Learning The Art of Disney’s Planes! #DisneyPlanesBloggers

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I solely received travel accommodations and the opportunity to attend this event from Disney. All opinions are my own.

Hey All!

As many of you know I love Disney. It’s no secret and I share that love proudly. What you may not know is my love of Disney stems from my dream of being a Disney animator when I was younger. I actually started NYU as a animation major and studied under a famous Oscar winning animator named John Canemaker. Sadly my dreams didn’t come true in the form of being an animator, but I now am living a new dream of this amazing blog.

This blog has allowed me to have some fantastic opportunities to live out my animator dreams every so often. For example, I recently had the amazing opportunity to visit Disney Toon Studios to learn about the process of animating Disney’s PLANES. I sat down with DAN ABRAHAM (Head of Story on PLANES) and ART HERNANDEZ (Storyboard/Story Artist on Planes). We chatted about the process of bringing this film to life and they even took the time to show us how to draw the main character from the film Dusty.

When asked what was unique about animating this film and what it’s like to be an Animator for Disney, Art responded:

That’s one of the things about this job that makes it so unique and so much fun is that just because it works in the script doesn’t necessarily mean that it works visually.  And we’re not just translating what’s in the script.  We’re,  going in and we’re changing the world of the script. There are times that, after a second or third pass screening, John will have us go in and just redo a sequence altogether.  And Jeff Howard, our writer, may not have enough time to get to a particular sequence in time, so what will end up happening is Clay will turn to one of us and say, you know what, this is what I’d like to happen in a sequence. This is what John was looking for.  Here are your notes, go to town, own it.  And so a lot of what you see on the screen doesn’t even have a script.  It’s a lot of collaboration.

And Dan quickly added to that sentiment.

We’ll do this generally in every animated movie they do.

Dan was very insightful with his responses. He continued to say…

It makes things so much better and so much more streamlined.  I was able to just kind of toggle through at my own pace, so I could get the timing of the dialogue and talking back and forth and the jokes and all that stuff.  Back in the day, not being able to do this, and everything on little scores of paper, it would be pinned up on bulletin boards throughout the entire room and you’d just have a big stick.

You’d walk through and you’d point at each one when you’re doing, which works, and it is great.

After going through a reenactment of one of the scenes in PLANES and discussing how blessed they felt to be a part of Disney Animation history, Art showed us how to draw Dusty. He drew him effortlessly on a beautiful Cintiq tablet, I had only my pencil and paper.  As you can see below I took this very seriously!

This is how my Dusty came out. Not too shabby if I don’t say so myself!

Drawing Dusty and learning from these amazing Animators reminded me that I should keep drawing and making my own little animations even if only my family sees them. It’s nice to do something you love to do and it was great to see these two amazingly talented people living their dreams.

If you’d like to draw Dusty yourself, check out this video of Art below showing you how to draw Dusty.

They were kind enough at the end of the interview to take a group shot with us. We of course had to do plane arms and Art made the Dusty picture he drew say “Hi Bloggers”! I thought that was adorable.

Yet another dream come true experience thanks to Disney!

For more information on Planes please visit the PLANES Facebook page.

Disney PLANES is out on Blu-ray now!

Photos Courtesy of Disney Pictures and Home Entertainment and The Queen of Swag.