Inside the Magic: How James Cameron and Disney Are Revolutionizing Animation—Secrets Revealed by Pietro Schito
Pietro Schito
Yeah. I love the question. Thank you. Horror Kitchen, for example, was my very first short film and it is live action. It’s this girl that gets home. It was a part of a film festival and it’s a very simple idea of a girl coming back home. It looks like it’s a horror thing that somebody broke into her apartment. But then when she slowly opens the door, you see that all her appliances basically are brought to life and they created a birthday party for her. So it’s a short film that it’s based on a surprise. And that had this animation element in love because it’s not stop motion, but we used the baby’s fish line and threads to move the different parts of the different characters. And so it’s still the soul. And that brings us to the idea of animation is not a genre and so it’s a medium. And so I think that at the same time, animation has a specific energy, a specific fantasy approach that we can have as writers. And I can observe that that has always been part of the things I would love to do. Nowadays, you have live action films that are live action, but they’re really animated. Like the live action remakes like Lion King or Mufasa or Avatar from James Cameron. That’s basically animation. So it’s just about distinguishing the medium and the genre. And so I also worked on live action because it is still storytelling. And actually there’s no difference between a script that is for live action and one for animation on the page. And so it’s about the style and the fact, something I really love about animation is the fact that you can really blend and morph reality. You can get into these inner states with much more freedom and it’s much more accepted. And that allows for a certain kind of story. But of course, as a medium, you could tell any kind of story, a drama or comedy, a kids film or four quadrant film. And so I worked on, I also worked in behind the scenes for some live action films. And also, as a story consultant that really helped me understand all the departments of a live action production. And so I would love to go on chat with the prop master, understand all these elements that then actually translate in animation as well. I mean, a prop master takes a real thing and create, create, they create prop props for a film, but it’s the same for animation. Every, actually even more, because in live action, some locations, they kind of exist, or at least you have some baseline where you start building stuff on top. Or if you’re in a studio, it might be everything from scratch, but in animation, everything is actually always from scratch. You need to build everything. And so, I think that it was a good experience to be in live action as well. And storytelling is my passion, regardless of the medium.
