Brian Green: The Art and Science of Animation at Pixar
It’s indicative of the metamorphic nature of design when even someone with an illustrious, 20-year career at Pixar admits to feeling the need to constantly hone their craft.
“You get stale really quick, so I need to work on my artistic side,” says Brian Green, the animation studio’s Character Supervisor. “It’s a case of getting back in art classes, doing drawings, painting and just reenergising myself.”
Having grown up in an outer suburb of Melbourne and completed a double degree in Computer Science and Math, Green hit the world of work at a time when the animation industry was speeding toward a veritable creative explosion with the release of Toy Story – the world’s first computer animated feature film. Radically different to anything the industry had ever undertaken before, the animated antics of Woody and Buzz spurred Green to apply for a role that, at the time, seemed outlandishly ambitious.
But one interview and a rather calamitous first trip to the US later, Green found himself embarking on a round the world career move to San Francisco and the homeland of imagination.
Assigned to commercials, a division that, as a result of the gargantuan revenue generated by Toy Story, was set for imminent disbandment, Green stint at Pixar could have been short-lived had it not been for the fortunate collision of happy chance and good timing that saw him adopted onto the A Bug’s Life team; a project that saw him create his inaugural character, Slim the juggling Stick Insect.
Two decades on, and he has added The Good Dinosaur, Toy Story 3, Ratatouille, Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc to his back catalogue of cinematic blockbusters.
As Character Supervisor, Green is the bridge between the visual artistry and cutting-edge technology that enables Pixar to create characters with what they call audience ‘appeal’ – the point at which realism, stylisation and mathematical accuracy align. It is an artistic challenge that, from the studio’s inception, has been driving Pixar’s desire to code entirely new technologies, in order to build a physically and emotionally authentic cast that connects with audiences on every level.
fluoro. The development of a character and its execution involves a great deal of planning, love and care and, for us who see them come to life, we see personality, emotion and movement. How important are these three elements to character development?
Brian Green. All those elements are part of what we call the character’s appeal, so how the character looks, how it acts, how you interact with it. There’s a huge body of knowledge we built up over the years of what is appeal.
The thing that I find infinitely fascinating about my job is really about expressing emotion, interacting, and that’s what we do as people; we interact and express emotion and we communicate and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with these characters.
I’m always looking at people and what their gestures are, what makes them appealing or interesting. And that’s an infinite study, you can study that forever and still learn new things, so to me that’s the exciting aspect of it – it never gets old. There’s a technical aspect that we have to do to support it all, but it’s the emotive side that’s really cool.
f. Pixar has just celebrated 15 years of Monsters Inc. How has Pixar’s history contributed to the development of the more recent characters?
BG. We have a unique style to our characters. You look at other companies and it is realism or could be photorealism. Ours has a certain look and feel and appeal that we’ve built on over the years.
One example is Hank from Finding Dory. Here’s a character that’s incredibly sophisticated in terms of its technical achievement and that’s incredibly appealing as well. He’s like the culmination of all of these years of technical achievement and pushing the boundaries of what we can do. But, also, it’s an artistic achievement, in how we make a septopus that you can relate to, that’s fun, that’s appealing? Each movie pushes the appeal in a different direction.
f. Why do you think films like Toy Story, Monsters Inc and Inside Out have been so successful?
BG. I think there’s a sweet spot we found in terms of appeal. There’s a lot of movies out there where they get a little bit too real and it gets creepy, because you’re know it’s real, but there’s something off. And then there are movies out there which are too cartoony.
So, it was bringing in that sense of vulnerability and we try and introduce that in the movies pretty early on. So, we present a character and, if we’ve done a good job and you’ve connected with them, then you care about them and whether they get hurt and whether they survive. For example, in Toy Story 3, Andy goes off and it’s very emotional, it’s like ‘goodbye toys’, almost like a break from a relationship.
f. Tell us what the character Nemo means to you?
BG. Nemo was kind of my breakout movie, because that’s the first movie I got to be character supervisor on and it was set in Australia. I actually auditioned for the voice of Bruce the shark, but they said I wasn’t Australian enough!
But that whole movie was magical for me in the sense that, until that stage, The Lion King had been the most successful animated movie of all time and suddenly Nemo exploded and it toppled The Lion King, so the success was one aspect of it.
But there was another aspect of it, which was just creating this world. For our field trip they sent us to Hawaii and gave us scuba diving lessons so that we totally immersed ourselves in the environment. We were all really dedicated to the movie – to the world we were creating – and it became a work of passion for us.
f. How long did it take to refine the character Hank and the specific technological aspects of the character?
