Things have been pretty crazy lately.  I’ve been extremely busy at work over the past three weeks and it’s been a month and a half now since Jenny came down with Pneumonia.  It started as a bad cough which was sticking.  It got a bit better and then suddenly got much worse.  I had to take her to the emergency room at one point.  I’m happy to say that she’s feeling much better now but it has been a long and tough recovery for her.

During her recovery, I started work on a sizzle piece for Disney/Pixars upcoming release Monsters University, a Monsters Inc. prequel.  Pretty awesome, no doubt.  I’m always content to be working on anything from Pixar.  I’m lucky because I get to receive lots of cool concept art and Monster designs created by the Pixar artists.  I felt the same way when I worked on Up and Toy Story 3.  The artwork that I get to see from these films is stuff that may never see the light of day somewhere else.  I decided to google some of the artists and I found a plethora of them had their own blogs.

I started at Lou Romano’s blog.  I remembered his name from working on Up.  He is someone who did a lot of the visual development on that film.  In fact, he was the artist who painted the picture of Paradise Falls on Carl Fredricksen’s mantle.
 

His artwork is awesome and it’s so cool that I’m able to go back into his archives.  Then, I began investigating all of the artists on Lou’s sidebar.  Every one of them was super cool and had a style that totally appeals to me.  Seeing all the awesome art kind of inspired me to possibly take on a new challenge in the future.  A drawing challenge.  To try and draw something every single day.  It’s certainly not official yet but it would be such a good thing for me to do.  I love drawing and always have.  From the time I was six years old up until sophomore year in high school I thought I was going to be an animator.   I realized later that I probably didn’t have the patience.

Anyways, I want to describe the sizzle piece we made because I’m quite proud of the way it came out.  I wish I could just post the video of it but I would get into trouble doing that.  A sizzle piece is a mini-documentary or promo that is usually cut together while a film is in preproduction.  It tends to be used within the company in order to build interest and excitement amongst possible investors.
 

 
My work began with a flight up north to Pixar.  I filmed an interview with the director of the film Dan Scanlon.  I shot him in front of a full body green screen so that later I could place him into a virtual set in the computer.  (Interesting green screen tip:  I shot him with the one of the cameras at a 90 degree angle so that I could utilize as much of the resolution as possible.  When I brought the footage into the computer I could rotate him back 90 degrees and get my virtual camera up closer to him without blowing the resolution.)  I used this exact same shooting setup back on Toy Story 3, for this piece below.

So, for the past four weeks or so, my co-worker Gage and I have been busy at work creating graphics and structuring the sizzle.  Much of the Pixar promo stuff opens with a pedigree montage saying something to the effect of, “from the people who created Toy Story and Wall-E, etc…”   For this part, I decided to take my inspiration from the opening credits of Monsters Inc.  The opening credits are a cool 50’s style cutout animation beginning with shapes dancing to the music.  The shapes then form into a door and then into many doors.  The doors fly around and monsters inside of them form the words to the opening titles.
 

For ours, it opened exactly the same way.  Shapes appear and form into a door.  The door opens and we go through it towards a wall full of Toy Story clouds.  Titles pop up, synced to brass hits…”They’ve…Taken..Us…”  The camera pans down and lands on Andy’s bed with all the Toy Story characters.  A title behind them reads…”To Worlds of Imagination…”  Buzz’s wings pop open and a slimey blob arm appears and pulls the frame up.  The camera flies down into blue and lands on a Finding Nemo frame with a title that says “Under The Sea”.  A monster claw comes in from the side and shuts a door over Finding Nemo.  The door flies back to reveal it’s the door from the house in UP and it’s flying over buildings.  A title appears, “Up Above The Clouds.”  A dumb looking monster pops up behind the buildings and looks at the house.  We fly upwards above the balloons to see a flying door throwing words out of it.  The words form into…”And in 2013.  The door flings open to reveal a giant monster mouth (the same one from the Monsters Inc. opening) and we fly through mouth to see more title cards.  “They’re returning to Monstropolous…For A Brand New Adventure.”  Then, the monster you see at the top of this page (his name is ClabClaws) shows up at the bottom of the screen and grabs a letter “M” from above.  Each of his claws fight for the letter.  Finally, the “M” pops out of they’re claws and forms the title “Monster’s University”  Finally, we are off into the main body of the piece.

The way Gage and I worked was we pulled iconic moments from various Pixar films and recreated them graphically in illustrator out of simple shapes, like the logos below.  Then, we exported the shapes into After Effects so that we could animate them independently.  Gage also went about designing all of these amazingly cool monsters that would help us transition from one film to another.
 

The sequence shown above was ultimately cut from the opening graphic because there was the likelihood that recreating the logos was not going to be accepted.

It was sort of a risky thing to do to attempt to recreate such a style.  It’s not the norm or something that they’d expect from a sizzle.  And more often than not they’d replace something like this with feature footage instead.  In the end, I’m glad we did it because it turned out awesome and it was well received at Disney.

Like I said, I can’t really show you the piece itself but if it ever finds a commercial place or ends up on the internet then I will definitely embed it here when it does.