The Worldspace. Victor Navone




Date of the podcast: 2020 / 08 / 28
Podcast link via The Worldspace

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ePRYnhVoZ8


We have an other two mics accuracy transcript as I was eager to hear what Victor had to say and he didn't disapoint! Two mics accuracy means the A.I. transcript was verified by a human and therefore close to perfect, let me know otherwise!


Show notes:

Shawn Krause 

Chris Sasaki 

Don Knotts in Deputy Baney Fife / Andy Griffith show / The ghost and Mr chicken 

 

10:39 Characters overall shapes and colors are inspired by their personality 

12:16 Animating Kitbull 

14: working on Bao and Domee Shi 

16:16 Animation workflow on Hector 

18:34 Animating Lou 

23:54 Working with Brad Bird 

25:58 Animating the Dash sequence in the Incredibles 

27:55 How Victor approaches an acting shot 

32:58 How to get to Pixar 

35:00 Tools and workflow 



Transcript:


Ilse Zamarripa  0:33  

Hey everybody, welcome back. My name is Ilse Zamarripa, the world space, I can't even describe how excited I am to be speaking to this legend. Why is he so important to me? because he basically animated the Pixar films that defined my childhood : Monster Inc, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, Wall-E, Toy Story 3, Brave, Inside out, and my beloved Coco. Victor Navone, it's a pleasure to have you in the World Space. Thank you so much for sharing your time and your knowledge here.


Victor Navone  1:11  

Hi Ilsa, it's great to be with you even if it's only virtually. I wish I could be there in person, I wish I could be anywhere in person besides in quarantine but it's a pleasure to join you. Thanks also for that really nice intro. That's a lot of hype, I will try to live up to it, as best I can. 


Ilse Zamarripa  1:29  

The pleasure is ours for anyone who doesn't know Victor got hired at Pixar in the year 2000. Thanks to this wonderful clip. (Alien Song clip)


that clip became viral because it's so creative. It's so funny. It makes me wonder what in your opinion were the biggest challenges of computer animation back then,


Victor Navone  1:57  

boy that was a long time ago was truly a different era, this was around 1998 1999 that I was teaching myself computer animation on my spare time. And I didn't have any training in animations so I was learning as much as I could on my own I was, you know, buying books like the Illusion of Life and whatever books there were on computer animation at a time which maybe there weren't a lot there were maybe a handful. And the more important thing that was happening in the late 90s was you know obviously there had been Toy Story which was the first full length animated computer animated feature film, but also the software at the time was becoming affordable to hobbyists and people who just wanted to learn for fun like myself. Prior to that, if you were to try to buy a version of Maya 1.0, a seat of Maya would cost you over 10 grand. But then I found a piece of software called Hash Animation Master, which ran on a Mac or a PC and it was only like 200 bucks, but there was no YouTube there weren't a lot of online learning resources at that time so it was kind of the wild west of animation.


Ilse Zamarripa  3:06  

Let me ask you, out of all the amazing movies you've worked on what characters have you loved the most.


Victor Navone  3:13  

Oh boy, there are so many, but the ones that rise to the top in my memory would likely be Wall-E, Hector from Coco and Fear from inside out I think those were my favorite to work with,


Ilse Zamarripa  3:27  

Wall-E is one of the best Pixar movies ever made in my mind, I saw it again, two days ago. And there are so many impressive things. I was shocked with the fact that the movie, like, more than half of the movie goes by almost without a dialogue. That is impressive right


Victor Navone  3:45  

yeah people often talk about how challenging it must have been to animate these silent characters like Wall-E and yeah he's a really limited character he doesn't have facial expressions. He doesn't even have elbows. So it's a bit of a puzzle to, to figure out how to emote through that limited body but I really enjoy those kinds of challenges. And as an animator I really enjoy animating pantomime scenes. I like not having to rely on the dialogue to tell me the timing, or the subtext or the mood of a scene I can invent more, and I can take more ownership over the performance, which I think is kind of a rarity and a luxury for animators in a film production, a feature film production situation. So working on Wall-E was a really special time for me. And I think for the other animators who worked on that film. 


