Pixar’s Brave Fun Movie Facts: The Characters

June 17, 2012 by Momstart 19 Comments

Brave Characters

Merida

OH MOTHER – The story of Merida and her relationship with her mother, Queen Elinor, was inspired by director Brenda Chapman’s own relationship with her young daughter.

COSTUME CHANGE – With five dresses, plus a cloak, quiver, hand wrap and necklace, as well as torn dresses, Merida has a total of 22 different costumes. She also has five different hairstyles. Diva? Never.

GOOD HAIR DAY – Merida has more than 1500 individually sculpted, curly red strands that generate about 111,700 total hairs.

BIG STRETCH — If Merida’s curls were straightened, her hair would be four feet long and reach the middle of her calf.

Queen Elinor

UNWRAPPED – If Elinor’s hair were unwrapped, it would be about six feet, six inches long.

King Fergus

COMPLICATED KING — Fergus wears nine different simulated garments at the same time—each has its own movement that must be “simulated” by algorithms in the computer. His head hair and mustache are also simulated, as well as his sporran (pocket-like pouch) and scabbard (sheath for a sword). He has arm hair, chest hair, hair lining in his boot, as well as a full bear pelt on his bear-clawed cloak—all of which are simulated in some way.

LOTSA LAYERS — To achieve the mass of Fergus’s kilt, the drape going across his chest has eight layers of cloth folded over and interacting with each other and other garments. The left, right and back sides of the drape have six layers each.

The Lords

A LITTLE FUZZY – Pixar artists divied up the Lords’ hairier characteristics in unique ways:

· Lord Dingwall has chest hair, arm hair, back hair and ear hair.

· Lord Macintosh and Fergus are the only characters with fur on their boots.

· Lord Macintosh is the only character with fur on his sporran.

TARTAN TIME — For each clan, artists at Pixar created a new, unique tartan design.

TAKING LIBERTIES — The DunBroch tartan pattern is physically impossible to make with traditional tartan weaving methods.

Tertiary Characters

HAIRY SITUATION — There are more than 100 unique hair/facial hair combinations used in “Brave” for human characters and animals. Each variant can appear in any of nine different colors, creating more than 900 hairstyle/color variants.

Animals

FOUR-LEGGED FUR – Hair was created for 70 different animals—some living, some living forever as taxidermy—including 11 horses, 13 birds 7 bears, 16 other animals and 23 animal pelts.

THE WORLD IS MY INSPIRATION – The demon-bear Mor’du’s skin textures are based on satellite images of scorched earth.

Brave will be in theaters June 22nd.

Behind The Pixar Movie Brave With Director Mark Andrews #BraveCarsLandEvent

June 15, 2012 by Momstart 16 Comments

Oh my gosh, before I get started on the behind the Pixar Movie Brave with the Director Mark Andrews I have to tell you…DO NOT READ THE CHILDREN”S BRAVE book unless you want to know the story of Brave. Oh, my daughter’s friend came over and brought her brand new Early Reader Brave story and was showing it to my daughter and telling her everything about the book, and my daughter said, no you’re wrong. You can’t know that. I looked at the pages and thought oh no, I was trying to save myself for the movie. Sigh!

But it’s not like knowing the score of the Super Bowl people, because Brave is still going to be an awesome movie. SO go out and see it Friday June 22 and buy as many Brave books as you want. Your children are sure to enjoy the story, written or through the theater.

Now meeting Director Mark Andrews was an amazing experience. Everyone at Pixar has so much gumption for what they are doing. So much so that it rubs off on you and you want to get a job there. I mean look at him, he’s up in that picture learning how to shoot a bow and arrow, and I think he said his whole team did because how can you work on a story about a princess that loves to shoot a bow without knowing how to do it yourself?

Alright, now we can delve into that interview. Mark Andrews has been telling stories for 20 years and has been at Pixar for 10. He worked on The Incredibles and on Ratatouillie.

What is the hardest part of the process in making a film for Pixar?

Well, story, the story process which is the hellfire of all processes, it’s the hardest part of the process to make this sort of work, obviously. ‘Cause that’s where most of the problems come up, of whether the film’s working or not. It all boils down to the story. So I was forged in fire, so I am fine in fire. It doesn’t make any less hard, it’s still the hardest. Uh, it’s still the stuff that makes me sweat the most. I go home going, “AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” and frustrated. But I, I love it, I love that aspect of this giant puzzle that you have to make work.

So all the other departments are just like candy. You know, animation, layout, which is filmmaking for me, which I love. Animation, that’s all the acting. Then you’ve got, you know, lighting, design, sets. I mean, Everybody here is awesome.so fantastic. I get really inspired once that story’s locked. And they know what they’re doing and the assets that they have to create and build and shade and render and animate and stuff like that. But then we could just have fun. Right? So it’s a little overlapping, it[‘s not like story’s done and you go on the next — it’s all happening at the same time. But story’s the hardest.

