Mix Glen Keane and Virtual Reality Please
Glen Kean is world renowned… you just don’t know his name. Glen Kean is the genius behind many of Disney’s greatest and most beloved movie including; The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Pocahontas, and Tangled. But my latest favorite from Keane has bee his push to drive Disney towards much more realistic animation. Like for example in his Oscar winning entry Paperman (which I discussed previously here, here, and here. Maybe I have a crush on the guy… sheesh.)
Well, now Glen has taken to drawing in virtual reality and it really is very impressive to see an older gentleman like Keane adapting to and utilizing such modern tools. We saw him make the transition from traditional hand drawn animation and now we’ve got him sketching in three dimensional space. Pretty amazing.
As you watch that clip, did you see him flipping those pages? I tried and tried that maneuver until I got it down when I was in my very early teens. I wanted to be able to animate like the pros did (which was on paper at the time) and I tried and tried to get that move down. But it is a lot harder than you could imagine, to fluidly flip back and forth 3 or 4 pages and animate them like a flip book as you are drawing on a fifth page. So cool. And did you notice that loft studio he was working in?!? Oh my gosh, serious workspace envy happening right here, right now! hahaha.
And if you are interested, here is Paperman if you’ve completely forgotten it already.