Ricky Nierva describes his role as Pixar production designer as the person in charge of the overall look of the film and makes sure it fits the director's vision. When he graduated from CalArts, he worked in the clean-up department for The Lion King. After working as a storyboard artist for Dexter's Laboratory at Hanna-Barbera, he left with Ralph Eggleston to Pixar where he became a storyboard artist on Toy Story 2, lead character designer on Monsters Inc, character art director on Finding Nemo, and production designer of Up and Monsters University. Ricky showed us some early drawings of Sulley to his final look and how the character transformed; in the early stages, some of the drawings had Sulley skinny with tentacles for legs and was originally a terrible scarer. He presented a quote by Steve Jobs that helps him with his work, "Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." In the first seminar from an earlier post, Ronnie explained storyboarding is RE-storyboarding. Ricky explains designing is similar, as in designing is RE-designing. He showed a page from Illusion of Life (an animation book by veteran Disney animators, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, that both he and I highly recommend) drawings of realistic snakes and how they evolved to become Kaa from The Jungle Book. Part of working as a designer is doing a lot of research. For example, he and several artists visited a university ichthyology research center to study what a fish looks like, how they move and what their personalities are like. He later showed many beautiful drawings he did for Finding Nemo; thousands of drawings were made during production, since "everybody has a million bad drawings in them and the only way to make a good drawing is to draw them out." However, Ricky taught that you are your worst critic and it is best to work with a team. He recounted one drawing of Bruce the shark he thought was terrible and wanted to throw it in the garbage, but some other artist insisted the drawing was great and wanted him to hold onto it. When designing, Ricky looks for simplicity. When designing Carl, Ricky shaped his head like a square because a square represents immobility and someone stuck in his ways, which described Carl himself, and was influenced by Spencer Tracy. For Russell, he drew a circle for his head because a circle represents someone who is dynamic. Ricky showed an animation test and many drawings of Carl and how he evolved to his final design, while trying to see how he can be improved; there were these drawings of Carl doing various things, such as balancing spoons on his face and just trying to find his personality. Ricky also told us how he received an amazing photo of a man who looks just like Carl!!
He also was told by a person who watched Finding Nemo that Dory looks like Ellen DeGeneres. Although she voiced her, Ricky didn't think Dory looked anything like her, but he was really glad that Dory's character portrays Ellen's characteristics. Lastly, Ricky taught us a few things about art and design: find character and essence, not a beautiful drawing; explore; inspiration is everywhere; and draw like a child.
Matt Nolte has been working at Pixar for ten years. When he graduated from CalArts, he saw Toy Story and was entranced by the animation and his desire to work at Pixar, but also scared at having to work with computers. He is a big fan of Bill Peet, who worked in the story deparment at Disney in the forties and fifties and later wrote and illustrated his own books. Matt spent the the second half of his discussion describing his job as character art director and work on Brave. He works drawing the characters, finding their personalities, relationships with other characters, and how they fit into each scene. He likes to listen to music while drawing fit to the assignment and noted numerous times to working closely with production designer Steve Pilcher while working on Brave, as well as director Brenda Chapman. Matt showed us a drawing of Merida giving Elinor the cake and how she slowly transformed into a bear. However, the transformation was too cartoony and silly, he was told to look up the works of animator Jiri Trnka (I plan to post something about him in the future) for inspiration, which shows a lot of power to make the movie like a dark fairy tale. When designing Elinor as a bear, Matt looked up many different species of bears, particularly polar bears. Matt patterned a polar bear's mannerisms to Elinor as a bear because Elinor is proper and elegant (she hasn't changed on the inside) and polar bears are regal. Matt explained it is a long process drawing up the characters because you usually don't find out who the character is until the end. When Brave was complete, he related to Merida and her horse Angus to him and his mountain bike. He has three children and lots of pets.
Jerome Ranft grew up in Whittier and loved going to Disneyland. After studying sculpturing, his first job was a sculptor on The Nightmare Before Christmas and his first job at Pixar was a freelance sculptor for A Bug's Life. Some years later, Pete Docter called him at Las Vegas to work on Monsters Inc and worked on many more films later. Jerome often builds his sculptures out of steel and his greatest influence is sculptor Herbert Haseltine. He also works with Imagineering when statues of Pixar characters are being built for amusement parks, consulting with the employees on keeping the character's essence.
Kevin Reher and Natalie Lyon, Pixar casting directors who have been working together for several years, explained the process of casting actors for animated movies. Once a script has been approved, a team of story artists create drawings of the characters and the casting director tries to think actors who would be a perfect candidate to do the voice. Casting directors are usually provided a voice sample of an employee giving the casting director an idea of what the character should sound like. Sometimes, it isn't temporary. Examples include Edna (Brad Bird), Squishy (Peter Sohn), Eve (Elissa Knight), Crush (Andrew Stanton), Roz and Dug (both Bob Peterson), Linguini (Lou Romano), and Heimlich (Joe Ranft). When finding a possible actor to hire, they have a character sketch with audio clippings of the actor to see if the actor is a good choice. A sketch of Lord Macintosh, MacGuffin and Dingwall were attached to audio clips from movies and interviews of their respective actors Craig Ferguson, Kevin McKidd and Robbie Coltrane (one line was from Hagrid of the Harry Potter films). Kevin and Natalie recommended tips on finding actors: no Saturday morning cartoon voices (too cartoony, exageratted); funny is money (find actors who bring comedy to the character); and a casting director needs to find animate-able voices, a voice that can help the artists flesh out the character. Casting directors want to find people who can evoke a character and animators study the voice and personality. They also recommended to not hold auditions or cast actors too late (originally Pixar tried to get Fran Drescher to voice Rosie the spider from A Bug's Life) or too early (in many of their past movies, there were too many actors to choose on to voice one character). Although Kevin and Natalie prefer having the actors stick to the script, they do sometimes allow opportunities for them to improvise, like Billy Crystal for example ("I'm giving you gold here"). They showed a clip of Tom Hanks on Bravo talking about his experience voicing on Toy Story, which he explained he would be sitting in a booth running through his lines or saying a single line in different ways in front of the casting director and several people who looked like "East German Communist judges." Lastly, they showed some behind-the-scenes clips of actors from Monsters University performing their lines.
During the Q&A, there was one person who talked about how much she loved and really connected to the movie Brave (this is because they had such a strong director) and another person talked about John Ratzenberger's roles (who is their good luck charm and has voiced in all of the Pixar films). At the end, I got to meet all five speakers and sign my sketchbook; I was able to talk to Jerome about his relationship with his brother Joe. The remaining three seminars are all happening in the spring back-to-back with the animation seminar at the end of February, the music seminar in March, and the lighting seminar in April. Purchase your ticket at www.waltdisney.org
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