Category Archives: News

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News: Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling

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pixars-22-rules-for-storytelling

These rules were originally tweeted by Emma Coates, a Pixar Story Artist. Incredible insight into the inner workings of the story juggernaut that is Pixar!

  1. You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
  2. You gotta keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different.
  3. Trying for theme is important, but you won’t see what the story is actually about til you’re at the end of it. Now rewrite.
  4. Once upon a time there was ___. Every day, ___. One day ___. Because of that, ___. Because of that, ___. Until finally ___.
  5. Simplify. Focus. Combine characters. Hop over detours. You’ll feel like you’re losing valuable stuff but it sets you free.
  6. What is your character good at, comfortable with? Throw the polar opposite at them. Challenge them. How do they deal?
  7. Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle. Seriously. Endings are hard, get yours working up front.
  8. Finish your story, let go even if it’s not perfect. In an ideal world you have both, but move on. Do better next time.
  9. When you’re stuck, make a list of what WOULDN’T happen next. Lots of times the material to get you unstuck will show up.
  10. Pull apart the stories you like. What you like in them is a part of you; you’ve got to recognize it before you can use it.
  11. Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it. If it stays in your head, a perfect idea, you’ll never share it with anyone.
  12. Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way. Surprise yourself.
  13. Give your characters opinions. Passive/malleable might seem likable to you as you write, but it’s poison to the audience.
  14. Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of? That’s the heart of it.
  15. If you were your character, in this situation, how would you feel? Honesty lends credibility to unbelievable situations.
  16. What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character. What happens if they don’t succeed? Stack the odds against.
  17. No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
  18. You have to know yourself: the difference between doing your best & fussing. Story is testing, not refining.
  19. Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating.
  20. Exercise: take the building blocks of a movie you dislike. How d’you rearrange them into what you DO like?
  21. You gotta identify with your situation/characters, can’t just write ‘cool’. What would make YOU act that way?
  22. What’s the essence of your story? Most economical telling of it? If you know that, you can build out from there.
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News: Titmouse Facinator Plugin Demo

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Here’s a small demo of an incredible plugin called Facinator developed by Titmouse; creators of Megas XLR, Metalocolypse and Motorcity which allows artists to manipulate 2d Flash heads as though they were 3d models. The video is not new but there aren’t many hits on the video so I think it’s safe to say many have not seen it.

If you anything about Flash animation you know it’s very easy to make it look like a big bag of suck. Conversely, Titmouse does it all kinds of right! Here’s a small peek into why.  What the plugin does is essentially allow you to grab the head and rotate the playhead inside the clip so that it appears that thew character is moving his head. genius! especially once you look inside that clip and see all those hundreds of keyframes.

Incidentally , we interviewed the studio’s owner, Chris Prynoski back in 2011.

 

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News: 3 Dimensional Pen!

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Screen Shot 2013-03-09 at 12.30.30 PM

How about this? A 3d pen you can draw stuff in a 3 dimensional form all for $75 bucks! Pretty cool! talk about a different kind of 3d film!

Boston toy company Wobble Works uploaded a pitch video to Kickstarter of its newest toy, the 3Doodler, awaking a sleeping desire to write in 3-D.

The 3Doodler, a plastic extrusion pen that resembles a hot glue gun, heats up plastic filament to about 270 degrees Celsius, or 518 Fahrenheit. But unlike a glue gun, the plastic cools almost instantly, allowing you to lift the 3Doodler off the paper and draw in air.

You can read more here!

 

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News: Estonia’s First Feature-Length 3D Animation Screens Today

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Tallinn’s Solaris Cinema is today screening “Lisa Limone & Maroc Orange,” the first feature-length, stereoscopic animation produced in Estonia.

The stop motion animation, directed by Mait Laas, is essentially an opera dealing with the topics of illegal immigration and slavery in modern times, reported ETV.

The sound track includes Italian, French, English and Estonian languages. Voice-over work was done by well-known Estonian singers and actors.

 

 

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News: US-Visual Effects Petition

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US-vfx-petition

As you probably have heard unless you are living under a rock there is major grumblings in the US VFX communities about job losses and bankruptcy  primarily set off by Rhythm and Hues who declared bankruptcy a few months ago at around the same time that their most recent film Life of Pi was passing it’s 1 billion mark in profits. Many of the artists who worked on that film have been laid off without pay and it seems that it has all finally come to a head. Below is a link to petition President Obama do do something about runaway production in the US.  Click the pic to be taken to the petition site. Currently there are 3700, signatures and a total of 96,303 are needed as you can see.

As Animation Insider is a global site, we can understand that some of our international readers might question why they should care, and I would say regardless of where you live,  you should be paid fairly for your services. No one should be laid off without pay if others have profited billions from their talent. I urge you all to share this petition so that these people can get their fair share and we can stop the visual effects community from being pawns of the studios.

The last sentence really sums it all up:

No matter how successful or efficient our work is, we are ultimately at the mercy of the next government willing to distort prices and put the companies we work for out of business. We want to end the race to the bottom so we can compete on a level playing field and begin the race to the top.

You can find the VFX petition here.