15 March 2010 · Comment [1]
Another update within less than six months of the last! How exciting.
Hey everyone! Here’s um, a random collection of facts they’ve told us and neat things that have happened in the first four weeks of work. I don’t know, it is hard to come up with coherent blag fodder that is not in list form OKAY
When they were making Bambi, Walt Disney brought in a bunch of forest animals for the animators to observe. And then when the movie was over, he wanted to keep them all in a zoo on the studio lot, but a bunch of jerrrrks convinced him not to. But he DID keep the squirrels around so now there are all these super fluffy, awesome squirrels who will come right up to you and if you hold out a piece of food they’ll climb along your arm to get it! This place truly is a magical fairyland!
Okay, this isn’t a Bambi squirrel, it’s just an adorable squirrel that was hanging out on my parents’ deck a few summers ago. Just look at its wee lit’l eyelids! I don’t think we’re allowed to take pictures on the studio lot, so to picture a Bambi squirrel, just imagine this but with a fluffier tail and more anthropomorphic.
Aladdin was animated in California and Jasmine was animated in Florida! And they mailed the pages back and forth when both were in the shot. Because for consistency, there’s usually one master animator assigned to draw each character on 2-D movies. But I think in 3-D movies, the animators just do whoever’s in the shot because the characters are already modeled so it’s not like they have to worry about people’s different drawing styles making the characters unrecognizable from shot to shot. But maybe that’s not the case at every studio because I heard that when Donkey gets turned into a horse in Shrek 2, he was animated by just one really good animator. Because I’m sure you care! But sewiouswy, it’s so freaking awesome to work at the same studio where the classics of your childhood and mine were made. Last week we met the guy who animated Simba and Mulan and the week before that, the director of “Pocahontas” and “The Rescuers Down Under” said hi to me in the halls! I restrained myself from asking if I could bear his children, but only just.
We got to tour the archives building a few weeks ago, and there they showed us the puppets from “Nightmare Before Christmas!” And they’re really fragile and slowly disintegrating despite being like, vacuum-sealed and in the dark all the time except for when getting shown to tour groups of trainees. And then they showed us the vault containing the cryogenically-frozen head of Walt Disney! Just kidding about that last part but oh how desperately I wish I weren’t.
Last week the nine trainees got to have a meeting with Ed Catmull!! One of the founding fathers of computer graphics and the president of Pixar and Disney Animation! I asked him a question and his response contained the phrase “old farts come from young farts!” Spectacular.
My mentor worked on “Total Recall”!!!! On the scene where Arnold Schwarzenegger walks through the x-ray and you see his skeleton. And he got to go to the Academy Awards and Jamie Lee Curtis elbowed him in the ribs! A literal brush with fame! These are the jokes, people!
Hmm, I grow weary of all these words. And yet, I haven’t taken very many pictures lately.
Umm, here’s a completely unrelated picture of a room in which I someday hope to live if it even exists. The painting is called “Inside M&T’s” by Jennifer Miller and it was in an art gallery in Durham when my parents and I visited David a few months ago.
It’s some power lines! I just thought they were pretty is all. They’re right outside my new apartment, so helloooooo sterility! It’s cool though, I keep working on getting David to have kids so that I can play with them and spoil them and he can take care of them. Though he keeps giving me these weak excuses like “I need to find a girl and get married first” and it’s such nonsense.
Welp, I think I’ve besmirched my family’s honor enough for one day. Later, everyone!
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Sounds awesome SB! Keep the posts coming, glad you’re having a blast :)
… but I’m not sure you can consider Shrek as a classic of your childhood!
— O · Mar 16, 04:09 AM · #