Inside the Magic: How James Cameron and Disney Are Revolutionizing Animation—Secrets Revealed by Pietro Schito
Pietro Schito
Yeah, so it’s just, I would say it’s moving the conversation to a different world of animation where now it’s more about efficiency and trying to get the job done and not caring as much about how certain things look in our design. Because if you look any art book of any animated film at big studios, or even some independent productions, there’s a real care of how everything looks. And so they would really distance themselves from something procedural. With exceptions, you know, you have to create a lot of buildings for a town. It’s not really, once you have the general idea of, you know, the visual language of the show, especially in TV, you know, you also need to find a cheap solution to do it. So it’s not like you can design every single thing. So that’s where libraries and nowadays, I know that can also, you know, you have a tree and then that tree is not always the same. It depends on the style. If you want to photo realistic stuff, then, you know, these game engines, you don’t really care if the tree has one more branch or not, it’s in the background. And that’s something that’s a principle of animation, knowing where you, you know, where to focus when you put your where you put your budget, and where you leave that in the background as a general tool, because people sometimes coming from live action, they think that you can do whatever you want, because it’s all in the computer. Well, actually, everything is expensive. Some things are even more expensive in the computer compared to that. So, in production, Unreal Engine, I love it, we are experimenting with data on two projects that are blending stop motion with that Unreal Engine, because it can be a very interesting blend to create things that are almost not impossible, but they would create the most expensive film in animation history if we had to do everything in stop motion. And finding that blend is very interesting. You’re running all sorts of pipeline problems and difficulties. Yeah. And I know that Epic Games and Unreal as a team, they’re working very hard. And they’re very serious about bringing this as a tool for animation. Some things they sound very attractive. And that’s something I also thought they were much easier than when you speak with people that know about pipeline because in an animation project, the pipeline is super important. And some studios, they each have different pipelines in animation, you know, usually go shot based, especially in TV, where sometimes you think is coming from live action that they just build everything, they build everything and then, you know, you move the camera around everything is, is like a set that it’s there for you and you can go crazy. Many times, you know, you work with plates compositing where some things are rendered separately. I’m not an expert in all this, but I can tell that, you know, it looks more promising than it is because I’ve met people working with Unreal Engine. And I love that many people are pushing, many studios are working with that. And it will get there eventually. We’re in that phase where it’s better you have a good team of engineers to, to help you alongside, especially when it’s not just a teaser, you want to keep doing stuff. And you can create very interesting things, especially in the animation part. It’s a little more difficult now in terms of it’s still not there. If your story has to do with that, that’s why many projects from, they come from many of these artists, they come from the video game world. And some of these projects kind of look the same. It’s robots, because they don’t have to animate facial expression, or people that would have helmet on and things that they look really cool when you but then you stop and think about it and say, wait a minute, there’s no facial expression, there’s no style, everything looks very real, water looks like water, there’s no stylization, there’s so, there’s so many new tools that they’re helping so much in that and we’ll we’re moving towards that and that’s super interesting.
