Princess Merida pictured at Disneyland. Photo by mydisneyadventures/Wikimedia Commons
Gigglebit is Siliconrepublic’s daily dose of the funny and fantastic in science and tech, to help start your day on a lighter note.
Today, we expose the guts of computer animation, which has developed to become the default for animated feature films since Pixar blew us all away with the first – Toy Story – 20 years ago.
Pixar put CGI animation on the map in 1995 and, in 2006 the animation studio was snapped up by Disney for US$7.4bn – a transaction which made majority shareholder Steve Jobs Disney’s largest single shareholder.
Toy Story director John Lasseter has since risen to become chief creative officer at Walt Disney Animation Studios and, these days, it’s far more rare to see animation produced without CGI on TV or film.
Pixar uses PhotoRealistic RenderMan, its own implementation of the industry-standard image-rendering application programming interface, to generate high-quality images. For 2012’s Brave, the studio completely rewrote this animation system for the first time in 25 years in order to create the most complex visuals possible.
However, with great technical advances come greater technical glitches, as this Brave blooper reel illustrates.
The ‘Wee Gaffes’ video comes from aspiring visual development artist BriannaTheStrange, who singled out some of the highlights in GIF form – a collection which became very popular on Imgur, and may well have already introduced what could be the GIF of the year.
