Research and Development for Animation and Visual Effects: Part B. Research into the development of a film of my choice.

Research into the development of ‘Finding Nemo’ (2003)

Through my research I learnt that at Pixar, films generally take approximately five years to produce and go through four specific stages; development, preproduction, the making of the film and post production.

The inspiration for this film came to Andrew Stanton, co-writer and co-director of ‘A Bug’s Life’ through a series of events in his own life. He visited Marine World in 1992, which made him think about making an undersea world using CGI. He also enjoyed trips to the dentist because there was a fish tank in the office. It was the relationship with his son that was the final piece of inspiration. Stanton then pitched his idea to his coworker and mentor John Lasseter, an animator film director and Chief Creative Officer at Pixar. Lasseter said he knew right away when Stanton mentioned the words ‘fish’ and ‘underwater’ that it was going to be great.

In “The Making of ‘Finding Nemo’”, Lasseter said ‘I always believe in research. No matter what the subject matter is, you cannot do enough research because so much believability will come out from what’s really there’. During the development stage, the directors, art directors, character designers and others went on numerous field trips to aquariums, museums and diving stints. Lasetter urged the production team to become certified scuba divers as he believed that they all had to experience the under water word first hand. Ralph Eggleston, production designer explained how one of the biggest decisions they had to make was how much they were to caricature reality. Andrew explained to him that he didn’t want to ‘overly anthropomorphize the characters’. They understood if they put realistic fish in the film, the characters wouldn’t seem appealing, as fish are slimy and scaly. It was imperative the audience would love the characters. Pixar had study sessions in front of a 25-gallon fish tank and a series of lectures from an ichthyologist who was in the branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish. They decided making the fish luminous made them appear more attractive. They resulted in having three types of fish; gummy, velvety and metallic. The main protagonists were Marlin and Nemo who were ‘gummy’ which had a density and warmth to it. Using backlighting and rim lights, they took the focus from their scaly skin. The character Dory, Marlin’s companion, was ‘velvety’ because of the soft texture. The schools of fish were the metallic group and were the typical scaly fish.

Preproduction began in 1997. Andrew wrote the screenplay himself and had a complete screenplay before beginning the story boarding process, which normally didn’t happen. Therefore they assumed the process was going to be more ‘smooth sailing’. However, they realized in reality, when they put the screenplay in storyboard form, a lot of aspects come to light that aren’t as clear as when you read from a printed page. Stanton said that a good portion of the rewrite process doesn’t come from the screenwriter alone but from the storyboarding department. Stanton sat in with the department for around two years. The process was malleable, messy, frustrating and glorious. Bob Patterson, the co-writer said that ‘When it got dark and we didn’t know what to do, Andrew Stanson and I would jump in a car and drive to Los Angeles’. They would drive for around six hours discussing ideas without distractions.

By the end, there were 43,536 storyboards drawn. The editors spent years cutting the storyboards together, honing the story reel, trying to create the best entertaining template for the film. The next step in production was to establish a range of underwater colours to track the characters throughout the film. In the film, the reef is a clear and very light greenish turquoise colour. As the film progresses, it becomes a dark turquoise, then black and blue. When it gets to Sydney harbor, it develops into a greenish murky colour. They then needed to make the fish emote and so they studied how how dogs emote. The subtle movements of a dog’s eyebrows were enough to emote sadness and happiness. They then put enough eyebrow mass in the character designs to capture the nuances of emotion in facial articulation. The hand drawn picture below represents the character's various emotions.

Dylan Brown, supervising animator explained how they had to study the movements of fish. He said underwater, fish travel three feet in the blink of an eye. They watched a video of fish’ movements and slowed it down to figure it out. Alan Barillaro thought the process was fun and challenging to come up with a range of how the characters would communicate and gesture. Due to there being no gravity underwater, they realized when a character made a gesture, they would drift a little. The next step was creating clay models of the characters. They would be remodeled until they were perfect. Using the clay models as a reference, the 3D modelers would produce the characters on a computer. Robin Cooper, art director and responsible for shading scan dead fish to find out how they are responsive to light and further understand their skin texture.

During the voice acting process of bringing the characters to life, the voice actors must give a perfect performance to make the characters more believable. I learnt that for one of the emotional scenes, the voice actor for Dory shut himself in a room with pictures of people and things in his life that were gone. He said it was a depressing day but it put him in the moment to get appropriate dialogue for the scene.

One of the primary reasons as to why this film was a huge success was due to the level of research and development that was put into the film. From researching the movements of eyebrows and creating emotion in the characters to studying the lighting under the sea and the transitioning colours throughout ocean. Andrew Stanson was correct in saying that believability is enhanced when extensive research is done.

The images below show the progression of development.