Pixar in a Box: Visual Language

(upbeat music)

- Hi, I'm Dean Kelly and I'm
a story artist here at Pixar.

You know that old saying,

a picture's worth a thousand words?

Well it's true.

Using simple visual
cues, you can communicate

all kinds of cool ideas
and different emotions.

And because of this, a single
image can tell a whole story.

(boing)

Let's make this scene a simple drawing,

like the storyboards we create at Pixar.

The first thing you'll notice is that

the bigger something is in the frame

the more important it is.

I'm clearly the most
important thing in this frame.

Choosing to put a
character in a large space,

where they appear small, is one way

to communicate how vulnerable they are,

or how big their world is.

A low angle can make me
seem commanding or menacing.

I now seem a little unbalanced.

Everything you see on screen is a choice.

And all of it can help you tell stories.

This is development art from Ratatouille.

This single image clearly illustrates

how important shape and
framing are to storytelling.

The artist who drew this chose

everything in the frame,
including the framing.

Look at Remy; he's a tiny rat,

but in this frame and
from this perspective,

he's the same size as the chefs.

See how we separate from the
kitchen with these panes.

He's literally being kept from

his dreams of being a chef, with these

horizontal and vertical
lines boxing him in.

But Remy seems equal to the chefs,

which is an important story point.

Shape also helps us tell stories.

Take these three main characters
from Monsters University.

The artist who designed
Mike, Sully and Hardscrabble

show shapes that amplified
and reflected their character.

Mike is essentially a ball.

He's just not threatening or scary.

Sully's a big rectangle; he's
sturdy and he's tough to move.

You believe he can be a scarer.

Hardscrabble's a bunch of triangles.

She's pointy and threatening.

It helps her to be
intimidating, in the film.

(screeching)

(rumbling)

As a visual storyteller, you have a chance

to guide your viewers
in all sorts of ways.

Color can guide the eye.

Value, or how dark or light something is,

can make it stand out from
everything else in an image.

In the movies size and position
in the frame also matter.

They have an effect on how we feel

about a character or a moment.

In the Incredibles script, this scene

was just two people arguing,
but the story artist

used Helen's stretching abilities

and Helen becomes the
powerful one in this moment,

just by being larger
than Bob by stretching.

But usually an artist will

make a character closer
and bigger in frame.

In this storyboard I drew
for Monsters University,

you can see how I made
Mike dominate the frame

by putting him in the
foreground, close to camera.

Mike is coming into his
own as a scare coach.

And I made him the biggest thing in frame,

because he's the strongest character

in this moment; stronger than Sully.

We can communicate so many things

using only visual language.

In these next lessons you get to explore

these ideas and use them to
help tell your own stories.