Up & up

This week here in the UK sees the release of Pixar's 10th feature film UP.
Reviews, as with the other 9 of their films are already glowing with praise. In Hollywood terms Pixar is untouchable, no other studio has had 10 consecutive hit movies from its inception. So far (and long may this continue) they haven't made a dud yet. Only 2006's Cars slightly underperformed, but even that grossed $462 million worldwide. Their most popular film to date has been Finding Nemo which grossed $866 millon. This explains why all their trailers begin with 'From the people that brought you Finding Nemo'.

It is often said that the reason they get it right every time is because their formula is simply that of telling captivating stories. Chief Creative Officer John Lasseter comes from a traditional animation background (he started his career as an animator for Disney) and although he was one of the pioneers of computer animation it's not what drives his approach. Pixar produces cutting-edge CGI but it's never for the sake of technical prowess, it only ever serves to enrich the story telling. This is something that rival studio Dreamworks could learn from.

This cartoon perfectly sums up my feelings toward Dreamworks(click to enlarge):


From a brand perspective Pixar are now in a very enviable place. They were originally backed by Steve Jobs of apple in the early days, he is still the majority shareholder. In 2006 Pixar was bought by Disney for $7.4 billon since their traditional animated output was failing badly. Jobs is now Disney's largest individual shareholder with 7%.
Since the buyout, John Lasseter has been made chief creative officer of Disney in general and Principal creative advisor for Disney Imagineering, this means that essentially he is now the creative director for all of Disney's output, including things like their themeparks, so we can expect all of this to improve greatly over the next few years.

After laying to rest their traditional 2D animation output in 2004 with Home on the Range, Disney is now reviving this due to Lasseter's new role. Maybe his enthusiasm comes from his heritage in hand drawn animation. This Christmas Disney will release a new 2D animation called The Princess Frog.

I think this proves what Pixar have known all along, people want great storytelling, it's not about the medium it's only about the communication. We'll see in a few months how the public responds to the return to the 2D approach, after the general trend for releasing movies animated in 3D, with 3D glasses it might be a welcome change of pace.

If anyone can oversee the change back it's Lasseter, as well as being a leading light in computer animation he is also great friends with the 'Japanese Disney' Hayao Miyazaki and has producing credits on several of the english language releases of his films such as Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle.

One of my favourite things about Pixar films is their attention to detail. I suppose when you work on one project for 3 or 4 years you have the time to add nice touches, in fact it probably maintains your interest in the project.

Here's a great article about all the hidden references in Pixar films:

http://jimhillmedia.com/blogs/jim_hill/archive/2007/12/09/a-special-where-s-wall-e-edition-of-why-for.aspx##

The Toyota Pizza Planet delivery van from Toy Story apparently appears in every subsequent Pixar film.

Given that Pixar productions overlap in their timelines, it is also possible for them to make hidden 'forward references' to future movies. Such as the boy in the waiting room in Finding Nemo reading an Incredibles comic book:


All of which brings us to the people and the culture of the company. It's widely known that they have slightly unconventional offices. Animators are encouraged to create their own space in which to work, feathering their nests with anything and eveything that inspires them, so they become immersed in their work:


In fact I noticed that even their offices' lobby has been the inspiration for the set of Monsters Inc. Notice the similarities?


Some of the many artists, animators and designers have blogs about their work and you can read interviews with Pixar artists here:
http://www.pixar.com/artistscorner/index.html

It's obvious that Pixar care a lot about their output, their people and the stories they tell. I'm just glad that this has lead to the success it deserves, hopefully their approach will be good inspiration for the correct way to run a whole range of creative companies.

I'll end this post with Pixar production designer Lou Romano's website. His colour treatments for UP are wonderful, and a great reminder of the many artists behind the scenes that contribute to a movie's look and feel:
http://louromano.blogspot.com/
(the first image in this post is by him too)

All LIFE is here

Google has made every page of every issue of LIFE magazine (from mid 1930s to 1970s) available online in their Google books.

Great to read through, not just for the photography and articles but all the old adverts are fascinating

http://books.google.com/books?id=N0EEAAAAMBAJ&source=gbs_all_issues_r&cad=2

Another Rand logo bites the dust

The Yale University Press has, this week, updated their identity. Gone is Paul Rand's quirky asymmetrical slab-serif roundel and in its place is a simple piece of type set in Matthew Carter's Yale Typeface.

