Up

Last night I went to see Disney Pixar new film; Up, and I have to say that I thought it was a brilliant piece of animation. It had the whole group of us in fits of laughter and even reduced a few to tears!

The film itself had a very good story line that both adults and children will enjoy: " Carl Fredricken, a 78 year-old curmudgeonly balloon salesman, is not your average hero. When he ties thousands of balloons to his house and flies away to the wilds of South America, he finally fulfills his life long dream of adventure. But after discovering an 8-year-old stowaway named Russell, this unlikely duo soon find themselves on a hilarious journey in a lost world filled with danger and surprises."

After speaking a little more about the film today, I became interested in learning out more about the making of the film and the design process that the animators have to go through. I went on both the disney and pixar websites to gain some inside info! I discovered that in preparation for their assignment on 'Up' members of the creative team went on their own adventure to South America. Once there they fell in love with the scenery and were left facing the problem of how to design a place that looks 'otherwordly and yet still believable'. To do this the team took thousands of photographs and made many sketches. The images of the vegetation, etc that was captured during this research, can be seen throughout the film.

An area which was discussed online and I found very interesting was the character design:

I thought this was conveyed brilliantly, you could instantly tell what type of person each character was. This didn't necessarily apply to the human characters but the animals too.

The amazing attention to detail was something else that surprised me. I learnt online that one of the technicial directors calculated that it would take between 20 and 30 million balloons to actually lift Carl's house. The team used between 10,297 and 20,622 balloons for most of the floating scenes. The number varied from shot to shot 'depending on the angle, the distance, and the finetuning the size so that it feels interesting, believable and visually simple.'

Even though I knew that a lot of research and planning goes into making an animation I didn't realise that the details were so precise. This hard work has really paid off as the film is definately worth seeing!