BY MOLLY PETRILLAIt’s February 2. Oscar Night. On stage beside Paul Rudd, Melissa Mc. Carthy leans into the microphone: “Here are the nominees for the Best Animated Feature Film.”The screen behind Rudd and Mc. Carthy awakens. Bagpipes whine as a red- haired girl arches her bow and arrow. The digital crowd around her cheers as she shoots the arrow straight toward the camera and, in a close- up, whips her ample hair to the side, fiery curls bouncing and swaying. Mc. Carthy names the title and directors of each. Mc. Carthy peers over his shoulder and emits a small gasp.
Penn offers degree programs that allow students to obtain degrees with coursework from at least. Digital Media Design Program.Individuals searching for Salary and Career Info for a Digital Media Designer. Salary and Career Info for a Digital. Online Multimedia Design Degree Program. This time the red- haired girl—Brave’s main character, Merida—is clinging to a steep boulder, her wild hair and green dress flapping in the wind. Despite Mc. Carthy’s gasp, there’s nothing shocking about the fact that yet another film from Pixar Animation Studios, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, has won an award. In fact, this is the seventh time a Pixar movie has won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature since the award was created in 2. From the technology that enables Merida’s dress to flutter and scrunch, to the large crowd standing behind her, to that springy red hair, alumni had a hand in each moment of Oscar footage. Professor of Computer and Information Science Norman Badler, director and faculty advisor for Penn’s undergraduate Digital Media Design program (and an old friend of Pixar co- founder Ed Catmull), estimates that Penn has been sending one or two graduating students a year to the revered animation studio. They join still more alumni who have already been working there for years—some since the mid- 2. The relationship between Penn and Pixar is very strong and we’re very thankful for it,” Badler says. He’d been striding through the company’s central outdoor area, as he did every day, when a large mass caught his eye. Glancing up, he saw an enormous hot- air balloon. There was a full- size sofa attached to it and, strapped to that sofa, a newscaster was midway through a broadcast about the Pixar film Up. The University of California, Berkeley marching band once showed up and played their way through the company’s halls. Another day a petting zoo appeared outside. I saw Shaq today!’” Raja says. Baraff recently went to a meeting in which an employee from each in- the- works film stood up to discuss its status. Actor John Goodman—the voice of Sullivan in Monsters, Inc.—“just appeared out of nowhere,” Baraff says, to offer an update on the sequel, Monsters University. Oscars don’t win themselves, nor do animated movies gross billions of dollars without help from a vast team of artists, storytellers, and technicians. One of those technicians, Ana Lacaze Jordan EE’9. FA’9. 7, jokes with her husband about tracking their lives by the Pixar films they’ve worked on. They’ve both been with the company since 1. We figure out if something is shiny, if it’s opaque, if it’s wrinkled, if it’s transparent, if it glows, if it’s waxy.” In the 2. Up, Jordan shaded the main character, Carl, whose skin transforms from pale and sickly at the beginning to a youthful tan by the end. She knows the transition is so subtle that audience members may not even notice it, but then again, “if the audience doesn’t notice . In Cars 2, she shaded several of the film’s vehicular characters, revealing their past lives through their rust patterns. She sat at her computer every day for several years, surrounded by reference photos: East Coast rust, West Coast rust, upper- facing rust, rust from snow, rust from seawater. What is the pattern it leaves? Which places in a car would you see that?”It’s immensely detailed work, but “I tend to be attracted by details,” Jordan says. There may be shades of that in the Pixar art department, but a technical director’s job relies on advanced technology, trading in colored pencils for powerful computers. A technical director ideally has “a strong aesthetic vision but also knows the fundamental principles of computer graphics and how to do programming,” Raja says. She uses a physics- based computer simulation program to create and control the way a character’s hair or clothes move. Once a director sees the default simulation, he’ll often decide that things should look a little different and Raja will summon her computer science expertise to start “playing with the parameters,” making a hair toss last longer or a patch of fur stand up straighter. As a technical director who helped animate hair and fur for Brave and Monsters University, Raja says her work feels important. At times, it’s almost felt too important.“In the beginning, I got really stressed out because I knew if I made a mistake and no one caught it, it would be there for millions of people to see and then it would live on forever in the DVD,” she says. I’m okay with the pressure now.”In the middle of Pixar’s sprawling campus in Emeryville, California, a 4. For anyone who’s seen a Pixar film, the tribute is obvious. The lamp appears at the beginning of each movie, bouncing on a ball that suddenly bursts, then turning its lamp- shaded “head” to look sheepishly into the camera. But even before that, the lamp starred in the company’s first animation, Luxo Jr.