Last month What Culture - then still Obsessed With Film - was invited to the San Francisco Bay Area to visit the airy, concept art covered halls of legendary animation studio Pixar, with the company eager to promote upcoming sequel Cars 2. This is the first in a series of exclusive interviews.
Last month What Culture - then still Obsessed With Film - was invited to the San Francisco Bay Area to visit the airy, concept art covered halls of legendary animation studio Pixar, with the company eager to promote upcoming sequel Cars 2. Over the course of this week we'll be letting you in on our conversations with producer Denise Ream, actress Emily Mortimer and the film's director (and all round modern animation legend) John Lasseter. First up though, we had the pleasure of speaking to character animator Jude Brownbill and first assistant editor Kevin Rose-Williams, both of whom hail from the UK. For aspiring animators on these shores, the prospect of getting a job at Pixar might seem like the stuff of wildest fantasy, with the Berekely-based studio an ocean (and then an entire continent) away. Yet Kevin Rose-Williams, originally of Bristol, just got done with working as first assistant editor on Cars 2 - having also performed similar roles on Wall-E and Ratatouille. To be fair, he had a pretty stellar CV before he landed those gigs anyway, working at Skywalker sound on such films as Terminator 2. In fact, a lot of Pixar employees I spoke to had ILM/Skywalker Sound backgrounds, with many having worked on films like T2 and Jurassic Park. So if you've ever wondered why live-action CGI often looks less tangible now than it did in the summer of 1993, blame Pixar for stealing a lot of the talent! Watch the video below to find out more about the editor's move to Pixar, as well as giving us an idea of the work environment at the famously collaborative studio:Character animator Brownbill, originally from Somerset, made the move across the Atlantic more recently. Despite joining Cars 2 fairly late on, she still managed to leave a tangible mark on the production - particularly on the character of super-sleek, lady-spy Holly Shiftwell (as voiced by Emily Mortimer), as recalled in the video below:Check back throughout the week for the rest of our Pixar interview series, with Denise Ream, Emily Mortimer and John Lasseter. Cars 2 is released in the U.K. on Friday! Cameraman: Dennis Routledge-Tizzard Editor: Joe Murphy