A Student of Animation at Disney Institute

Recently, I was able to attend a Pixar exhibit in Sha Tin Museum in Hong Kong during one of my trips.  It was a simple exhibit, which featured all the steps to doing animation, both pre-computer days and post.  It brought back memories of my Disney Institute experience :-)

Oh yes, I was an animation student for a day at the Disney Institute.  I have always been amazed at how they create those animation movies.  I was intrigued and often wondered if I could be an animation artist someday.  I wanted to know what it was like to do animation as a career.


So this opportunity came when my niece, who's more like a sister to me because of just a decade's worth of age difference rather than the usual two to make a generation, found out about classes that we can attend while visiting Disney World in Florida.  I was studying abroad in San Francisco, California at that time, and met up with them during one of their summer vacation trips in 1996.

The facility was great, the grounds were vast and environment was very conducive for learning.  At first, it felt surreal to be in such a place, which I only see in my dreams.

We met top animation artists from Disney who were our instructors for the class.  They shared with us their experiences as animators, and we were immediately transported into their world.  We used the top software programs and created simple animations for ourselves.  This is where I learned about rendering and how tedious the process of converting a simple idea into a working animation takes.  It's not just because of the multiple steps but also how many iterations each step has to take.  I also learned about the mega powerful computers used 24 x 7 as workhorses for the process.

But wait, this is digital animation.  How did they do it years ago, when computers didn't even exist?  Well, I am now ultimately amazed.  I remember we used to see how animation was done by flipping hundreds and even thousands of drawings with each page representing a small movement.  I used to wonder how they drew all those pages, but yes, they did it manually!  We can still see very vivid shifts between each page or each movement.  But due to the aid of computers, we can add hundreds more pages in between to make those shifts seamless and make the movements look like the real thing.  Today's animation movies made by Pixar such as Bug's Life and Toy Story show exactly that.

I still love animation movies, and sometimes I still dream to be an animator, but I don't think I have the patience and creativity to do it as a living.  But it's nice to be transported to that life, even for just a day :-)