Taste
Visualization for Pixar's Ratatouille
In
the Fall of 2006, I was contacted by Brad Bird to create a series of
animated vignettes for his movie Ratatouille. The concept was
to design and animate abstract representations of what the character
was tasting.
After
discussing ideas and concepts with Brad Bird, I created a series
of images to illustrate potential ideas of how the taste could
be visualized in an abstract way. These were reviewed by Brad and
shown to the music composer as inspiration
Once
we had agreed on a general direction for the visuals, a music score
was composed. The dialogue and music was mixed and I was provided
with these two soundtracks:
I
imported these files in Animo Sound Breakdown software
and wrote down all the musical cues on elaborate spreadsheets.
Drawing
-
Using
my spreadsheets
as guideline, I moved on to the next phase: Hand drawings
the animation.
Around
1400 drawings were created for the animation. Each one
was scanned, painted and composited using two softwares: Animo and Photoshop.
Compositing
and Digital Enhancements
Once
all the drawings were scanned, I started compositing everything in Animo
Director, adding blurs, shimering effects, and various digital
filters. Each of the animation clips were sent to Brad Bird for comments
and approval.
Final
Compositing
Once
the pieces were done and approved, they were rendered as a set of
Tiffs (with alpha channel) and sent to Pixar for final compositing
with the characters.
