Insight to the making of Toy Story 4- The hyper-realistic animated movie of 2019

  Bibin       January 31, 2020

If you have seen Toy Story 4, you’ve probably noticed the attention to detail Pixar has given to different characters and environments in the movie such as the dust particles in an antique shop and the signs of ageing in the toys. All of these tiny details are rendered realistically in the big screen. Let’s see how Pixar bring this intricate world to life by going through the different processes they implemented.

Story

Like any other, the story comes first. While the writers draft the script, story artists work alongside them making preliminary sketches for each scene in the film. These sketches are called storyboards. It will give the Pixar team an idea on how each should go down. Editors then cut the storyboard together into a story reel. Which is basically a long detailed flipbook that reflects the pace of each sequence. The storyboard is edited with rudimentary sound effects, scratch soundtrack and temporary dialogue that’s been pre-recorded by the team members. It serves them as a rough draft for the movie allowing the filmmakers to get an idea on how the story will unfold and hone the sequences before having them animated. 

Character Design

Once the storyline is set, the art department and production designers get together to create concept art for the characters and their environments. Meanwhile, character artists will lay out how each toy will look like in the film. For this movie character design involved a lot of research into the toys themselves. How they were made, how they age and everything in between. The character design team found their villain on field trips to antique shops were they often spot vintage dolls lurking around. There the idea of ‘Gabby Gabby’ was born.  She is a talking doll from the 1950s, and she is designed to come off as very toy-like in a way that it might even give you the creeps at first. 

Modelling

This is were the characters takes form in a 3-dimensional space. Modelling artists take the basic shapes of the characters, sets and props and mould them into a 3D mesh. Then they refine these build until they are satisfied. To get an accurate size in comparison to the surroundings, they take photos of these toys interacting with real-world objects and checks those images for reference. 

Rigging 

The character model requires an extra step. They get rigged with a movable skeleton which has controls placed around the face, joints and the rest of the body. Like a really advanced digital puppet, animators will then be able to manipulate the characters movements using its unique set of controls making it act and show emotions precisely. But at this point, everything is kind of flat and have no surface features. That’s were shading comes in. 

Shading

Shading artists furnish the 3D models with natural textures, tints and colours similar to real life. Some of these work are done by shaders which is a set of computer programs that know how to simulate a range of materials like plastic, fabric, metal, wood, glass, hair or skin. Incredible Softwares proved useful for about 10000 items that filled the scenes in the antique shop. Shading team was able to save time by developing a language of three different ages for the many items in the store. They applied different degrees of textures to objects based on different visual language. But, most of the shading was done by hand. 

Voicing stage captures the actual dialogues done by real actors. The layout is the stage were characters placed in front of a virtual camera. Layout artist in an animated movie works as a camera team in any live-action movie. The layout helps artists to find the best composition for shots so that it tells a story the way it would in a real movie. 

Animation

It’s the animation team that gives life to the characters by giving them movements. This brings all the primary and secondary characters to life. Each character is composed of a thousand joints built into their skeleton. Every single day, the animation team comes to analyse the one or two seconds of the scene they put into motion. It takes more than 8 weeks to perfect a single shot. 

Rendering

This is when all the digital data that makes up the motion picture gets translated into actual frames of films, with 24 frames per second of the movie. At last, the final touches that give perfection to the shades, shadows and highlights are done. It is done by the effects artist who decides the amount of dust that should be present in each scene. In the end, sound mixing is done and the film is scored. 

You won’t believe, but ‘Toy Story 4’ took about 5 years to complete. If you find this article exciting share it with your best buddies. Contact us for any 3D modelling or animation services.