bachelor's degree in advertising from the University of Santo Tomas, he came to America almost 30 years old to pursue his dream to work in movies. He started out as a storyboard artist on Widget, the World Watcher and Where's Waldo?. When he was a kid, he always wished he would someday work on Batman. In 1992, his wish came true when he was hired as a storyboard artist for Batman: The Animated Series and was involved in storyboard for Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker. He later moved to DreamWorks where he was story supervisor for The Road to El Dorado (with Jeff Snow) and Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, which he won the 2003 Annie Award for Outstanding Storyboarding in an Animated Feature Production, and worked on The Prince of Egypt, as well as Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. He would eventually land at Pixar where he became story supervisor of Finding Nemo, my favorite animated film from 2003 (but Ronnie honestly doesn't remember most of the movie), and Up, which became the second animated film to be nominated for Oscar for Best Picture, and worked on story for Ratatouille and WALL-E, in addition to Brave and Monsters University. He is currently serving as co-director for Pixar's next film Inside Out set to premiere on June 19, 2015.
His brothers are in the animation business as well. Louie works for DreamWorks as a storyboard artist for theatrical films and Rick works for Fox Animation as a storyboard artist on Family Guy.
Ronnie showed us how Pixar comes up with their story by showing "behind the scenes" of Up and how it came to be. It started with Pete Docter talking to Ronnie about the idea of how sometimes people wish to get away from their stresses in their everyday lives and the main character Carl, who was voiced by Ed Asner, came from a sketch of an elderly man in Pete's sketchbook he drew at CalArts. During auditions for the character Russell, Hunter Nagai came and brought his younger brother Jordan (who wasn't auditioning) with him, but Pete Docter and the casting directors loved watching Jordan just being himself that he was chosen. Dug, my favorite character from the movie, came from Bob Peterson, who voiced him, when he was a camp counselor and a kid came up to him and told him that although he just met him, he instantly likes him. The filmmakers wanted a character like that and a dog was the perfect choice. Director Pete Docter was the tallest Pixar employee, so that's how he was chosen to do the voice of the bird Kevin. When South America was chosen for the setting of the movie, Pete, Ronnie, Bob and other crew members travelled there and took pictures to get an idea of the movie's backgrounds and layouts for the artists.
For every sequence of the movie and eventually the complete movie, there would be a company screening of reels, featuring animatics of storyboards. Then, the Brain Trust would hold note sessions, which usually consist of John Lasseter, the directors, the producers, the writers, the story supervisor, and many others, because "you can be wrong." Ronnie taught how an artist shouldn't be too attached to their ideas because there needs to be room for new and better ideas. He presented an inspiring excerpt of author/educator Ken Robinson explaining a quote Ronnie loves, "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."
During that time, Ronnie was visiting his dad who was growing old and showed him clips of the movie on his computer. Ronnie's dad passed away before he saw the finished film, but he thought he showed him enough of the movie in storyboard that he knew what the movie was about and he seemed to love it. Ronnie even told him that all of Ellie's handwriting was his due to his dad not liking his penmanship.
During the Q&A, he talked about how he was re-storyboarding the sequence of Carl and Ellie's married life during production. Original drawings showed them before they were married, such as when they were in high school. However, the movie had to be so many minutes that it had to be edited and re-boarded to only show scenes that were story-relevant.
At the end of the seminar, Ronnie signed my ticket and I am planning to attend the second seminar on character development in December. You can purchase your ticket at:
www.waltdisney.org
Here are sites that feature Ronnie's work:
Old website: www.ronniedelcarmen.com
Blog: www.ronniedelcarmen.blogspot.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/paperbiscuit
Tumblr: www.ronniedelcarmen.tumblr.com
