Posts with tag Film Industry

“Life is more than shopping!”. We zick-zack the streets of Bangalore in a rickshaw to go back to the hotel and try, like a number of times today, to explain to the driver that we are not interested in going shopping. Every driver knows where the best shopping is, something usually coinciding with where they have friends, and they try to drive us there. Business is made in every corner in this around 10 million-people city. The Silicon Valley of India, as many call it, is full of contradictions.

“One billion people have two billion opinions!”, they tell us at Suchitra Cinema and Cultural Academy. “it’s not possible to agree”, they say with a laugh, “There are contradictions everywhere. Just look outside”. Suchitra Cinema and Cultural Academy run a filmfestival with films from all over the world, show around 100 screenings a year, have filmpolitical discussions, workshops and, together with this, teach languages.

The film industry in India is, as they put it, a “Masala industry”. The large Bollywood productions has taken over, which makes it hard for smaller films to get distributed and recognised as an important part of the industry. Together with a lack of strong film policy and also of theoretical framework, analysis and film critics, the alternative filmmaking struggle with difficulties. A start would be to arrange training and education that is not only very practical as today, but also teaches a theoretical framework to give coming filmmakers, producers and editors tools for analysis and context.

We are introduced to the three ways of cooporation you need: 1) internal cooperation within your organisation, 2) corporate and public cooperation (you will need to balance between both these, specifically in the India context), and 3) cooperation on a local and international level.

For the movie Finding Nemo, 43.536 storyboards were presented during the three year period it took to make the film. The full movie was screened five times for an invited audience until the result was satisfying for the team. At Pixar Animation Studios they are constantly creatively challenged. The storyboarding process is all about building an idea, pitch it for the creative team, get critique and re-do it. When screening the films, the interaction is direct. Critique is not about being polite, but say what you think. Details are important. An idea is finished when they feel a hundred percent sure that the result is exactly what they want. Intuition is a driving force. In the book The art of Wall-E Andrew Stanton, director and writer , describes the process: “If you challenge yourself with each artistic endeavor, always aiming beyond your comfort zone, you invariably become a student of your own work…”. On the team directors, artists, sculptors, actors, writers, designers, editors and animators work in collaboration: drawings are done by several people and a story is very much a product built with team-work.“The atmosphere at Pixar is casual. But deadly serious when it comes to quality”.

Eric Pearson, Post Production Manager, meet us in the lobby. Two things strikes you when stepping in through the doors at Pixar. The lobby is a very large open space at the center of the building. It’s planned as the meetingplace for both visitors and the employees. It’s a place where you eat lunch, meet over a cup of coffee in the lounge sofas or just run into each other as you move around between the film theatre, the second floor, coffee and drinks, and the reception. The second thing is how quickly they put up exhibitions of the work behind the films. Wall-E, the newest film, just opened at the film theatres in US. Walking at Pixar, everything is already exposed in the exhibition: example of storyboards, sculptors, products, sketches and small stories of how the film was built.

In New York Times’ Sunday Book Review there is a review of the new book telling the story of Pixar The Pixar touch. The Making of a Company. Writer Michael Hirschorn, argues in the article, that what is striking about Pixar’s history is that the whole thing with computer animation in the beginning seemed provisional. The entrepreneurs starting it kept on working, even though no-one believed in it, driven by an intuitive feeling that this was what they wanted to do. They were, as Hirschorn puts it, “entrepreneurs seeing clarity where others saw only fog”.

Also look at New York Times’ critic A.O. Scott, where he is reviewing Pixar’s movies.