Interview with PIXAR Animator Gini Santos
Santos Talks About Animation and the Film Ratatouille
Sep 1, 2008
Animator, Gini Santos worked for an advertising agency before she submitted a drawing portfolio and was hired by PIXAR in 1996. She moved to San Francisco and worked as an animator on films such as Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles. Check out Santos' in-depth conversation about animating Ratatouille here.
Isn’t animation a tough industry to get work in? How did you manage to get such a great job?
I know it is a tough industry and I tell you right now if I applied now with what I had in 1996 I probably wouldn’t get hired I always felt I came at the right time.
The reason I ended up in New York city was because I wanted to further my art background. That was about the time the desktop computers were kind of exploding onto the scene and there was this course in New York City called Masters of Fine Arts, major in computer art and one of the areas you could specialize in was computer animation. I actually took the two year course and from there I sent a reel to PIXAR.
I do have to kind of emphasize, even with the advent of the technology, PIXAR believes in a very strong art background, and one of the things they asked, was that I had a port folio and I had only sent a reel at that time. They wanted to see a drawing portfolio because, for them, they believed 'we can teach people to work on the computer, we can teach anyone to use the computer but we want to have someone that has a good strong art background use this tool, because it is a medium'. They definitely believe that the quality of the films we produce is because people who are still running the computers are artists.
As an actor you’d be given a script wouldn’t you? So, what’s the process you follow as an animator?
Well, we actually liken ourselves to closeted actors. Like we’re not the kind of people that would readily jump in front of the camera and go ‘hey watch us do our acting’ we actually do it all through the characters that we animate. Part of the process of that is actually video taping ourselves and when I do that, I am able to see things, or nuances that my body, does that I wouldn’t readily immediately feel - even though I’m like standing in my office trying to act a scene out!
So are you given a brief as to what the character is going to be like?
Oh always! We always have what we call a ‘directors briefing’ before we start and the director basically talks about what he expects as far as ‘the arc of the character’ at this point. Communication with the director is something that is key with the animator because we want to make sure we are able to bring what he wants to the plate.
What characters did you work on in Ratatouille?
In the case of Ratatouille I initially started mainly with the humans, Linguini and Colette, and I got to do a lot of great scenes, especially with the female character. You know, it was a shift but I also wanted to work on a rat character because they were so interesting to me but it’s a shift you know, from animating a human standing on two limbs to all of a sudden animating a rodent.
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