—a two- minute short from 1. The baby Luxo lamp is iconic at this point—enough of a mascot for Pixar to justify the towering replica—and the inspiration behind it has a Penn connection. John Lasseter, now the company’s chief creative officer, came up with the idea one day thanks to an alumnus- employee and his visiting baby. Price explains in The Pixar Touch: “. A baby’s head was huge compared with the rest of its body, Lasseter realized. It struck Lasseter’s funny bone and he began to wonder what a young lamp would look like. He fiddled with the dimensions of all the parts of his Luxo model . He arrived in 1. 98. Buzz Lightyear flew or Nemo swam, and even before the group was called Pixar. Back then, it was the Computer Graphics Division at Lucasfilm, Star Wars creator George Lucas’s production studio. When Apple co- founder Steve Jobs bought the Lucasfilm offshoot in 1. Porter became one of Pixar’s first 4. Though he was unavailable for this article, in an interview with The Exeter Bulletin, Porter revealed that a Penn professor unintentionally guided him away from further studies in math, which he majored in at Penn, and into the world of technology. He went on to study computer science at Stanford before landing at Lucasfilm. Along with Catmull and several of his Pixar peers, Porter won the Scientific and Engineering Achievement Academy Award in 1. Render. Man software. By then, Render. Man had helped filmmakers create computer- generated visual effects for Jurassic Park, Free Willy, The Abyss, and Batman Returns. When Pixar released its first feature- length film in 1. Porter’s name appeared in the credits. He had supervised Toy Story’s shading and, using Render. Man, also its visual effects. She had been hired to oversee production of the Toy Story Activity Center—“a CD- ROM with a bunch of computer games based on the Toy Story world,” she says. It’s funny to talk about.”Once the new game disc was in kids’ computers, Jobs—then president and CEO of Pixar—“decreed that it didn’t make sense for us to do that kind of game development at Pixar,” Grindle says. She moved over to managing the company’s films, overseeing production for A Bug’s Life,The Incredibles, Monsters, Inc., and Ratatouille. More recently, she associate produced Toy Story 3 and Monsters University, which opened in theaters in June. Grindle recalls “just inventing everything as we went along” during the mid- 1. Pixar. There were only about 1. You wanted to be sure you always said the right thing to him and surprised him—that you were honest and creative.”She also remembers the champagne. It flowed frequently when Grindle first came to Pixar because there were so many milestones to celebrate: Toy Story’s theatrical release, then its glowing reviews, then its $1. The company now leads the animated- film market with 3. Academy Awards and more than $7. As Grindle sees it: “It’s been an amazing ride—an amazing 1. By 1. 99. 8, Grindle, Porter, and Jordan were each immersed in their roles at Pixar and the company was beginning work on its next film, Monsters, Inc. The movie presented new technical challenges, including a big blue- and- purple monster covered in soft, hair- like fur. The fur had to blow in the wind and stand on end. It had to get drenched and be shaken dry. It had to look real. After graduating from Penn, David Baraff had gotten a Ph. D from Cornell and joined the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University as a professor of robotics. He’d been working on hair and fabric simulation technology for several years, co- founding a company called Physical Effects, Inc. It was his fellow alumnus, Tom Porter, who sought Baraff out for Pixar. The company soon hired him to research and develop cloth and hair simulation technology for its newest film. Back then, “the challenge was simply to make anything work,” Baraff recalls. Along the way, he created the first simulated garment to appear in a feature- length movie—a shirt for the toddler character, Boo—and helped bring monster Sullivan’s fluffy blue mane to life. Since Monsters, Baraff has continued to develop and refine the technology that clothes Pixar characters and that lets their hair—or fur—move freely. He fixes things within an hour, easy. He’s like the mastermind, always fixing things or creating new tools or giving demos for the tools he created.”Just as Porter had a decade earlier, Baraff won the Scientific and Engineering Academy Award in 2. But while Porter and Baraff both held prominent, even award- winning positions at Pixar, for years they were among only a handful of employees with Penn degrees. That’s recently started to change. Of the current alumni- employees at Pixar, more than half graduated after 2. A number of recent grads and current students have interned there, including Karl Li W’1. Joseph Tong EAS’1. Zia Zhu EAS’1. 4 this past summer.
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