Sam's Production Case Study

‘The Incredibles’ a production Case Study by Sam Mealey

Eight years in the making and the first Pixar film to feature a cast of human characters, The Incredibles was an ambitious project right from the start.
The man behind it all, Brad Bird who wrote and directed the feature, originally designed the film to be a traditionally 2D feature. After another film he worked on, ‘The Iron giant’ received an audience smaller than he originally hoped for he fell back to an old friend of his John Lasseter of Pixar.
Lasseter managed to persuade Bird to bring the idea over to Pixar where it would be done in a computer generated style.
As the concept was designed for traditional animation styles, Bird did not know the limitations of CGI and as such, invoked a challenge. Pixar had never produced a film which consisted of a cast of human beings before and thus had to carefully map out how to go about animating human characters.

The rigging team and digital sculptures were given physical copies of
the medical book ‘Gray’s Anatomy’ to help them better understand
the structure and movements of humans.
Brad brought with him, a team of experienced animators he wished to work on the production. Due to their lack of experience in the workings of CGI, this meant many of them had to be trained to use the software.
Throughout the production, Bird refused to compromise style or context for the sake of easy technical workings and often spent large periods of time debating such issues with the technical team. An example of this is the character Violet, Violets character traits involve being shy and socially vulnerable and this is well portrayed by her long hair covering her face. For the majority of the production phase, her hair was considered impossible to create and animate, it involved having to be moveable under water and blowing through harsh winds. However, Bird refused to accept that and the result is visually stunning. 

The entire studio had extreme pressure during the production phases but when asked afterwards, Victor Navone of Pixar claimed “Pixar is the dream job for an animator. It's the best place in the world to work. It has a casual, fun atmosphere, lots of talented and friendly people” This suggests that despite the pressures and demands of the seemingly stubborn Brad Bird, there was still the friendly and enjoyable working atmosphere present that Pixar is famous for.