Animating Behind the Scenes
- vinathiprasad9
- Oct 25, 2017
- 3 min read
For my first Film/Media department event, I attended a behind-the-scenes animation presentation of the Pixar movie Coco from Gini Santos. Ms. Santos was one of the two supervising animators for the movie, and was also involved in the animation of Monsters INC, The Incredibles, and Finding Nemo. Disney/Pixar animated movies were a huge part of my life growing up and I attended this presentation because I felt like the work that goes into making them went unnoticed by me when I was a child who only cared about the final product.
Coco is a film about a 12 year-old boy in Mexico who dreams of being a musician despite his family's generations-long ban on music. It takes place during Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday honoring the dead, which happens during the first two days of November.
To start her presentation, Ms. Santos explained to us how a team of animators, writers, and other creative people had to research Mexico and the Day of the Dead, in order to properly represent the country, themes, and art styles. She explained that they were largely inspired by Mexican folk art, and used it as inspiration for the film's story, music, design, and even lighting. Throughout her presentation, she showed us (unfinished) clips from the film that highlighted these aspects and gave us glimpses into the story. We also saw beautiful concept art and animation tests.
In the second part of her presentation, Ms. Santos gave us a peek into how animation works behind the scenes, with regard to the skeleton-bodied characters that are prevalent throughout the film. They had to figure out how to make the skeletons move in a realistic way, when they were used to animating human bodies with flesh. To do this, they defined their own rules for movement, and decided to let each character's personality affect how they move. They also had to figure out how to depict emotion in a skull, without eyebrows, and tongues, and ended up having to break some rules (giving the skulls eyeballs, eyelids, and lips).
What I considered the most interesting part of the presentation was when she explained how they had to use real life models as references to make their animation appear more realistic. For example, to animate the character Abuelita, one of the animators brought in his grandmother so they could study how her loose skin moved with various facial expressions. To accurately animate the movement of the guitar strings during specific songs, they had a guitarist play the song, and recorded the movement of the strings with several GoPro cameras.
When making movies deeply embedded into a culture such as this one, Disney/Pixar try very hard to make the depiction accurate. There were many people from Latinx backgrounds on the team who gave their input on real life experiences and culture to make the film seem more realistic. They also brought in Mexican consultants to run things by. Ms. Santos mentioned that one of the things the consultants corrected them on was the movements of the mouth. All the characters were speaking English, but their mouths were originally animated in a more American way, when in reality, the mouth moves differently when speaking English in a Mexican accent.
I thoroughly enjoyed my experience at this presentation, and I learned so much about the animation process. It takes a lot of effort to make a film, even more so if it is animated. This film went into pre-production in 2012, and Ms. Santos and the animators only got involved three years ago, when they were sure of the characters they wanted animated. It took five years to produce a result as beautiful as what I saw in this presentation. When this film releases on Thanksgiving, I know I will definitely be there to see it.