Day: June 16, 2016

When it comes to animation, Michael Stocker has seemingly done it all. His first animation role in a movie was with the 1994 classic The Lion King and from there he moved onto actual animation roles in Hercules, Tarzan, and The Emperor’s New Groove. After a few years, he found himself an animator working on purely 3D movies like The Incredibles and Cars.

When Toy Story 3 came around he was a directing animator and now, with Finding Dory, he is a Supervising Animator, leading the entire film along side David DeVan.

So when we got to sit down and chat with Stocker on the past, present, and future of animation, he had a lot of interesting things to say.

“The rules they used to animate Pinocchio, we all used to animate Dory,” Stocker said. Despite a change in technology, the same rules still apply to making an animated film, technology just makes things easier. “The difference is we are doing it in a computer, we are doing it in a 3D world.”

New technology comes with its pros and cons. “One thing that is easy [with a computer] is that when…fifty people animate Dory, it will still look like Dory. When fifty people draw Dory it will look like fifty different people drew Dory.”

The advancements in technology actually hurt them in a few ways since the release of Finding Nemo in 2003. He compared using new technology to opening a very old Word document on a newer computer: It wouldn’t understand the older data. “We had to go back and rebuild Dory, rebuild Marlin…The challenge was that people loved this world…We had to make sure that our new world matched that exactly.” Despite advancements in technology, they had to match the world aesthetic from 2003 and couldn’t upgrade every component.

Newer technologies did make certain aspects of the film a bit easier to handle. Software they developed a few films back was used extensively in Finding Dory. When they were not sure how to animate or take a current scene they were able to take a pen and just draw freehand what they wanted into the scene. Instead of taking a day to animate it and maybe trashing the whole thing, they could visualize in less than a minute and match the animation to their drawings.

As for the future of animated film? “I’m not sure,” laughed Stocker. “Things are changing so fast.” What he did know is that the challenges in the future for Pixar will drive the technological improvements. It will be a movie by movie basis. He went on to note that with Cars 3 coming down the line, it had a similar issue with Finding Dory, where things had to be rebuilt while maintaining their previous aesthetic.

Stocker was very open about his past in animation and his role in the Finding Dory film. But more importantly, he said his favorite animal was the octopus, and thus was a big component of Hank the Septopus from the film, arguably the best part of the movie. Coming from a family obsessed with the octopus, both in sports and in our child’s nursery, I can say that he clearly is a man with the finest of tastes.

Welcome to documentary review day, or foreign film day, depending on what I feel like doing and feeling. Today, I don’t look at just any documentary. I look at a documentary that is really local to my current location. I am looking at an award winning documentary, technically

I am looking at The Last Man on the Moon. Now that it has made it onto Netflix I finally had a way to watch it. It is actually a winner of the Texas Independent Film Award, given out by the Houston Film Critic Society. I mean it went up against such classics like…Results. And uhh, other films I haven’t seen.

Just because the competition was weak doesn’t mean the movie didn’t deserve an award though. Just remember that!

And in The Last Man on the Moon, we look at the space program, astronaut Gene Cernan, and how he has the honor of being the last man to ever walk on the moon. Not typically an honor one thinks about. When one thinks the moon and people on it, they think of the first two names and kind of gloss over the rest.

But damn it, after Apollo 11, there were six other missions that went to the moon! And since Cernan left, no one else has graced it with their feet. Well, no one that isn’t a robot.

Yeah, Science bitches!

This documentary is actually about more than the moon landings though. This is basically a sort of bio on Cernan’s life. How he grew up, when he joined the Navy Air Force, his days as a pilot, his first wife and first daughter, his second wife and many new kids, how he first heard about the space program, got drafted and tested and picked over dozens of individuals, and his not one, not two, but three trips into Outer Space.

Shit, I just talked about the entire documentary!

I think it is important to show that astronauts didn’t just go out into space and to the moon once, they had multiple trips. His first trip was part of the Gemini missions which had a lot of failed aspects. He was part of Apollo 10, the last mission before they finally let people go to the moon. And of course he was part of Apollo 17, how he scraped in barely to the final trip the US would fund for testing.

It is actually a really informative documentary, looking at early aspects of NASA that isn’t super common knowledge. I loved his story about his first interview to be an astronaut, the tests involved, the secrecy, and how no one knew really what the hell was even going on. It made science feel sexy again. And everyone knows that science was the sexiest in the 1960’s during the Cold War.

The Last Man on the Moon was a better documentary than I imagined. And it was about a man who did a lot who doesn’t get a lot of recognition. I wouldn’t say I am biased, but I heard his acceptance speech when it won the TIFA, and it made me cry a bit. A speech about reaching for your dreams and achieving what you love in life, never giving up, and making every minute count.

Shit. Astronauts are the coolest American heroes. Space Cowboys and what not.