The work of artists and designers for computer animations

Today on 27 January 2013, the MKG Hamburg invited to the opening of the exhibition 'Pixar - 25 Years Of Animation' (on show until 12 May; video by MKG below).

fig.: The invitation card to the opening of the exhibition 'Pixar' at the MKG Hamburg on 27 January 2013. The drawing (colorscript) of the running figures on the card is created by Lou Romano for the animation movie 'The Incredibles' (2004); digital drawing, (C) Disney.

More than 500 items such as drawings, paintings, sculptures from Pixar's archive (Pixar belongs today to Walt Disney) introduce into the development of movies like the Toy Story Trilogy. In 1986 co-founded by Steve Jobs (interview with Steve Jobs about how it started on CBS), the computer animated Pixar films are built from three main elements which are reflected by the curatorial concept of the exhibition: world, characters, and story. On Pixar's website, the members of the creative team speak about their work such as (artist-)designer Harley Jessup about 'World-Building' (he discusses the production of 'Monsters, Inc'), or sketch-artist Jay Shuster (trained in industrial design, studied product design) who explains in the video 'Tractors and Cows' his inspiration for the design of a tractor for 'Cars' by "looking deep into the eyes of a cow". The development of the story is a work in progress which begins with the storyboard and is continued by the story reel (which is a pre-version of the movie) and phases where the story becomes optimised; Pixar calls this process 'Plussing' after name creator Walt Disney who has started to use the word for denoting the work-style of 'writing' a story together with the team during the production of the animations.

At the MKG Hamburg, the Pixar drawings and painitings are presented as digital 3-D animations by artist Andrew Jimenez at the 'Artscape' installation with sound by designer Gary Rydstrom. With the 'Toy-Story-Zoetrope' (zoetrope is like a flip-book with pictures that run in a cylinder), Pixar introduces into the illusion of motion with 18 pictures which consist of 3-dimensional figures or 'maquettes' - only that Pixar's interpretation of the zoetrope principle works with a stroboscope.

Video: Zoetrope by Pixar and how it works. Pixar's Zoetrope is inspired by the 'Bouncing Totoro' at the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Japan.

Video for the exhibition 'Pixar - 25 Years of Animation' from 27 January until 12 May 2013 at the MKG Hamburg.