The whole first act of that film was completed by six or seven animators working in a very small tight group over a few months, and the director Andrew Stanton gave us a lot of latitude to add our own ideas at acting ideas and moments of entertainment at length, add frames to our shots you know make them longer if we felt it could really make the character more endearing or more clear. That's not the kind of freedom that you usually have on a feature film production so that's another way that while he was was special. Yeah, Wall-E was a really fun character to animate for me. First personality as well he's so childlike and naive and innocent, he kind of reminds me of like a more sophisticated version of Luxo Jr. Just curious and energetic and you know wants to know more about his world, wants to know more about Eve. Clearly, and so I found I could relate to him pretty easily, and his performance choices became second nature after a while you know after I'd gone through a few sequences with him. I felt like I understood the character well enough to anticipate what he would do next. And there are some scenes like the scene where he wakes up really sleepy in the morning because he hasn't had his solar charge yet. When I was animating that scene. We had just had our second baby so I had a newborn at home. I wasn't getting a lot of sleep, so I could really relate to the weight the way that while he felt stumbling around in his own trailer during that scene.


Ilse Zamarripa  6:01  

Wow. And you You told me you loved animating Fear of inside out. He is such an expressive character right, I, I really love what you were saying the intersection between 3d and 2d animation. I feel like in that movie it's wonderful. You were the animation supervisor for that film, how do you as a supervisor. Explain it to the animators, like, how do you polish the personality of each character and transmitted to your team, 


Victor Navone  6:32  

good question, so, I was co supervisor on that film with Shawn Krause. We teamed up for that one. And it's this is a challenge on on any film is trying to keep the the characters consistent, because of course, you know, with a crew of 60, or more animators, you're going to have 60, different opinions about who that character is and how they move and the choices, they're going to make. So it's an ongoing struggle to try to keep that character consistent and feeling like it was only animated by one animator, ideally, but we have a lot of different methods for controlling the quality of characters. For instance, during the pre production process when we're building the character along with art and the character rigging department, we create what is called a model sheet which is just kind of a packet of poses that are what we call in on-model, and "in character" for that character so what they should look like? What's appealing for that character? What controls you should use to animate that character  versus what controls you should avoid? So it's basically like a how to user guide for that character, and usually the animator, who helps develop that character in production will continue to shepherd that character into production as well so they become the lead person to go to for questions about that character, and how that character should behave and how that character should look. That's not to say that they are the final answer because the character will always evolve over the course of the production. You really don't know who a character is until they've gone through a few sequences in the film you can see them in context of the movie. So, you know, a different animator might have a new idea for how to play that character that the director might really respond to. So that new idea becomes part of the lexicon of how we pose this character and who that character is gets added to the model sheet. We also might create pre determined libraries of like hand shapes and face shapes, just to get the animator started with something that's already on model and appealing with Fear the real challenge was he had to be designed specifically for the camera. As soon as you open loaded him up in our software in Presto, he was immediately off model and you had to kind of sculpt his features to make them look right for camera so we always had to have his nose and profile, his mouth was like a cutout negative space, his eyes would always be slightly stacked on top of each other and they'd be diagonal, depending on which way he turned his head kind of like the way Mickey Mouse's ears rotate around his head as he turns, keeping the his curlicue hair in silhouette. There are a lot of very particular rules for Fear for making them feel more like the 2d kind of graphic style that we got from the character design from Chris Sasaki,


Ilse Zamarripa  9:13  

I also heard before, that fear was inspired by Mr. Bean's personality. Is that true


Victor Navone  9:19  

yeah I don't remember. Mr Bean being referenced so much as an inspiration for Fear I don't remember Pete Docter talking about that character in particular, more often. I would hear. Pete talking about Don Knotts the comedic actor from the 60s and 70s, some of the older viewers where I might remember him from The Andy Griffith Show he played the deputy Barney Fife. (video clip)


Unknown Speaker  9:45  

He's gonna cry, steady now Luther Tell us about it.


Unknown Speaker  9:53  

Who do you think you are.


Victor Navone  9:56  

Drop dead That's


Unknown Speaker  9:58  

right, Mr back good, Mr. Mr. Van was bad.


