VIEW Conference 2007: Grand Finale with Bozzetto and Pixar Animation Studios

Here is the second and final part of the last shiny day at VIEW Conference 8 in Turin.

While I was lost in the Virtual Reality space of SOE | The Space On Earth Project of Franz Fishnaller, Professor of the School of Art and Design, University of Illinois at Chicago, my phone rang. Once. Twice. Franz with great dedication showed me this immersive interactive space where an entire city is simulated. I used a sort of wii-like remote and glasses to navigate it. Buildings, streets, teleporting holes. It’s the first time in my life I have the experience of an immersive Virtual Reality system. It’s been so many years I have heard about the Cave that finally I have the opportunity to try it. But the phone kept on ringing. “yes”, “Hey Massimo, Pixar’s session is starting”. Oh my god, lost in the virtual space I totally forgot where I was and what I was doing. So I said thanks to Mr Fishnaller and I ran into the main hall of Torino Incontra conference center.

A franticly crowded room was waiting for maestro Bruno Bozzetto, Italian animation master, about to present Sharon Calahan, Director of Photography in Pixar Animation Studios. Actually I lost maybe the most personal part of the conference, the one where the Boss, the Director, Maria Elena Gutierrez makes her closing remarks and remerciements.

Bruno Bozzetto is an expert master with so much energy that I feel old and tired each time I meet him. He keeps on saying he has a lot of ideas and he wants to write new movies and follow new projects. Although he presents himself in his bio writing:” I’ve also written two subjects and a screenplay for new features, but unfortunately Italian producers, in spite of what happens abroad, do not seem very interested in these kind of productions which, in my opinion, are the kind of works they should invest in the most”. Bozzetto presented the 3D animated short film “looo” which is dedicate to “certain” film schools and “certain” film production approaches lurking in Italy in the past years. The film is dedicated to Pixar and I think it was really exciting to have the director on stage presenting this artwork with the presence of four people from the same Studio.

Of course I asked the Maestro some questions as well as some people from the audience did. We often struggle to find opportunities for cinema and videogames in Italy but I understand, also from the questions asked, that we should make people more aware of how a film or a videogame is made.

Maestro Bruno then spent so many beautiful words to present the next session. I think he really involved the audience in the crescendo of emotion that would announce the final and maybe most prestigious talk: Sharon Caralhan with Creating the Look of Ratataouille.
I don’t remember if the audience were allowed to take pictures during this session but I didn’t even try to ask. I was so captured by Lady Calahan that I was able to barely write some notes.

Ratatouille is a movie about a rat who wants to become a cook. The life metaphor is that everybody can do everything. The major goal of the movie was to make the audience hungry!
As I noticed in other Pixar’s presentations, also this one was very clear, tidy, elegant, fluent with a nice rhythm in the images and the speech. A lot of beautiful and provoking images went through the screen. Paris, day and night, sunset and dawn, the River, cobbles, lights reflecting on the wet ground. The sewer, the Eiffel tower and then: leaves, branches, trees, romantic promenades, lights at the windows with a dark sky.

But this was only the beginning: the real juice (ah!) arrived when Sharon started to talk about the food. The most ambitious challenge with this film was the one of reproducing believable food and extracting the essence of it so to inspire the entire visual style of the feature film. Calahan didn’t talk about shaders nor rendering algorithm: she paints! A lot of the directions she gave to her incredible staff (Jessica McMackin, Jessica McMackin, Jessica McMackin, Jessica McMackin, Jessica McMackin, Jessica McMackin, Jessica McMackin, …. This is what appeared on the screen during the credits) were in the form of beautiful, vivid, warm paintings. Once again I re-discovered the actual function of CG: Computer Graphics is a tool and it must serve a story. The director is the leader of the army which work to drive a vision on a screen. The DOP (that is Director of Photography) is responsible to put ideas, environments, concepts and actors in form of images.

Sharon Calahan went through the needed phase followed by each serious artist (and scientist): research. You may be glad to learn that “Pixar doesn’t use a toilette, before researching it”. And the metaphor really gives the sense of what it means to be a filmmaker at Pixar. Calahan went with her photo camera taking thousands of pictures of every possible visual hint around, inside and underneath Paris. (Yes, of course she had problems with local Police because of 9/11 and weird people taking weird photographs).

Of course she and her team had to bear the heavy weight of experimenting the best food in the World: French Cuisine. I am not really sure they just scanned Bouillabaisse and Langoustines and they never touched it (come on!). Anyway she focused on those peculiar visual aspects of delicious food she wanted to recreate in Ratatouille. I am not able to remember everything but the main points were about removing greys by rendered food. Thus, special lighting and shading algorithms have been developed by the engineering team (Ciao Guido!) and implemented by Shader Writers and Lighting TD to reproduce what Madame Calahan firmly and undoubtedly indicated with her visual directions.

I must say the story told in this talk, the images, the procedures, the inspirations, the tastes just completely sucked me in. I was totally lost in the narration.

That is why at the end of this beautiful talk, after a long standing ovation of the excited audience (400, 500 people?) I stood there, staring at the screen, mute.

The guy sitting on my left, unknown to me, hit me with his elbow: “Hey, Max, don’t you ask a question to the Calahan?”

For the four days of VIEW Conference I have been asking questions to every possible person sitting on the stage. Many of them were grateful (some not). So actually people around me were expecting me to ask something.

Time passed. The session ended. Ladies and gentlemen this is the end of the most important event on computer graphics ever held in Italy. We made history.

But while I was still astonished by sensations and thoughts, something weird happened. Signora Sharon Calahan is looking at me.

No maybe just somebody behind me.

No. She is looking at me.

Oh my. I never had the pleasure to met her before. She must want something.

She looks me in the eyes. When she walks down the stage and the people start to surround her, she gets near me and she tells me “Massimo, why didn’t you ask me a question?”

8)

See you next year at VIEW Conference.

Won’t you come?

Max