Main content
Pixar in a Box
Unit 2: Lesson 4
4. Visual languageIntroduction to visual language
Welcome to Visual Language.
Want to join the conversation?
- So does visual language just mean zooming in or focusing into an image which gives you a good picture of the movie ?(23 votes)
- Zooming in or focusing on an image is part of space, but the lessons show you how shape, motion, tone and color can also be used in an image to convey a particular feeling.(16 votes)
- Um.... The problem is that I'm not good at drawing... :(
Does that affect how my stories are told?(9 votes)- Anybody can draw, it's not like a born talent, it's a learned skill. The key is to draw everyday.(6 votes)
- When doing Visual Language can I use simple tools to present my drawings for example :Crayola pencil crayons,crayons and markers or do I need more expensive quality art tools to make my artwork more better?(5 votes)
- you don't need expensive tools, just focus on quality.
the best crayons are Crayola. sharpies are the best markers .(2 votes)
- Wow.. It's so cool how you can use "visual language" in almost any story! great job pixar!👍... Vote this up if you agree!(5 votes)
- I'm writing a book and I don't want to have drawings.
Is this a bad idea?(2 votes)- If you want to skip out on drawings, then it would be a good idea to put in descriptive language so that your readers can still "see" what you are telling. Brian Jacques "Redwall" series is a perfect example of this. The stories he told were told to blind children. He had to be able to make them "see" things they wouldn't originally be able to see. He did it very well.(5 votes)
- When you finish the video does anyone see the white circle for .000001 seconds?(3 votes)
- Yeah I saw that. Did you hear the beep too?(2 votes)
- What if art is not my forte?(0 votes)
- See my comments above, they might help. "Art" is one thing, drawing or sketching as a way to document what you perceive in the world is a very different category.(7 votes)
- pause at any time between- 0:00and try and tell me you don't wanna work at Pixar 0:04
*looks with utter adoration(2 votes) - 첫 번째 영상에 왜 삐 소리와 흰색 원이 있는 거죠?(2 votes)
- If i want to do 2d animation, then does it matter if i don't like math, or does math only have to do with 3d animation?(1 vote)
- Hi Redwall,
There are at least three different types of 2D animation. There's frame by frame animation, which is made by drawing each frame separately. There's a way to animate using code, but that requires a lot of math to do correctly. Lastly, there's animation software which is kinda like marionette puppetry.
Hope that answers your question.(2 votes)
Video transcript
(upbeat music) - Hi, I'm Dean Kelly and I'm
a story artist here at Pixar. You know that old saying, a picture's worth a thousand words? Well it's true. Using simple visual
cues, you can communicate all kinds of cool ideas
and different emotions. And because of this, a single
image can tell a whole story. (boing) Let's make this scene a simple drawing, like the storyboards we create at Pixar. The first thing you'll notice is that the bigger something is in the frame the more important it is. I'm clearly the most
important thing in this frame. Choosing to put a
character in a large space, where they appear small, is one way to communicate how vulnerable they are, or how big their world is. A low angle can make me
seem commanding or menacing. I now seem a little unbalanced. Everything you see on screen is a choice. And all of it can help you tell stories. This is development art from Ratatouille. This single image clearly illustrates how important shape and
framing are to storytelling. The artist who drew this chose everything in the frame,
including the framing. Look at Remy; he's a tiny rat, but in this frame and
from this perspective, he's the same size as the chefs. See how we separate from the
kitchen with these panes. He's literally being kept from his dreams of being a chef, with these horizontal and vertical
lines boxing him in. But Remy seems equal to the chefs, which is an important story point. Shape also helps us tell stories. Take these three main characters
from Monsters University. The artist who designed
Mike, Sully and Hardscrabble show shapes that amplified
and reflected their character. Mike is essentially a ball. He's just not threatening or scary. Sully's a big rectangle; he's
sturdy and he's tough to move. You believe he can be a scarer. Hardscrabble's a bunch of triangles. She's pointy and threatening. It helps her to be
intimidating, in the film. (screeching) (rumbling) As a visual storyteller, you have a chance to guide your viewers
in all sorts of ways. Color can guide the eye. Value, or how dark or light something is, can make it stand out from
everything else in an image. In the movies size and position
in the frame also matter. They have an effect on how we feel about a character or a moment. In the Incredibles script, this scene was just two people arguing,
but the story artist used Helen's stretching abilities and Helen becomes the
powerful one in this moment, just by being larger
than Bob by stretching. But usually an artist will make a character closer
and bigger in frame. In this storyboard I drew
for Monsters University, you can see how I made
Mike dominate the frame by putting him in the
foreground, close to camera. Mike is coming into his
own as a scare coach. And I made him the biggest thing in frame, because he's the strongest character in this moment; stronger than Sully. We can communicate so many things using only visual language. In these next lessons you get to explore these ideas and use them to
help tell your own stories.