Victor Navone  10:03  

He was also in a lot of very broad comedies from the 60s and 70s, often where he'd play very easily frightened character, like the movie "The ghost and Mr chicken",  he's known for having these sort of wide bulbous eyes which lent itself very closely to fear so he was an inspiration I think the Muppet character Beaker was also an inspiration too, and


Ilse Zamarripa  10:23  

do you know if it's true that the characters are inspired by shapes, because I've heard, Joy is a star, Sadness is a teardrop, Fear is like a nerve, Disgust is broccoli and Anger is a brick. Do you know if that's true, 


Victor Navone  10:39  

Well I think it's kind of the other way around, rather than the characters being inspired those by those shapes, those shapes represented a distillation of who those characters were. So, the, the art department led by Albert Lozano tried to reduce each of the emotions down to a single color and a shape which would become kind of the touchstone for that character, okay so you know how do you distill down Joy well like a golden star, she's a burst of energy or, you know, anger is is hot like a brick so he's just this red rectangle. So that was more just a way to simplify and create a statement about their character rather than that being the inspiration for the character. 


Ilse Zamarripa  11:18  

Okay, and throughout your amazing and very long career. Do you have  favorite shots or favorite sequence that you've animated


Victor Navone  11:27  

oh wow that's that's a tough question Ilsa. A lot of times, I look back on my work and I just don't like it you know all I see is what I think is wrong with it, but there are a few sequences here and there that stand out in my memory and I look at those and I'm like, I'm still pretty good. um, of course I like a lot of my work on Wally. Just the the freedom of working with that character and I felt some of my ideas were pretty successful. I really enjoyed working with Hector, on, Coco. He's just such a fun character and the scene, I got to animate with him trying to bribe the officer into letting him go across the bridge and you know detaching his hands and doing lots of fun little gags with that, that was really fun too. I enjoyed that a lot. And I have to say, the work I did on Kitbull was really satisfying for me. It was my first time really animating in 2d, I don't have hand drawn animation training. So it was kind of back to school for me on that. And, you know, while it's not the most refined animation it's not on ones, the drawings are pretty loose the styles pretty rough, but there's, there's a playfulness to the to that character in that those, those characters in that world and the scenes that I got. That was so much fun to animate it was a real freedom to it a real freedom of expression. And so I was pretty happy with my work on that film as well.


Ilse Zamarripa  12:49  

How was it like to work with Rosanna Sullivan,


Victor Navone  12:51  

yeah. Everything about that project or working on that project was a real a real joy. I love stories about animals. I'm actually not much of a cat person but animating a cat, in this case a spastic little kitten was really fun working with Rosanna was really fun. She's a great storyteller and such a sweet person, but also with a really clear artistic vision, and also just working in a small team I think we only had like six or seven animators. Anytime you're working on a small team like that it becomes very collaborative and everybody has a real sense of ownership over the final product because we're all contributing so much to it as a percentage. If nothing else, so it was really fun I felt like a young animator again because I was learning a medium that I hadn't really tried before 2d animation. We animated in TVpaint which is a pretty cool program. And we got to do everything from rough animation all the way to clean up in color. wow, which is pretty cool to be involved in that through the entire pipeline. We didn't do the final compositing on the backgrounds that was done in After Effects by Andy Jimenez, but as animators we got to do pretty much everything else as far as the animation side. So a really enjoyable experience overall and I would do it again in a heartbeat.


Ilse Zamarripa  14:06  

And I feel like it's proof that you don't need as huge and intense production with a lot of complex elements when you have a strong story like this story tells itself, and you can create amazing art with just a very simple style I loved it, you told me before you loved working with the director Domee Shi. I also had the honor of meeting her a few years back, she is lovely. She is very very talented and very young Wow, how was your experience like working with her.


Victor Navone  14:39  

Yeah, that's another example of just a really wonderful experience again working on shorts is so great and there's the small, intimate team working with Domee, is amazing, like you said she's, she's very young, but she has such a mature sense of storytelling. And she's very confident in her ideas, but very easy to work with and such a clear and unique vision, which is another great thing about the short films, is you get to try different kinds of storytelling and different kinds of character design, which was definitely the case in Bao. I got to learn about a lot about Chinese culture or in this case Chinese Canadian culture. We got to work with very different character designs and we'd never explored before so we had to figure out a lot of new rules for that. And, you know, playing with the dumpling who's so cute and figuring out the transformation sequence for him was really fun I got to be involved in the pre production and the animation of that so that was really satisfying. Yeah, and overall I'm really proud of that film, and again short films are such a nice break after you know the behemoth of of working on a feature film which are also great but sometimes you know you feel like I'm just one out of 200 people, you know, am I really making a difference, but working on a short film is really fun especially when it's something is as unique and refreshing as bow.


Ilse Zamarripa  16:00  

Yeah, I can imagine. And speaking of full of characters and wonderful choices, let's talk about Hector,


like how how


did you shoot reference. And how did the rig work, because you have so many like detachable pieces it's a thing.


