Courtesy of Bigscreenanimation.com
Mike and Sully from “Monsters, love.”
In order to truly capture the essence of the college experience, the research for the film required the filmmakers to visit schools.
Since the majority of the filmmakers went to art schools, they sought to explore the traditional fraternity and sorority experience.
“We wanted do just walk around and soak it up and see the buildings and the fraternities and sororities, and just kind of get our heads set back into the college student mindset,” Scanlon said.
Among their observations was “fraternities with sleeping students,” Rae added.
“It was a really good opportunity and the artists came and actually drew buildings and drew sort of campuses and in the end, put them all together to create a campus that, although it’s original to Monsters University, hopefully feels familiar to everyone,” Scanlon said.
After completing their research and creating the campus, the next step was to make the monsters look younger.
To achieve this, the art department worked to make the characters appear thinner and brighter in color.
“We started to notice that thinning them up really helped. We were all a little thinner in college,” Scanlon said.
Rae found that the task was to find the balance between making the characters appear younger while still maintaining their familiarity.
“It was important that they were recognizable… so we had parameters that we wanted to make sure that we kept. We didn’t want to do anything too crazy because they still needed to look like Mike and Sulley and be recognized as Mike and Sulley without a whole lot of changes,” she said.
It was not only challenging to update the main characters, but also to populate the University with new characters, Rae added.
“It was a lot for the character department, and it was also a lot for the animation department, who had to animate scene after scene of anywhere from six to ten to twelve characters in the foreground,” Rae said.
“And then have hundreds of characters in the background. So just the scope of the film from a character standpoint was definitely a Inc.” was released in 2001, the animation used to create Sulley’s hair was groundbreaking at the time.
Since then, there have been major advancements in technology that the filmmakers took advantage of in the making of thesecond movie.
“What we can do now is pretty staggering,” Rae said.
Scanlon found that one of the biggest advancements is the use of lighting.
“We have a sort of a new system of lighting our movies, which has been great,” he said. “We love it, it’s just created a much richer look to the film than what we’ve had yelling.”
It was the voice work and the animation that allowed the filmmakers to be able to achieve their goal of taking the monsters back to college.
“I think it was more in the energy. And then amazingly, the animation helps that illusion as well…these characters look younger, they move younger and they’re- it,” Scanlon said.
Ultimately, Scanlon and Rae agree in addition to being a fun film, the early story of Mike and Sulley’s friendship will still emotionally touch audiences.
See the film when it hits theaters nationwide on June 21, 2013.