Pixar's Mark Andrews Comes To Town!

So, as I have mentioned before, all of us at the Glasgow School of Art were eagerly anticipating the arrival of Mark Andrews, the Academy Award winning director of Disney-Pixar's "Brave."

Mark started off his visit by giving us a lecture with a bit of background information on how he ended up in the industry himself. He then showed us some storyboards that he has worked on, taken from movies like "The Iron Giant" and "Spider-man" as well as giving us an exclusive look at what Pixar are working on at the moment, which I won't say anything about, just in case.

We also got the fantastic opportunity to present storyboards for a two minute animated short to him, thirty seconds of which we will need to animate for our next animation project. As previously mentioned, I chose a story that revolves around Ted, a boy genius who creates a time machine to bring a Viking to the modern day. Mark had some really good suggestions for where I can take the story, and great ideas that I wouldn't have otherwise thought of. I will keep his advice in mind for future projects and I have already began to look at story-boarding in a different way. This experience, which was also my first workshop with a professional, has encouraged me to make an effort to attend the Animex masterclasses which I have always missed because it meant an extra days stay, which would mean more money. But after this experience, I would imagine that these classes will be worth the extra price, and will hopefully attend them in 2014.

Drawings by Mark as he explained his suggestions for improving my storyboards.

Overall, I learnt a lot from the past two weeks with Mark, and from his colourful personality, which made him all the more likeable as a person. His advice always lead peoples stories down avenues that they may not even have considered before. I also learned a bit more about pitching my storyboards - that for two minute boards, I should be presenting them in roughly one and a half to two minutes tops. This helped me a great deal, as before I would simple drone on, which I guess must have really bored the listener.

My next posts will likely be about my next few assessments: the Masters Proposal and the Animation 3 project which, as mentioned, will be animating thirty seconds of the storyboards that I made. I will also try to have my storyboards scanned and uploaded soon.