Victor Navone  16:16  

Yeah, working with with Hector was really fun. Did I shoot video reference, sometimes, for the scene where he's trying to grab the guard. I did shoot some reference of myself for that, just kind of sitting down, because he has to deal with like the prop of the hat and he's leaning on the desk and I just kind of wanted to figure out some of the basic physicality of that scene, but I didn't want to be limited to just what I can do with my own body so I relied for Hector I relied a lot more on just drawing thumbnails. I actually sketch blocked out that scene and 2d drew you know blocked it over the, the layout, jiust for quick experimentation and to really, you know, get broad with the performance and push the shapes. Same thing with the the scene of Hector riding on the gondola with Miguel, and he's kind of playing guitar and talking to Miguel. That was all blocked using sketch thumbnails  and then 2d blocks 2d hand drawn blocked in the scene. So sometimes I like to use video reference for Hector, I found it to be less useful because I wanted him to be broader than I can be. And I just wanted him to be really appealing to look at and just try to get really fun exaggerated poses out of him. He's definitely a fun character in the scene of him trying to bribe the, the, the guard the officer is also one of my favorites because it's Hector, pretending to be something else. So I love scenes where you get to see a character actually performing, you know they're, whether they're lying or whether they're performing, you know as a part of a play or they're just trying to deceive another character. I really enjoy acting scenes like that. Yes, it was a complex rig. He's composed of, you know, 100 or so bones, all of which can be detached from his body and parented or constrained to something else animated separately however you want to, however animate however ambitious the animator wanted to be. He or she could could completely disassemble the entire rig if they wanted to. Luckily I didn't have to do that I only had to detach a hand here or there so it wasn't too bad, but the technology was definitely there to let the animators have complete freedom over each individual bone and actor's body if they wanted to. 


Ilse Zamarripa  18:34  

Okay, and speaking about this technical aspect. How was it like to animate Lou, how was that rig structured, was it kind of similar to actors, does it like changes body parts?


Victor Navone  19:05  

Well it was a similar principle between Lou and Hector but very different execution, of course, working on Lu, it was just, you know, it was a short film, much smaller budget much smaller team so we didn't have the same resources as a feature film like Coco, and also Hector was designed from the beginning with a rig that allowed the bones to detach and, you know, be very robust in that way, with.


Lou the character design actually changed a bit. In the course of production so we had to throw out some animation and go back to the drawing board for a little bit for his character design. Okay. Originally, he was, he would change shape less he was mostly just the, the hoodie, with a pair of eyes on top and and they became worried early on the production that he looked too much like a muppet. So we kind of redesigned him to be more haphazard to look a little bit more janky, and we decided that as long as the eyes stayed together in a readable place where the audience could know what Lou was thinking and feeling the rest of his design was kind of up in the air and we could change it in every scene, depending on what Lou needed to do, which I think was really genius idea for storytelling and entertainment, but a really difficult idea to execute for the animation team. On one side. All the animators got to contribute ideas for different configurations of Lu, we would take, you know, the two balls for the eyes and the hoodie, and then all the other props that he was assembled from I think we had like 12, different props that we could use, and we would just experiment with different ways to combine those into new character designs. And so, Luke could be radically different from one shot to the next. But then it was up to us to figure out how to animate those transitions and create those on the fly rigs for all the the motion that Lou needed to do, which is a real challenge. And I like to think of myself as a pre technical animator and I don't normally get overwhelmed by those kind of things. But animating some of those shots, really brought me to my knees as an animator and I had to take a lot more breaks and walk away from the computer on that film than I normally would. It was still a really enjoyable film to work on I love the people I love the story and I'm really proud of what we accomplished. But boy, it was hard work. Have you ever felt intimidated by the level of complexity of the shots like you receive it and you're like, how am I gonna do this?


 Absolutely. Many of the shots I animated on Lou are exactly that. Not only was there the complexity of the character you know coming up with a design for my shots, and then doing all the constraints and attaches, and then figuring out how to transform into the next version of Lou, but also in some cases they were moving cameras and both characters are running and they're having a tug of war with a backpack. I mean that's like all the hardest things in animation to do.


So that was a real challenge, and it made me think back to one of the earliest challenges of my career at Pixar, which was working on Incredibles 1. I had this sequence of were Buddy who becomes syndrome. Buddy jumps out the window and is flying around and he's got a bomb attached to his cape. And so Mr. Incredible grabs the cape and they're the two of them are flying through this city.


