Overview of Pixar in a box

welcome to Pixar in a box a collaboration between Pixar Animation Studios and the Khan Academy I'm Fran I work here on the technical side of things and I'm Alex I work here on the art and storage side of things Pixar in a box will introduce you to some of the fundamental skills we used to make our movies there's examples of real-life film challenges that show how an artist's idea can create a tidal wave of technical creativity and how technical advances can inspire artists to think of new ideas to bring to the screen you'll meet artists scientists animators coders sculptors all kinds of different people and a thing is most of them use skills you may already be learning in school but here in the box you can see how we use those skills to make cool stuff before you dive into these lessons you should see how it all fits together inside Pixar the real Pixar come on check it out Pixar on any given day we're working on various stages of many films but it all begins with an idea for example Toy Story started with the notion that when kids leave the room their toys come to life and honestly I was convinced that my toys did that our films start in story along with the director and the writer we figure out what happens using simple drawings it's kind of like a comic book exactly and while we're drawing production designers and their teams start designing the world and the characters while they're painting and drawing and sculpting our storyboards go to editorial where they string together all the drawings that we've created we time them out at music dialogue and sound effects and as these shots go through each stage and production will update this scene over and over again and this is where the science and the math come in what's next pipeline we're ready to start making the film you'll see in the theater and this happens in a particular order it's time for our technical artists to figure out how to create the movie in the computer I've been here for nine years and I still have no idea how you guys turn our drawings into the finished film to be honest something stumped us on every movie Hey Galen hey you've been here since Toy Story what's been hard on each film well Toy Story everything here let me show you on Toy Story we were inventing the entire process from scratch monsters incorporated fur and clothing on cars reflective metal surfaces on every new film there's a new technical challenge on inside out we had a deal with a character made of glowing particles and it took lots of people to figure out just that one thing whoa what is she made of her shape will be made of points and particles of light she was tough this is the 17th version and the characters have to move so someone has to add controls to the model like a puppet right yes except instead of strings our animators will use a computer program to move the characters in a digital world next in the pipeline that's so for cars too you've built the entire city of London we need a huge chunk of the city because mater and MacLean speed through it so we figured out how to grow buildings with enough variation for them to look real and we move through that set with our virtual cameras next up animation I dunno what the animators do they bring the characters to life you see how she's moving but her clothes and hair are missing adding and moving those elements it's gonna be someone else's job further down the pipeline and by somebody else I mean me and about 20 other simulation technical artists where are you getting all these shirts we have to build everything you see including the textures and surfaces which help make the world and characters believable next up lighting ironically it's really dark in the lighting department so when you start there are no lights no any source of light is something we have to add into the scene in this shot alone there are 230 lights last stop the render farm a film is really a series of images or frames there's 24 of them every second this is where we make the frames everything comes together here all the art math and science a single frame can take more than 24 hours to render and that's just one frame and that's assuming we don't run into any snags [Music] Wow it's incredible seeing final shots and now that I know how they're made even cooler so that's the tour the next step is to jump back into the box and choose a lesson what do you want to try well this one I'm building robots using combinatoric s-- that looks pretty cool what about the one I'm petting staging yeah are the one on animating The Incredibles awesome always wanted to animate