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Pixar's technical team rises to the challenge with new tools and techniques to create digital landscapes, rig and animate characters, and simulate muscles, skin, hair, and cloth for Brave By Barbara Robertson
Pixar's extraordinary run of successful films starring male characters took a courageous turn in June with the release of Disney/ Pixar's 13th feature, Brave, the studios first princess film. The conflict in this feature centers on the relationship between Metida, a young "don't wannabe a princess," and her mother, the elegant Queen Elinor. Merida inherited her father's fiery character along with his flaming red hair, radier dian her mother's calm demeanor. She would rather be outdoors riding her horse, rock climbing, and practicing archery like Fergus, her father, than studying to be a princess and meeting her pre-ordained destiny - marriage to the son of a rival clan leader. With a fairy-tale setting in medieval Scodand amidst lush landscapes and kiltwearing clans, and a fairy-tale plot that includes a tricky witch, a spell that must be undone, and plenty of action-adventure along the way, Brave enters new territory for the studio.
Behind the scenes, Pixar's toolmakers and artists entered new territory as well, by developing and implementing new technology and methods for the first time that affected everything from the landscape to the costumes, from animation to Meridas mop of curly hair.
Setting the Stage
During late summer of 2006 and again in October 2007, 12 members of the Brave production team - including directors Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman, producer Katherine Sarafian, story lead Luis Gonzales, production designer Steve Pilcher, and shading an director Tia Kratter - traveled to Scodand to meet people, immerse themselves in the landscape, and scout locations. In the Scottish Highlands, the team felt the wind in their faces and pushed their hands down into the spongy moss that softened the rocks and draped the earth. They saw lichen dripping from trees shrouded in mist. They stretched out like snow angels in fields of heather.
"We knew the world of Brave was going to be really, really rich," Kratter says. Merida would race through the world surrounding her family casde, on Angus, her Clydesdale. She would run through it on foot, following little electric-blue will-o-wisps. It was...