You know Mr Incredibles trying to pull the bomb off the cave and but he's trying to shake him loose. And it's just total chaos, and I had no point of reference for that you know it certainly couldn't shoot reference. It was, you know, a moving camera flying characters, you know, with a complex action and complex constraints set up at the same time. It took me a long time to get those shots approved and, you know, bless Brad Bird for his patience with me because my earlier, it might early iterations on those shots I think we're really just way off the mark and not nearly energetic enough but he worked with me. I think it took three or four passes before we really found it.


But I was really glad to have that opportunity to figure that stuff out gain that confidence and have leadership that was patient with me and willing to work with me to grow and learn how to do those kinds of shots,


Ilse Zamarripa  23:40  

my favorite movie director when it comes to Pixar has always been the Brad Bird. He is a true genius. How is it like to work with him in The Incredibles and Ratatouille, what are the things you have learned from him? 


Victor Navone  23:54  

Yeah, working with, with Brad is is kind of an animators dream, and I was very lucky to do it early in my career at Pixar on Incredibles 1. Anytime we would go to dailies with him it was like going to animation school or film school for that matter because Brad has a really deep knowledge of cinema in general not just animated films but live action films you know he can talk about real camera lenses and light and cinematography and all that stuff so he brings a huge wealth of knowledge to the table. And it was a real pleasure for me to learn from him in dailies, I remember sitting in dailies with him and he would go over my shots and other people's and that was the first time I really understood what spacing meant in computer animation. And just the concept that it really doesn't matter that we're working with three dimensional characters in a three dimensional virtual space. The audience at the end of the day only sees a two dimensional image up on screen so it's up to us to make sure that that image reads as clearly as possible and that you know the timing and the spacing and the arcs and the silhouette and all that are as graphic and readable as possible, to really maximize the appeal and the readability. So that was just one of the many lessons I took away from working with Brad. He also worked with me on a, on a scene in The Incredibles where Dash does it take you know just reacting to something. And I remember him coming to my desk and kind of working over my shoulder and talking me through like how to do the squash and stretch and the timing and the overshoot and all that stuff. And I it's still techniques that I use to this day, and techniques that I try to share with my students you know pass on the knowledge. I didn't get to work officially on Ratatouille I did one shot kind of under the table just to help out and because I wanted to work with Brad again. And same thing on Incredibles 2, I just did one quick throwaway shot, just to, you know, because who knows what if we'll ever get to work with Brad again you know if he's off to do live action or something else so if you have the opportunity to work with him as an animator, or as just a creative, you definitely want to take that opportunity.


Ilse Zamarripa  25:58  

Well, and I have always loved this sequence that you animated for The Incredibles.


How did you solve the camera with the action, would you mind guiding us with as much detail as possible through your process,


Victor Navone  26:18  

it was it was really kind of a dance between me as an animator and the layout department who was in charge of camera. But that was a scene that we did some previews on. So, before the shot was officially released to animation. They asked me to do a quick just rough timing pass on Dash moving back and forth in the tunnel just with the basic timing that I thought would be appropriate for the shot. Nothing else you know no facial expressions or anything just, you know, animating the route controls, and then we show that with to Brad you know to get Brad's buy off on it and then the camera person would kind of follow my blocking. And then if there was any adjustments I needed to make for the camera I would do that so it wouldn't be back and forth. And then once that shot went into production. I got to keep animating on that shot which was great because I was just kind of building on top of my own previous animation. So there was still some iteration back and forth to make sure that dash was always in the right place in screen and you know the cameraman animation wasn't too unrealistic. But yeah, it was a really neat kind of collaboration between animation layout and sets to to make sure that there weren't any stalactites or stalacmites in the way of the performance you know we could set dress things, you know where they needed to be so that they didn't interfere with the action. Yeah, it was kind of a cool cyclical iteration cycle with three or four departments,


Ilse Zamarripa  27:44  

which techniques, would you use to have like a very neat, very well prepared reference, if you're doing for example an acting piece, how do you approach it?


