Drawing and being artistic is not my forte, which is why I have such an appreciation and am in awe of people like Art Hernandez and Dan Abraham who both worked on the hit movie, Disney Planes. During my trip to Disney Toons Studios, I got a first hand lesson on the background on the making of Disney Planes which included meeting the Director Klay Hall and Producer Traci Balthazar-Flynn and learning how Disney Planes gets it’s wings.
Dan Abraham was the head of stories while Art Hernandez was a storyboard artist on the movie. Wondering what a Story Artist does? Me too. They basically create all the storyboards for a film through drawings adapted from the movie’s script. That means setting up the staging, where the characters are, what the locations look like and where the camera should be positioned in the story.
Now you would think story artists toil in their little cubes drawing all day. Well, you would be wrong, this is not a job for the faint of heart or shy people. Story artists actually have to pitch the scenes they draw and that includes reading the script, enthusiastically, with emotion and even with accents to the other animators, producers, the director and sometimes John Lasseter. How nerve wracking, right? And it’s not always pretty because sometimes, their scenes are rejected and it’s back to the drawing board.
Fun fact I learned. Did you know that John Lasseter is very much into the truth of the materials? If something is made of metal in the real world, it’s metal and bits in the film. If it’s rubber in the real world, it’s rubber in Planes. That means, that planes can’t just shimmy off to the side. That’s not how the suspension works, nor can planes emote with their wings. They just don’t throw their arms up when they’re afraid and they can’t go pick thinks up with their wings.
So how did the planes in the movie pick things up? Sparkie and Dottie, the forklift characters in the movie do a lot of the “picking up” in the movie to compensate. After I learned this, I went back and watched a scene they referenced in our interview. Dusty has to enlist Edward’s help and if you notice there is a tight close-up of Dusty’s wing ringing the doorbell. He actually has to shimmy to the door to push the door bell. And the story artists had to do that because it would have taken too many scenes to make Dusty turn and position him to ring the bell (and wouldn’t that have been a boring scene, watching an animated plane rotate just to ring a door bell, hence the close-up to avoid the unneccesary scenes.
At the end of our session, Art gave the group step-by-step instructions on how to draw Dusty. My drawing is better than I expected but still looks nothing like Art’s. It really is fun.
Stay connected with the latest news and information about Disney Planes, visit disney.com/
Disclosure: NYC Single Mom was provided a trip to the Los Angeles for the Thor:The Dark World, Delivery Man and Disney Planes and Marvel Hulk/Iron Man press events. Opinions are 100% my own
