Pixar: 20 Years of Animation

NARRATOR:
 Take a good look at the images on these walls. They show you how Pixar created a monster. The film Monsters, Inc. revolves around the Scare Factory, where worker monsters collect children’s screams – the energy source for the city of Monstropolis. The champion scarer is Sullivan, or Sulley, a big furry blue-green guy with horns and purple spots. But how do you decide on that look when anything is possible? Ricky Nierva was the lead character designer on that film:

RICKY NIERVA
: When we developed the character of Sullivan, he was supposed to be the top scarer at Monsters, Incorporated. And then the story changed, and he was the worst scarer. Or he was the youngest of all these brothers that were scarers. Basically the design always comes out of the storytelling, and so when you see these images here, it's a great example of how much the story changes.

NARRATOR:
 Just before the end of this wall, at the bottom, there’s even a study for Sulley’s fur. The artists debated llama wool versus bear fur. In the end, 1000 individual hairs were drawn, then duplicated 2800 times – so there were 2.8 million animated hairs on Sulley’s body!


In the center of the blue wall is a drawing of six standing monsters. It shows how many people can be involved in a single work of Pixar art. The designer drew the character, the sculptor sculpted it, another designer took a photo of the sculpture, then an artist added color and detail.

RICKY NIERVA
: He had to have that huggable quality. But we had to make him a little bit scary when we needed to. We had to balance all these different elements with the character design.

NARRATOR:
 A crucial early step in the Pixar process is creating sculptures like the ones in the case behind you. They’re called maquettes, or simply sculpts. Sculpts show how well the drawings will translate into 3D in the computer. The sculpt nearest the blue wall was the very first one done in developing Sulley’s character.

RICKY NIERVA
: It's basically just a big head. It's got the two horns on the side, and like three fangs, and two little legs. We tried horns pointing up, horns pointing down, a tall skinny shape, frumpy shape, tentacle arms. And then we tried the tentacle legs. We thought that was going to be really cool to see in animation. But it just didn't pan out.

We were trying to push animation to try something completely new. And that's what we do in the art department.