Posts tagged with film
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![‘The Blue Umbrella’: Inside a Pixar Love Story
The process began on one of those unusually rainy but otherwise ordinary California days. Pixar camera and staging artist Saschka Unseldwas walking through downtown San Francisco. Something caught his eye. He looked down, studying more closely an object stuck in the gutter in front of him.
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“I still remember the moment,” he says. “It was a half-broken and drenched umbrella, and it was one of the saddest-looking things ever.”
Unseld had always been enthralled by the Venn Diagram intersection of the arts and computer science, and so he stood there wondering what happened to the contraption: how it got there; where it came from. He decided to make up a story about it — a 7-minute love tale called “The Blue Umbrella,” which will air in front of Pixar’s next full-length feature, “Monsters University,” in June.
“The Blue Umbrella” plays off that original San Francisco moment to introduce the story of two umbrellas (one red, one blue) as part of a dreary, rain-soaked cityscape, muted in blacks and grays. When red looks over at blue, there’s a spark of attraction. One stares longingly at the other. When the glance is returned, awkwardness ensues. It looks like love at first shade.
Part of the charm of a Pixar production is the way its animators and filmmakers sprinkle their moviemaking pixie dust over commonplace bric-a-brac like lamps, robots, and, yes, umbrellas. With a little studio wizardry and storytelling that brims with heart, they make the inanimate come to life.
But the process of creating such animation isn’t one that’s often seen outside Pixar’s walls. Which is why, about a year ago, Unseld decided to open up “The Blue Umbrella” to the world.
Armed with an iPhone camera and a Tumblr called Rainy City Tales 332 (the 332 stands for Unseld’s Pixar office number), he filmed his team trying to capture the sound of objects rattling in the wind. He documented them working creating the effect of cars on a wet street. He showed lighting experiments, and rainy street scenes of San Francisco and New York that he used for inspiration. He posted them all on his blog, ruminating about capturing the right “feel” for two umbrellas falling in love.
Ultimately, Unseld says, the film (as well as his documentation of the process) charted new territory — as the first time producers used photorealistic images to make the two umbrellas look, well, real.
Pixar has produced almost two dozen shorts now — each an attempt, says Unseld, to showcase the studio’s technical capabilities. (Pixar’s first short, “Luxo Jr.”, aired in 1986; a decade later, ”Tin Toy” became the first computer animated film to win an Oscar for Best Short.)
Unseld describes the shorts as “Pixar’s legacy, its roots.” He references the company’s charming early attempts with shorts like “Luxo Jr.,” the two-minute film that showed a pair of seemingly life-like lamps, one happily chasing a ball. (That lamp, of course, still hops out and bounces up and down on one of the letters in the Pixar name on the studio’s title screen before its full-length features start playing.)
“We have kept the idea of short films around not only to give people a little extra something at the cinema but also to mix things up a bit,” says Unseld.
How it works is surprisingly democratic: anyone can pitch. The best pitches are vetted by Pixar’s chief creative. If the idea is good, it gets made. Which is pretty much how it happened with “The Blue Umbrella”: Pixar, naturally, signed on.
The film pulls off a curious effect, seeming to attach animated features like eyes and a mouth to otherwise real-looking umbrellas. Life-like sunlight glistens off the umbrella covering, and droplets of water trickle down the side in little rivulets of melancholy.
“The reason for this unusual look lies in the story,” as the characters, Unseld explains, slowly morph from object to life. The transformations start incrementally, and early, against the backdrop of a wistful soundtrack, soft dripping of the rain and the kind of droning hum of pedestrians. Various features of the city — sewer drains, windows, doors — start coming to life at the 40-second mark, and they team up to help unite the two umbrellas unite.
“It was really important to me that this moment — the step from inanimate to alive — is magical and unique,” says Unseld.
In the end, the seemingly doomed lovers do what doomed lovers always do best on the silver screen: come together.
— Andy Meek](http://25.media.tumblr.com/71969d99c639c71d2eea24d95b532687/tumblr_mkaehvYN351rrpm57o1_r1_1280.jpg)
‘The Blue Umbrella’: Inside a Pixar Love Story
The process began on one of those unusually rainy but otherwise ordinary California days. Pixar camera and staging artist Saschka Unseldwas walking through downtown San Francisco. Something caught his eye. He looked down, studying more closely an object stuck in the gutter in front of him.
