After looking into the full cast of many Disney animated movies I was rather surprised to find that one of the smallest production teams was the music team. Disney tends to have just one song writer and let him/her work with the directors and producers to make the music for the film. The largest team in all of the Disney movies that I looked at was the animation team. In the most recent Disney animation Frozen, the animation team was sent to Cheyenne, Wyoming and other teams were sent to Quebec and Norway to research. It turns out that there is a lot of time in Disney movies where research is being conducted to produce the best possible movie. It is also interesting how the song can influence or completely change the script of these movies. In the case of Frozen, the song writers Kristen and Bobby Lopez created the song "Let it Go" which dictated the personality of Elsa from that point onward. The producer of Frozen stated that once the song "Let it Go" was created it was decided that that song would be in the movie no matter what.
Frozen took about two and a half years to produce from pre-production to release according to an interview with the films producer, Peter Del Vecho. He stated that this was an really short amount of time for a movie like Frozen. I was curious about how long these animated movies take to produce and found an article with a couple of animators from Pixar, a company owned by Disney. The interview stated that a Pixar film usually takes around four to seven years to create. This seems to be one of the main differences between animated films and live-action films. The movie The Avengers took less than two years from pre-production to release date and The Dark Knight Rises took about two and a half years. In an animated movie you have to start from scratch and create the environment and the characters and many frames per second have to be produced. In live-action, many frames per second are produced but the movie is shot in real time which probably where the main difference in time comes from.
Some of the Interviews I looked at:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.imdb.com/title/tt2294629/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/09/25/inside-the-research-design-and-animation-of-walt-disneys-frozen-with-producer-peter-del-vecho/
http://www.youngzine.org/article/animated-movies-you-asked-pixar-answers
http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/12/07/producing-a-movie-the-walt-disney-animation-way-with-frozens-peter-del-vecho/
This is an extremely interesting topic to explore! Many people's childhoods were greatly impacted by Disney movies, but not many people actually spend time to think about how these movies are made and how many people are involved in their creation. I am interested to see what you discover about these movies!
ReplyDeleteThis is a great topic. You are exactly correct. When I think of most Disney movies the first thing that comes to my mind are the songs. So why is there writing team so much smaller than the animation team, when they seem like such equal parts? Is it easier if it is kept to a smaller team? Or is it being neglected? Hope you find answers to these...now I am interested!
ReplyDeleteI loved frozen! Such a great movie, and I'm a fan of most Disney sponsored animated movies. It was always interesting to read about how they go about making those motion pictures. When you say they created Frozen in such a short amount of time as compared to other films, why was that? Also, its surprising because Frozen was such a hit, do you think other animation production companies could learn a thing or two from Disney itself or Frozen's specific crew?
ReplyDeleteI'm curious about the differences in scope between earlier Disney films that used hand-drawn animation and the currents ones that use digital animation. Perhaps you could talk about the challenges of both and how the transition happened.
ReplyDelete