BG. Each movie builds on the technology and you’ve got to decide which technology you’re going to use. With Brave, the horse really pushed the technology, but then we paused on that technology for a while, so we had to kind of like dig it up and take it to the next level.
Typically we have a look development stage of six months before a movie comes out, where we get all this technology going, but for a character like Hank we couldn’t actually make this character with our current technology, we had to write something new, which we call technical opportunity.
That’s exciting, when you can actually write something new and we had multiple teams coming together saying how can we really push ourselves to do this new character?
In reality, it took around half the movie to keep working on him and refining him, because there’s a combination of technologies in play; there’s bodymetric simulation, skin simulation, there’s collision technology – even the shading had a brand new rendering system in there – and all of these technologies had to come together. In some ways, the whole studio had to get involved and everyone gets a little nervous, because you know there’s a production pipeline and you have to deliver, but that’s kind of one of those fun things in that the producer will keep you in line, but you can push those boundaries as much as possible to make the character look as great as possible.
f. One aspect that is yet to be perfected is a character’s eyes, which is still quite a hurdle. What is the importance of a character’s eyes and what impact do they have on the audience?
BG. Throughout the whole movie, we’re looking at the eyes of the character, so they’re the most important thing that we do. There are a lot of cartoon elements, but they have to be real in the sense that you look at them and they’re not weird, so there are realistic elements in there and we introduce squash and stretch of the eyeballs, but we do it subtly in the animation, so you don’t actually see it but you kind of feel it.
One of the most important things is how the corner of the skin moves around the eyeballs, so, when you smile, how it pushes up. If it doesn’t push up, it’s not a genuine smile and so there’s lots of aspects of how the corner of the mouth interacts with the corner of the eye.
Then there are things like if a character is looking at something, but if they’re not looking directly at it, then you get this weird feeling of disconnection and so we spend an enormous amount of time and invest in schematic systems to make sure the iris – the pupil – is looking exactly over there.
One of the most intimate things we can do is to look deeply into somebody’s eyes, so it’s incredibly important for our characters to be able to look deeply into the eyes of another character and for you to be able to see that on screen and then for them to look deeply into your eyes as the audience.
f. You mentioned when you were completing your studies computer graphics was about the technical and artistic sides. Is this still the case?
BG. There’s a lot more specialisation now. We get these artists who are incredibly deep artists with no technical ability, it might be someone who paints scales on a dinosaur where they’re just fantastic at capturing the colour and the grit and everything. Then you’ll have someone who knows about its physical properties, light and how it reflects through those scales. You have these two incredibly specialised people, but they don’t speak the same language at all, so, for me, a lot of being a generalist is that I can bridge the gap. I can talk the technical language and I can talk the art language, so it’s kind of fun having that background of art and science, because I’ve been pursuing both for a long time. When I came in as a generalist on A Bug’s Life, I dabbled in everything, but it’d be very unusual to do that now. Everything is a little more factory pipeline, because we’ve got to be more efficient, because we do maybe two movies a year now.
For me, we need specialists and we need generalists, but the bottom line is you just want really talented people in each of those areas. One of the interesting complexities of my job is team building – how do I get the right team to get all this to happen?
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With training key to widening the talent pool required to safeguard and advance the future of animation, Green’s role sees him lend his expertise to potential and young designers. He contributes to Khan Academy, to show youngsters that math can take you down avenues they never even dreamt were possible. He works with Girls Who Code to improve the appeal of computer science for females. And he will be talking at Pause to empower people to pursue their dreams, with stories of his own personal and professional evolution, and that of Pixar and its characters as a whole.
“I came from an outer suburb of Dingley,” he concludes. “There was supposedly no hope of me ever going to Disney. But you can do it; if you work hard and you’re passionate and you want to do it. It’s about being a little bit inspirational and showing people that things might seem impossible, but they weren’t for me.”
fluoro is an official media partner of the premier creative, tech and business festival in Australasia Pause, where Green features as part of the Pause 2017 edition. To celebrate the partnership, we have created a special edition Pause Magazine 2017 by fluoro. Each feature within the magazine has been curated to offer an exclusive insight into the game changers from the Pause 2017 program, including the likes of Naples, SXSW, Lucasfilm, The Mill, Pixar, Google, Etsy and frog.
Click here for a complimentary copy of this special edition magazine.
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