What about the relationship between Merida and Elinor?

Originally it’s Brenda Chapman and her daughter’s relationship. And early on when the story’s working, they were really snippy, nasty. And it was always an issue going, “I hate Eleanor.” And then it would switch and they’d make her nice, and then you’d go, “Oh, I hate Merida.” So when I got on it, we hated both of them. And I’m going, “OHHHHHHHHH, how do I make these people likeable but still make it that real relationship that they’re not listening to each other?

I start writing the script and get into that. People ask me about the story process all the time and I just say it’s alchemy.” Nobody knows how to do it. We only know when it’s working once we put up what we see and we go, “That sucks, take it down, figure out why it sucks, work on it some more.” You know, add this, that and the other thing. Put it back up. “Uhhhhh, that’s a little better but this is still weak.” Take it down and do it again. It’s all alchemy. Even John Lasseter, Andrew, the guys who have several Academy Awards littered on their desk. They say “That’s a lot of Academy Awards,” they go, “Yeah, I know but it doesn’t mean squat.” ‘Cause we’re back to zero every time we start a story.

So it’s all about the story. EEEEEKKK. I’m geeking out that it’s coming out in one week and I’m going to be seeing it in just a few days. Remember go see it in the theater June 22nd and buy the books for your kids summer reading list!!!!

Thanks to Disney/Pixar for the interview opportunity, travel and expenses.

Behind the Movie Pixar’s Brave: Costume Design for The Royal Family

May 8, 2012 by Momstart 29 Comments

I always have a fascination with costumes in movies. Growing up I wanted to be an actress just so I could wear fancy dresses all the time. Then I found out I was too shy to get on a stage, and yet suddenly I find that I’ve found a career that still blasts me out in front of large audiences. Hmmm.

Last month when I was visiting Pixar I had an amazing opportunity to go behind the scenes of Pixar’s new movie Brave. We talked with Claudia Chung who was the simulation supervisor in Brave.

You see Elinor here in her fine, green, silken dress and Claudia had a lot of fun making the embellishments on her dress. She actually attached tiny jewels on the cloth she used as her sample and gave that to the animators to replicate. The end result is amazing and I’m sure I’m leaving most of the process out.

Here is a bit of the process as Claudia talks about Merida.

Merida has over twenty-two costume changes. She has about five dresses that she does wear throughout the film, she has her cloak and she has lots of accessories like her bow quiver arrows. All those things combine together in different ways making over twenty-two changes. That’s a lot of time for Merida in the dressing room. So when we start the tailoring process we get something like this from the art department.

……the length of her dress, I have to hit that. The fullness of the skirt and the tightness of the bodice and other key features that we want to make sure we address.

So in this case, for this reference, what we notice is what’s happening on her elbows and shoulders, right? There’s these breaks there. And what you realize is that doesn’t look like the typical, fine dresses of that era where they’re like these poufy material. It’s actually something Merida cut into the dress herself. Merida cut it up in order to do the archery she’s so fond of. The reason why we know this is because the back of the elbows are a lot looser than the front. As a tailor we want to make sure we get that look right. For those of you who know sewing, you know that to do gathers or to get frills you take a really long piece of fabric and you sew it onto a much tighter, smaller piece and that’s why you see this strange halo up here. It’s sewn onto her collar. And then the last step is actually to put it on the character, right? So it’s not like in real life where I can go, "Merida, let’s go into the dressing room. Let’s put your dress on, your costume, you’re all set to go." No. There’s no way. She’s animated. So instead we actually built the dress on the character. So you don’t see her there, but she is.

Then they pull and push on the computer and get it just right. Making sure that it moves with the characters. Now what about the boys? The men wear kilts and it’s a similar process.

……the other process that we use is draping. With the kilts, because of the complexity of the fold and stuff, we do actually more draping techniques of putting the pieces of fabric around the character and then relaxing it on. So here we have Fergus. He’s actually the most complicated costume we had to build on Brave because he has eight layers of fabric. On top of that, on his drape, that’s folded six, six to eight times. So it’s actually sixteen layers of cloth. The skirt really is a long piece of tartan, it really is just a flat piece of cloth like this. There’s no magic going on there. So we gather that all up and then we get to see how everything comes together. ….. we can say, "Action," and he starts being animated and we make the cloth follow him.

What’s training like for tailoring clothes in a computer?

my training is in computer science. I went to Berkeley and computer science. I was very technical when I came to Pixar. When I started on Ratatouille that’s when I went over to the tailoring side of things and it was actually a really hard process, a leap for me. It looked terrible when I started. And I got to the point, …..I was like, "Claudia, it’s time for you to take a sewing class.".

The combination of actual sewing and her expertise on computers made for beautiful costumes in Brave!

Brave comes to theaters June 22 2012.

Disney Pixar covered travel and expenses.