Saturday, August 29, 2009

Working on The Incredibles

I had an awesome time working on The Incredibles. My favorite characters to model were Rick Dicker, Jack Jack and Syndrome. I was fortunate to be asked to sculpt the Syndrome clay expression maquettes. I first sculpted the neutral head where the face is quite relaxed. This was then sent off to have a mold made. Two clay heads were cast from that head mold, and I used these clay copies to resculpt Syndrome into the squash smiling and the stretch screaming poses you see here.
My last assignment on The Incredibles was a large sculpture of Nomanisan Island. The dimensions were approximately 4' x 4' x 2.5'. This model was really helpful in blocking in the 100 mile dash sequence. Unfortunately I have no photographs of the sculpture and the last time I saw it in the hallways at Pixar it was looking the worse for wear.
Jack Jack was the first character I modeled and put into the pipeline. I loved the character design on him. I was asked to make his body muscular similar to that of a little gorilla.
When I came on board the Art Department a large resin cast had already been made of Helen's head. I was asked to model her body. Her forms had to be motherly with the wider hips, whilst maintaining a certain sexiness to the shapes.
Rick Dicker was great fun to work on. We were going for a Nixon like quality to his forms. The children you see here were to be Dashes classmates. Unfortunately due to time and budget constraints, they eventually got mothballed.
This was an early preproduction model of Buddy Pine I worked on. The final Buddy Pine was later modeled by Brian Tindal. I did model these boots which are the same as in the final film.
Snug the pilot was originally to have a larger role in the film, but his role was largely cut to make the story tighter. We were in the middle of working on his scene in which he dies in the plane crash when 911 happened. Although the scene in which Helen and the kids get shot out of the sky is intense, having Snug die was just too much and was ultimately cut from the story.
























5 comments:

  1. OMG, you worked on The Incredibles! The best movie I've ever seen:)You did some hillarious work there, Jonathan!

    Besides, thanks for you comment in my blog:)

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  2. One thing I keep wondering since no modeler is credited in any Pixar movie. Did you end up modeling manually in Maya using the usual low polygon to high res technique or did you use one of those "scanning" arm devices to bring the sculpt into the sofware?

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  3. Can you post any wires? Great work :]

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  4. Jack jack 3d image references please sir

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  5. Jack jack reference images send to my email rahuluser.rk@gmail.com

    Please Sir

    ReplyDelete