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Finding Fulfillment in ‘Bending Steel’
Of the thousands and thousands of micro-cultures extant today, the pursuit of bending things is a particularly niche obsession. This is the world of Bending Steel, which follows the personal journey of Chris Schoeck as he tries to find path forward to improving his body, mind, and spirit. He locates this path via the traditions of the vaudeville strongmen of Coney Island, who were known to bend nails, horseshoes, and steel bars with their hands, legs, necks, or even their hair and teeth. As Schoeck trains and challenges himself to bend, he finds a family of sorts among other would-be strongmen — the kind of kinship and validation that had eluded him for his entire life. The story culminates in a strongman show on Coney Island where Schoeck attempts to bend a steel bar that has always defeated him before, in front of his friends and a crowd of strangers who represent all his fears and doubts. We spoke to director Dave Carroll and producer/cinematographer Ryan Scafuro about how Bending Steel became a film and what its narrative means for Schoeck and for themselves.
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Director Hannah Fidell Talks ‘A Teacher’
At this year’s Sundance Film Festival, half the dramatic competition finalists were brought to life by women. It’s about time, boys. One such feature was written and directed by precocious, feminist filmmaker Hannah Fidell. Her film, A Teacher, delves into the emotional hills and valleys a female teacher experiences while having an affair with her student, reversing all those American Beauty tropes we know so well. We sat down with Fidell — and the film’s star, Lindsay Burdge — to talk about turning the tides on the omnipotent male gaze.
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Crashing the Black Box with ‘Charlie Victor Romeo’
It doesn’t get more real than this. Charlie Victor Romeo re-enacts — almost verbatim — transcripts from the “black box” recordings of six plane crashes that occurred from 1989 to 1996. Originally a stage play produced in 1999, CVR has since been performed worldwide in many different venues (it’s even been used for pilot training by the Pentagon). Gripping, harrowing, and poignant, the play has now made the leap to a film that preserves the spare and chilling authenticity of its creative predecessor. And in 3D no less (by way of New York’s 3-Legged Dog Media & Theater Group), which somehow makes the film seem both hyper-present and dreamlike. While at Sundance, we spoke to director Bob Berger and co-director/editor Karlyn Michelson about translating the play to the big screen, the artistic life of a the project, and respecting the borders of reality.
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From Manila to Tumblr with Love: What Isn’t There
While at Sundance this year, we were strolling the streets of Park City with our pal Te’devan when we ran into Marie Jamora and Ramon De Veyra. Turns out they had their own film, What Isn’t There (Ang Nawawala), over at Slamdance. In a rather amazing coincidence, it turns out their movie — set in their hometown of Manila — actually features one character gifting another with a Tumblr in a crucial scene. So of course, we had to sit them down and hear all about it.
What Isn’t There focuses on Gibson, a mute teenager who lost his twin brother, the girl who tries to draw him out of his shell, and the family, romance, comedy, and music that surround them both. It’s sweet without feeling trivial, and serious without being ponderous. Marie and Ramon tell us how it all came about and how they put it together in this interview. And if you’re in the neighborhood, you can check out the movie March 24 at the Southeast Asian Film Festival in Singapore.
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Harmony Korine: Soldier of Cinema
It stretches credulity to continue treating Harmony Korine like some crazed enfant terrible of filmmaking — dude’s past 40, married, a father, and by now has written and directed a substantial number of features, shorts, and unclassifiable oddities over two decades plus. And yet Spring Breakers, which from anyone else would be treated as a radioactive experiment in violent depravity, is instead discussed as Korine’s play for mainstream respectability. Guess it all depends where you’re coming from.
Much has been made of casting Selena Gomez and Vanessa Hudgens in this flick, and you can find ample chatter about that elsewhere. But who does Korine want to work with next? “Harrison Ford,” he says without hesitation. “Or Clint Eastwood.” After we got done imagining that, we talked with Korine about why and how he made Spring Breakers, how and why he makes movies at all, and his love of “liquid narrative.”
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