Victor Navone  27:55  

 I approach reference a little differently for everything I work on. Sometimes I use video reference sometimes I don't. Sometimes I do all just thumbnails on paper. Sometimes I'll do the thumbnails right in the computer and maybe even time them out sort of like a rough sketch blocking. Sometimes I'll just start animating straightaway in the computer because I already have a really clear idea of what I want to do. It depends on the kind of shots and the mood I'm in and how far along in production we are and how fast things are moving. But I generally, you know, if I can, if this schedule allows I'd like to take a week just to do my planning in my research before I touch anything in the computer. Just to, you know, try to vet through as many ideas as I can and find the best ideas, and sometimes that involves video reference and sometimes it doesn't. 


Ilse Zamarripa  28:47  

How much do you copy the reference? Are you very faithful to it or do you just use it for blocking?


Victor Navone  28:53  

 I use my video reference pretty loosely I try really hard never to just copy my reference verbatim. Because I just don't think the characters in the films I work on would move like me, you know they don't, they're not the same body type as me they're not the same weight they're not the same person I'm not good enough of an actor in front of the camera to really transform transform myself physically, you know, like a lot of really well trained actors can do. So I use video reference more just for general ideas and timing. You know what gesture happens where, and probably a lot for eye fi animation like you know where exactly is an eIder landing or blink, those things I may you know get pretty close to frame by frame as far as when those things happen and how long they last I animation I do find translates pretty well from video reference, but the, the greater physicality of the character and the gestures. That's more of a loose inspiration. One thing that I find and this is kind of a tip for your viewers, is if I'm ever recording video reference to go along with a piece of pre recorded dialogue. A lot of times I have trouble keeping up with the dialogue and maybe the dialogue is speaking very fast, or I just feel like I'm constantly rushing myself to try to keep up with that timing. And that doesn't lead to an authentic performance. So one little trick that I'll do is I will playback the audio that I have at a slower speed say 75%. And that's slow enough where I feel like I can relax a little bit take my time kind of explore the performance and still keep up with the timing of the vocal performance. And then once I do that I've got my video footage, I can take that into an you know an editor, and I can speed it back up 125%. And now my performance will match with the dialogue at the original speed, which is great because it means my performance moves a little bit faster and animated performances tend to move a little bit faster than real life anyway so it gives it a little bit of extra snappiness a little bit of extra life to it. So I find that that works pretty well if you're using video reference


Ilse Zamarripa  31:02  

yeah that's very clever Thank you.


Victor Navone  31:04  

Yeah, there are definitely times when video reference just doesn't make sense on Wall-E. I didn't want anything about him to feel like a person in a robot suit so I tried to invent all of his poses strictly based on what he could actually do as a robot. Cars for the most part I wouldn't use video reference. Sometimes I would just shoot video reference from the neck up and treat like my head as the car and sometimes that would be useful. but other times like a character was really broad like Fear, again, I didn't want to be too tied to what I could actually do with my body I wanted more just like the feeling of my body so I might ask something out in front of a mirror, you know, just to get a feeling of it but I wouldn't video reference it because I don't want to be tempted to just follow the video reference and everything I'll do is sometimes because maybe I do shoot video reference and I don't like the performance that I come up with, or I feel like I'm just doing the same thing over and over again and I don't want my characters to just look like me. I'll ask somebody else to act on my scene for me. and then I'll record them doing that, and that can lead to some really new, fresh takes on how to approach the shot. For example, on Toy Story 4, I had some really emotional shots of Gabby Gabby towards the end of the film. And I didn't really want to try to just imitate what I thought my impression of, you know, a little girl who had been hurt, you know, what would their performance be like I wasn't comfortable doing that myself. I was too worried I would get into the realm of cliche or being hammy. So instead I asked one of my female co workers to act it out for me, and she came up with some really cool authentic stuff really vulnerable performance that i thought i would i would never get that out of myself. And there were ideas in there that I'd never considered that I think really made the performance a lot richer.


Ilse Zamarripa  32:58  

I want to ask you something. You're not a recruiter, let's start there. But I do want to ask you if you have any tips or tricks to enter Pixar what would you recommend, sure,


Victor Navone  33:10  

as you mentioned, I am not a recruiter. So, you know, take everything I say with it with a grain of salt. But the first thing I want to focus on is that getting into Pixar doesn't mean being an animator necessarily I mean yeah animation is the biggest department there you know there is almost 150 of us. And, you know, maybe it's the, the part that gets the most attention because animations in the name of the studio, but there are a lot of other jobs at Pixar to be done as well you know there's many different departments, both in production and out of production, their support departments, you know, so whether you know you want to work in art or story or visual effects, or you know, camera and staging or editorial, you know, or if you're more on the computer side you want to be a technical director like working on shading or rendering there are so many opportunities at Pixar for all different types of skill sets. So there's a lot of different ways and. That said, you know, as you can imagine there's a lot of competition to get in and not a whole lot of turnover people tend to stay a long time so it's it's very challenging to get in!


