History of Pixar

Above is an excellent short film about the history of the Pixar studio. It's a promotional piece, but also a great introduction to the history of the modern medium, the second "Golden Age" of animation. Among the impressive insights into the story-telling process at Pixar are John Lasseter suggesting that "every Pixar film at one point in time was the worst motion picture ever made". Why? Because "it's a process". In other words, it's not the doing of the thing, it is the re-doing of it that really counts.

Pixar Story Secrets Revealed: The Twenty-Two Rules of Storytelling

John Lasseter famously described the three most important things about film-making as "One: story. Two: story. Three: story". Obviously, Pixar do a bunch of other stuff really well too, like, say character animation. But there is no doubt that great stories are at the heart of their work and their success. So what can we learn from Pixar about great story telling? Fortunately, Pixar are not guarded about their secrets. Recently, these "22 rules of storytelling" were tweeted by Pixar Story Artist Emma Coats.

John Lasseter explains what students need to learn to get a job at Pixar

In this excellent video interview,  Disney Studio Supremo and Pixar founder John Lasseter talks about the importance of mastering the basics language of film, art and design. Here at Bucks we could not agree more. Our course covers all the areas that John talks about here, including drawing, design, the language of film, in short - the basics.

Technology is important but so are the traditional elements of art and design. Life drawing? Of course. basic design principles? Definitely. We want our students to have a well-rounded training so that they can flourish as digital artists with a solid grounding in all the elements of film-making.

---Alex