On The Green Carpet: Up Hollywood Premiere

The Up Hollywood Premiere was held earlier today at Disney’s El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood, California.

Up "insider" on Twitter, @gossUP_girl tweeted through the whole experience. We’ve compiled a guided tour of the festivities based on these updates; please click on the links to view relevant pictures.

First and foremost, Hollywood Boulevard had to be cleared for decorations (such as this "foating" Up house) and the green carpet! Yes… green!! Before the screening jugglers, stilt walkers, and other performers were seen doing their thing among Carl, Russell and Dug, even the Aflac/Up NASCAR was there!

Don’t forget the VIPs and stars! Guests at the event included the marvelous crew of Up (seen here crossing the street to get to the premiere) including Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Jonas Rivera, Michael Giacchino and John Lasseter! The group was presented with this awesome Up house made of chocolate! More Pixarians were there, but unfortunately no pictures of them are available at the moment.

The cast of Up talked to the press and were happy to be attending. Ed Asner, Jordan Nagai, Delroy Lindo, Elie & Pete Docter and the rest of the voice talent were happy to celebrate the occasion. Of course, Pixar’s good luck charm, John Ratzenberger, was there too! Other special guests included Jeff Garlin, Patton Oswalt, Jon Voight, Justin Chambers, Melissa Joan Hart, Blink 182, Barbara Eden, Tia Carrere, Mimi Rogers and Eve Plumb among others.

It seems the premiere was a huge success! Look out for possible extended coverage in the next few days.

Designing Up/Inside and Out

Playing with shapes, studying overweight dogs, visiting the zoo, those are just some of the diverse activities that describe production research on Up!

The New York Times is running an article, Designing Up, featuring director Pete Docter and production designer Ricky Nierva discussing the film’s "simplexity." The team talk about each of the main characters and some facts on how the Up team came UP with them. For example, Carl and Ellie’s design center on squares and circles, in fact, pictures of the couple together feature a square frame and a circle matte. Russell was designed to be simple, but with simplicity comes complexity, at least when CG is involved. His clothing was challenging in particular because of the many overlapping layers. Don’t forget Dug and Kevin, for these two odd animals the team researched all sorts of creatures. From the rare, iridescent Himalayan Monal to an overweight Labrador/Golden Retriever mutt.

You can read the article here. Don’t forget to play the interactive feature, "Inside and Out", that compliments the piece. The feature includes recordings of Docter and Nierva talking about the characters; illustrated with concept art and fully rendered stills! Speaking of art, we’ll be reviewing The Art of Up soon.

Katakune’s Journey

We have a released a free e-book on our journey in creating the award winning animated preschooler series Katakune from scratch. This was first published in the Go Motion Animation Magazine in February 2009.

In it we talk about how the concept was conceived, how we went about raising funds, what USP (unique selling points we devised), our production techniques and more.

We hope that by sharing this e-book we would be able to inspire budding creators and studios to create their own cartoon properties.

Katakune’s Journey

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