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.

All atwork on this page is Copyright ©2007 Pixar/Disney


Conceptual Artwork

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


Soundtracks Provided by Pixar

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:

Remy's Visualization
4mb wav. file
Emile's Visualization
11mb wav. file

I imported these files in Animo Sound Breakdown software and wrote down all the musical cues on elaborate spreadsheets.


Drawing
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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.

Remy's Visualization
Cheese
Strawberry
Combined Flavors
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Emile's Visualization
Not Quite
Got it!

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.

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