This move has been seen by some designers as sacrilege, because one should never redesign one of Rand's designs. Indeed the replacement has none of the charm or quirkiness of the original but I can see the strategy behind the change.

Before, while they shared the name Yale, there was still some ambiguity as to whether they were indeed related, or to how related their content was.

In general I think consistency is a useful thing, but in this case it's a shame to lose Rand's design since he taught at Yale himself for 30 years. Strategic alignment is one thing but let's hope we don't lose our sense of history and individuality completely.


[Article on Yale Daily News site]

Charging brands for your time as a customer

Paul McCrudden, from my old employer Imagination, has started to invoice brands that he has interacted with for his time as a customer. A really interesting idea, the concept that we as regular, long term customers are of great value.
He has received payment from the the founder of Pret A Manger already for £62.
Read the full article on Paul's blog:
http://www.paulmccrudden.com/sixweeks.htm

Central Perk opens in London

To celebrate 15 years since Friends started (and presumably so sell some related merchandise/dvds) Warner Brothers have set up a replica of the Central Perk coffee shop from the show. It opens today and sells real coffee, located at 67, Broadwick Street at the end of Carnaby Street, it's an interesting promotional device, to deliver a tangible experience from something that we normally only see as an image on our tv sets. Sure to be a hit with 20/30 somethings everywhere, even if Friends has now become a round-the-clock staple of digital tv, once described quite accurately by someone as 'televisual mashed potato' – bland, but comforting and reliable.

Cadbury's Fairtrade campaign

I've noticed a recent and quite drastic change in Cadbury's advertising. A departure from the more recent abstract creatives (the drumming gorilla etc.). They have been acredited with the Fairtrade mark on the Dairy Milk bars. This is a big deal since Fairtrade used to be a niche concern, but this move by Cadbury's brings it to the most mainstream of mainstream chocolate brands, and pushes them above other brands like Mars and the ethically dubious Nestlé.

What's interesting is the ad campaign they are running, at first I thought it was an atempt to look 'ethical' and ethnic but after a tiny amount of reseach I discovered that it is in fact part of a larger campaign which involves Ghana. The poster features a mural like many that appear on walls all over Ghana. The mural in the ad is painted by a Ghanaian artist who comes from a family of cocoa farmers. They were painted for real on walls in Koforidua.


I'm intrigued to see where the campaign goes and how it is received but I'm impressed that as a brand Cadbury's are pushing the norms of a sector that is so often just about slow-motion shots of melting chocolate.

The campaign also includes the release of a single as well:


more info here:
http://cadburydairymilk.typepad.com/

Flash on the Beach 2009

On Wednesday 23d September I attended 'Flash on the Beach' which was held in Brighton at the lovely Dome Theatre. It's an annual 3-day conference of Flash developers and designers. My day there was incredibly inspiring. Covering subjects as diverse as visualising patterns of prime numbers to audience motion tracking and generative art.


First up I saw Mario Klingemann talking about his love of maths and geometry, showing a variety of ways of visualising complex patterns, including ways of finding patterns in prime numbers by ordering them in different arrays.
He also showed an ingenius experiement to use the 140 characters of Twitter to embed images, creating a flash program that compresses and interprets an image to condense it down to the correct number of bytes to fit the character allowance.
See here his 'Mona Tweeta': http://www.flickr.com/photos/quasimondo/3518306770/
http://www.quasimondo.com/

Other notable speakers were Andre Michelle for his incredible audio generation and experimentation lab.andre-michelle.com

And Jared Ficklin for his experiemental approach to visualising sound, using smoke machines and flames, he was like the very best kind of science teachers. He works for Frog Design http://www.frogdesign.com/


Closing out the day was self-proclaimed 'rock star' of design Joshua Davis. My impression of Davis' work had always been that it was a bit 'samey' he approached each project with the same generative method: he writes some parameters of his design in Actionscript, runs the program and curates the output. However seeing him present a range of his work, I realised there is much more to his process than this, such as work with other artists and social interaction projects, what really came across was his endless and unrelenting energy and passion for all things visual. Yes, his work is essentially illustration and I struggle to truly class the results as graphic design but the process itself is almost more interesting that the final artworks and that is why he continues to be of interest.
http://www.joshuadavis.com/