Bradford Animation Festival - continued -

Pixar’s Paul Mendoza

I’ll talk about what he said in the event, he joined Pixar’s when he was 18 when he was still in the animation school, at the time it was still 2D animation what they’ve learnt and 3D isn’t much of a hit yet, he then found a trial job at Pixar’s working for a week whilst still in school. After he decided to work part time there along with his studies in school, but then it became a nightmare for him because there were so much work load for school and work and he was working like 20 hours a day. He then said that he’ll work at Pixars full time as John said that they will teach everything there including all the 3D stuff.

His first work was on “A Bug’s Life”, one thing that he mentioned that surprised me is that at the time, there was no IK solvers on the 3D software they use so they would have to animate and tweak each motion frame by frame. Pixars built their own 3D engine/software to make their films.

Pixars film were based on a mature theme that not only attracts children but adults as well. In “Finding Nemo” the theme was based on father and son which was a rare concept in filming industry. In their film, they want to be realistic so that people can relate to themselves not in a visual way but in a more emotional way.

Ratatouille was another film he worked on, which was one of my favourite Pixars film, I wanted to watch it again after he talked about it, he showed us some of the storyboards that he created for the film.

Well the talk meant quite a lot to me, now I know a little bit more about life in animation, it’s definitely what I want to do, working for a big company would be a dream come true even if I have to work 20 hours a day! It has got me motivated more and gave me a better idea of what I want to do in the future, there’s a lot of research and planning needed to be done at the start any many test and trials through out the career, “can’t do” is not an option!