Learning to Draw Dusty from Disney’s Planes
During my time out in LA for the Disney events surrounding the premieres of Thor: The Dark World and Delivery Man, we spent some time at the Disney Toon Studios where we got to interview the Director and Producer of Planes.
I loved talking with Director Klay Hall and Producer Traci Balthazor-Flynn, they brought us to the how it all began, but the people that I met in the Story Artists Drawing Demonstration piece, they were awesome! Fun and full of stories, Dan Abraham, Head of Story and Art Hernandez, spent some time showing us how they were able to bring the characters to life. Even taking the time to teach us how to draw Dusty.
We sat down and talked with them, and here’s a little bit of the stuff that was shared.
We’re going to walk you through the story process of an animated movie, what we do everyday, all day. I’m Dan Abraham. I was the head of stories on Planes the movie. And this is Art Hernandez who was one of our shining storyboard artists. So what happens generally speaking in the story process in an animated movie, is ideally the story artists get the script right. If there’s a script that has been written we get it. We work off of that. Sometimes in rare cases there actually is no script and it’s a whole other thing like, but for Planes we did have a script.
And the script gets broken down into chapters and each storyboard artist will get like three different chapters from the script, a sequence from the movie. So we do then is we take the written word and we transform it into a visual. We kind of make a comparable conversion of the movie to set up a staging, where the characters are, what the locations look like, where is the camera in this story. Isn’t lo? Is that high? Did you know, is it a two shot with two characters speaking?
Is it a close-up of just one character’s reaction to something? We set all of that stuff up basically the template for all of the pipeline that comes after us, all of the animators, and the guys that model the characters and the guys that do the background painting and that’s where the environments are. We sort of set all that stuff up in the hopes that they’ll take what we’ve done and actually improve upon it, like hopefully what we’ve done with the script.
John Lasseter is very much into the truth of the materials. If something is made of metal in the real world it’s metal and bits. If it’s rubber in the real world it’s rubber in Planes. So anything you know, metal doesn’t bend. So we’ve got all these characters that are like this that have to carry on conversations and have relationships and stuff like that and you know, nine times out of 10 I mean they’ve got to like, in order to turn the day, I mean they can’t just like shimmy off to the side. That’s not how the suspension works.
They go on sharing the process. Fascinating, really.
These guys were fun and made the day at Toon Studios so fun! Can you draw? They make it easy. Give it a try!
One of the cool features of the PLANES on Blu-Ray DVD, you will get your own tutorial on how to draw Dusty from scratch! Just another reason to get this combo pack!
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*Thank you to Disney for inviting me to be part of the Disney’s Planes Bloggers Event. Having taken care of all my expenses to bring me out for this event, please know that all my opinions, excitement and fun I share are completely true.
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This looks like you had an amazing time and the drawings are amazing!!
Your Dusty turned out really well! This was one of my favorite parts of the trip – Austin even gave my Instagram photo a like, so I know I must have been doing something right!
WOW…an artist overnight is all I’ve ever wanted to be. This is pretty awesome. our Dusty turned out well.
They did a great job teaching us, didn’t they? Yours turned out beautifully! Dusty looks so happy.