3-D Animation in Movies

The exciting initial beginning of 3-D animation in movies basically started with Tron in 1982 and in the same year, Star Trek II where 3-D animation was used in fractal landscapes. Pixar then introduced the first 100% 3-D animation when they released Adventures of Andre and Wally in 1984. The Dire Straits music video in 1985 was the first of its kind in full 3-D animation and two years later Tin Toy won an Oscar as the best animated short using realistic human form. Several other 3-D animations was subsequently released over the next few years, introducing animated organic elements, convincing animated mouths with synchronised speech and naturally Jurassic Park in 1994 with its 3-D animated dinosaurs. The big hit however was Toy Story in 1995 and the 3-D industry was literally started with its release. Pixar, which released it, soon had competition from Pacific Data Images when they released Homer and subsequently their second film Antz made them Pixar's greatest competitor. Like in all industries everybody else wanted part of the 3-D animation action and from 2006, 13 other animations were released in the same year, all from different companies in the film industry. The first step was from Disney to buy out Pixar after the semi-failed 3-D Chicken Little from Disney made them realize that they indeed need Pixar for animation. Great techniques were incorporated by everybody, but some techniques failed miserably, resulting from extremely good animations to the extremely awful versions. Pixar remains one of the leading 3-D animators in the movie industry and follow the guidelines in producing a new 3-D animation in such a way that it is reminiscent of sales pitches. • Pixar employees will pitch their idea to the development team and they will try to see the possibilities in it and the believability of the idea. • Writing of a Text Treatment which in reality is just a short document which summarizes the main idea presented, finding a balance between open possibilities and solid ideas to be filled in by storyboard artists. • The storyboard artists each receive script pages and draw a hand-drawn comic book version of their interpretation of the movie. • Voice pitching and reel making will start and is essential in validating the sequence of the pages of storytelling and actors will pitch various versions of voices and emotions to get the perfect pitch. • The art department use their creativity to create inspirational art to illustrate the characters and their world. Impressionistic pastel illustrations are used in emphasizing light in scenes, the designing of sets, props and visual looks. • Characters, props and sets are articulated and sculpted either by hand and scanned three-dimensionally or directly modelled into the computer in 3-D. Different "avars" are used by the animator to make characters move and one character can have more than a hundred avars in the face alone. • Next the sets are built in 3-D to realize the vision for the environment in creating a believable world. • The story is now translated into three-dimensional scenes and crew choreograph characters using a virtual camera in capturing emotions and story points of each scene. • Finally the shot is animated neither by painting or drawing as it is traditionally done as the characters, layout, props, sound and dialog is already set up, Pixar animation software is now used to choreograph movements and facial expressions. • Finally shading and lighting are added and data rendered, which can take up to ninety hours per frame and a little as six hours.