Gini Santos on Animating Ratatouille
Santos Chats About Her Work as an Animator For PIXAR
Sep 1, 2008
Would you say you have quite a bit of creative control in the process you follow?
Animation wise I definitely have a lot of creative control because in a film like this, or even in the company I work for, the directors come in and they assume you’re already an animator. The assumption is that you know what you have to do and you know the principles and that’s what your profession is so he just basically tells us “here’s this character and this is what I want this character to be feeling like at this point and at this point there is a change.” That’s when, as an animator, I come in and although what I do is dictated by what the story calls for, in the shots there are scenes that are definitely open to the animator to help really make that character more convincing.
What was your favourite part of working on this movie?
I loved working on Colette and there was this weird parallel world because in computer animation there’s no a lot of women in the field. There’s definitely a lot more now at PIXAR and Colette is a female chef in what has always traditionally been an area where men work. I mean fine French cooking in Paris was something very dominated by men, by great Chef’s and there’s this female character, who plays a great Chef, and she manages to break into the business and she is the only female character in the kitchen. Its not like she fights to keep where she is, but you see she has to work a little bit harder to maintain her stature in that kitchen and in a lot of ways it really helps in my animation of that character because there was a time I felt that, not that it wasn’t a supportive environment, but that it was always been dominated by men and I always felt that OK I have to work a little bit harder to prove that I can actually be just as talented so I was able to draw a lot from myself when I was animating this character and how she’s feeling at certain times in the movie.
What advice would you give to people who want to break into the animation field?
I think my biggest advice is to watch films where the characters are really good because that’s the thing about computers, everyone has access to it and eventually everyone is going to do what everyone else does so the only difference in what you can produce is the quality of that content - and that’s one of the things at PIXAR, story and character is key. It’s definitely The Holy Grail and anything else we do is second to that. It doesn’t matter how great or how much faster the computers are. If content is not good, it makes a difference whether it will be a film that you remember or a film you went to see for eye candy so animators should really just hone their art for it. For someone like PIXAR, definitely build a good drawing portfolio because that’s what happened for me. They didn’t really care what I had, I mean they cared but they saw there was something I had in my animation as far as timing and pacing but when they know you have a good art back ground and a good drawing portfolio that’s the people they tend to hire.
Interview with Pixar animator Gini Santos continues here.