On the animation side I can speak to more specifically, I feel like a lot of our new hires come from the intern program, some we have a summer animation internship that we run every summer. This summer, it's being run remotely of course because of the shelter in place which is unfortunate but it's better than nothing. So we tend to end up at the end of each internship, you know, asking a few of the interns to stay you know if there is a need for them and production you know they can come on as a Fix animator or crowd's animator, and kind of work their way up into a full fledged animator. So that's one pretty consistent path. Beyond that, you know, occasionally we're on the lookout for more experienced animators so animators who do have feature film experience at another studio, that's, you know, a longer route to getting into Pixar you know kind of paying your dues at other studios but that's another source that we do hire from, put something of yourself in there and show us who you are. That's the kind of stuff that's really exciting for us to see when we're going through demo reels and trying to decide who we might be bringing aboard next.


Ilse Zamarripa  35:29  

Now you and I have talked before about the tools and the techniques we use for for work. Could you share some of yours with the audience. Sure.


Victor Navone  35:39  

I'm not going to really talk about the tools we use at Pixar because it's all proprietary animation it's our Presto system, which is not available outside of Presto but it's amazing, I can tell you that. But you know what I want to talk about stuff that your viewers don't have access to. So when I'm not animating in Presto when I'm animating in Maya say for personal work or doing a teaching demo, because I teach a lot.


Ilse Zamarripa  36:02  

On a side note to make sure to take animation collaborative. That's where Victor Navone teaches as well as many other very talented animators that we're actually going to have on the worldspace so check it out, their quality is amazing. Okay. Sorry for the interruption.


Victor Navone  36:16  

I rely very heavily on the, the animBot software, which is a suite of animation tools created for Maya which is fantastic makes animating a lot more fun and easy in Maya, and I rely a lot on the, the website SyncSketch.com, which is great for doing 2d annotation or sketches over my own work over student work, it's free to use really user friendly, really powerful. So I use those two things extensively. Beyond specific tools that I use. I also have a lot of different workflows that I use I'm not strictly pose to pose or strictly layered or strictly, you know, stepped keys are strictly splines, I don't mix and match depending on what I think the shot needs or what's interesting for that time. And I think it's good for all animators to have, you know, a couple different workflows that they're going, that they can work with, just in case one workflow doesn't work out for you in a given situation, you can fall back on a different kind of workflow. Thank you so much for your time.


Ilse Zamarripa  37:24  

You are such a wonderful and talented person, keep going and keep sharing your expertise and your charisma. It was an honor to have you in the show today. Thank you so much, 


Victor Navone  37:29  

And thank you again it was a really fun. Thanks again for your kind words, it was a really fun experience for me, and hopefully your viewers got something useful out of it too. Thank you. Thanks for watching everybody


Ilse Zamarripa  37:47  

that was Victor Navone everyone. I want to give a big shout out to Bernhard Haux, who is doing an amazing job in SyncSketch, it's used all around the indusstry, I will leave you a link in the description down below if you want to check it out. Also don't forget that Trikingo is a site where you can download many different tools and tutorials if you are an animator. If you want to learn scripting. If you want to even learn how to make your own video game It doesn't matter if you're highly experienced, or you're new to the industry, there is content for all kinds of CG artists, you can see this tools being used over and over again in the pipelines of the most important students around the world, my subscribers and I'd get a 20% discount in any purchase. There's even free stuff to play around with. I will leave you guys a link in the description down below. Make sure to check it out. For a more detailed conversation with me and for exclusive content like asking questions, having Zoom meetings with me, getting personal animation tutorials and more to check out my Patreon, I will leave you a link in the description down below for each dollar I receive a percentage will serve to Rescue Stray dogs and Cats, and you will unlook new content every week, so please check it out. Help me, help the channel and become a VIP Worldspace. If you want to keep receiving this content, please make sure to subscribe, hit the notification bell. Like this video and let me know in the comments what you learned what you think, your opinion, anything you want to tell me you know I read every single one and answer every single one of them. So, thank you so much for watching, and keep making art, you, beautiful artists.


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