“Unraveling Purl: Continuing Pixar’s Experimental Story Initiative”
Conference:
Type:
Entry Number: 35
Title:
- Unraveling Purl: Continuing Pixar’s Experimental Story Initiative
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
Last year, SIGGRAPH ’17 featured Smash and Grab: Off the Rails Filmmaking at Pixar [Serritella et al. 2017], kicking off the results of a new, experimental storytelling initiative at Pixar Animation Studios. This initiative enables new creative voices and explores new storytelling techniques, pipelines, and workflows in production. The program’s second short film, Purl, directed by Kristen Lester, continues to raise the bar for the program, and creates another example of what’s possible when filmmakers are granted this type of creative freedom within a fully functioning studio. Purl is an eight minute short film that explores the use of “digital backlot” management, an evolution of Smash and Grab’s motion capture application, shareable animation libraries, our real-time shading software “Flow,” and production practices that allow a busy feature animation studio to continue telling even more stories. This talk looks at the team’s process in creating Purl, as well as the impact of maintaining the initiative at Pixar.
References:
Vincent Serritella, David Lally, Brian Larsen, Farhez Rayani, Jason Kim, and Matthew Silas. 2017. Smash and Grab: Off the Rails Filmmaking at Pixar. Proceedings of SIGGRAPH ’17 Talks, Los Angeles, CA, USA, July 30 – August 03, 2017 (Aug. 2017), 2.
