Animating Emotions

Michael Venturini developed characters for Pixar’s animated film Inside Out 2. The movie features the ensemble of emotions that accompany a teenager named Riley. The film hits theaters on June 14!

Michael Venturini: I’m a supervising animator at Pixar. I oversee a team of animators. I help them research and design characters, including characters’ expressions and poses.

MV: It’s like one giant class project where 70 to 100 different people take a small piece and contribute to one big idea. We break a film up into sequences. Groups of 2 to 15 animators work on each sequence. In Inside Out 2, each character is a distinct personality. We might have one animator who’s really good with the character Sadness animate all of Sadness. We share our work with the director, who’s the big storyteller, and they’ll give us notes. We go through that process until we’ve animated all the scenes in a film. It takes us about four years—the same amount of time as high school—to make a movie.

MV: The characters are like digital puppets that have a lot of strings attached to them. We have software that allows us to move each of those strings and pose the character. An average main character in our film would have about 2,500 controls, or little strings to pull. We don’t use all of them all the time. In the hand, for example, I use one control to bend the base of the finger. We’ve evolved our software over the years as the complexity of our films increases. We have a whole software engineering team to build new tools when we need software that doesn’t exist yet.

MV: I love the art. I love bringing characters to life. Over the years, what I’ve enjoyed most is how each film requires us to learn something new to excite our audience.

MV: The most important thing about school is not what you learn, but learning how to learn. Knowing how to learn, no matter what your career is, will give you the opportunity to really pursue something in life.