Here's more info, taken from that blog about the Tangled presentation in germany last week. The lecture was given by Leo Sanchez Barbosa. Earlier you already read the first part, the introduction of the presentation. Now it's time for the actual presentation which went into the characters of Flynn and Maximus, which are the two main characters Barbosa worked on. I will not be translating the full article, but try and get all the important pieces of information out of it and list them below. If you want to read the full report in german or try online translation services, then go to this link for the blog post:
http://esbinaca.wordpress.com/2010/05/1 ... re-teil-ii
* Barbosa who is born in Barcelona, Spain has been working at Disney for a couple of years and was involved in projects like "Glago's Guest", "Bolt" and "Prep and Landing". He has been working on Rapunzel for over a year now.
* Barbosa's main work on Rapunzel is the characters of Flynn Rider and the horse Maximus, as well as Rapunzel's facial expressions.
* Barbosa worked together with character designer and animator Jin Kim on the design of Flynn. The many drawings Jin made were incorporated in his character design and model.
* A piece of art was shown where Flynn is sitting on Maximus all excited with Maximus looking less then thrilled. Another drawing shows Flynn and Rapunzel sitting side by side with him holding her hands
* As one of the many inspirations for the character of Flynn the actor and action hero "Eroll Flynn was used. He is also the reason of Flynn's name. The archetipal goodlooking guy.
* A lot of inspiration has been taken from artists. For instance sculptures from Michaelangelor and Tim Bruckner to analyse body structures and the way light falls on them.
* Dreamworks artist Nathan Fowkes' blog also served as an inspiration:
http://nathanfowkes.blogspot.com/
* Living celebrities that were an inspiration were soccer player David Beckham!
* Every so often the female Disney employees would be called together to ask them about their taste in men and what makes a man beautiful. They were often shown pictures of men and asked about their appeal.
* Other celebs that influenced the design of Flynn were Eric Bana, Jude Law and Brad Pitt who's headshots (based on lighting and shadowstructures really were very usefull).
* Photoshop was usefull to enhance shadows to be able to study their structures.
* Drappery of clothing on the human body was something they studied very closely as well.
* Even US president Obama was an example in terms of facial structures and posture.
* Other inspirational artists were Joseph Christian Leyendecker and sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt. The last one is known for sculptures of faces with extreme facial expressions. Some of those ideas can be seen in the movie, for instance a shot where Flynn strongly squints his eyes or is extremely surprised.
* The modelling and creation of Maximus was also adressed. And like with Flynn pictures, drawings and sculptures of horses were very helpfull in his creation. Body structures of other animals like panthers were also studied.
* Barbosa demonstrated the use of the ZBrush technology how a model comes to life at Disney. Using a standard model of Flynn without a pose or expression on his face he showed how the brush can influence the mouth, eyes and body of the model to either soften or harden the look of the model and pose. They try to use the model to it's most extreme with the earlier mentioned extreme facial expressions before achieving his neutral look. You need to know how far you can go with a model untill you can finally be satisfied with it.
* Flynn's mouth is almost totally based on David Beckham's mouth. It was deemed both manly and sexy, which is something they were looking for in Flynn.
* Another technique is the "inside out" modelling. They create the model with his mouth wide open so they can get everything from structures inside the mouth to teeth etc and then work their way to the outside. They went into great detail to achieve a sense of reality.
* A funny anecdote was that Mattell has created some Rapunzel dolls in advance which were then used by the crew to act out certain poses and shots. Together with all the posters of Eric Bana and Brad Pitt on the walls this according to Barbosa was: „not good for the reputation, but I found my real me again“….
* Barbosa described the character of Maximus as very funny and cute. The girl at the presentation says she found him to look very powerfull, serious and strict in the models and drawings that were shown at the presentation. Which isn't weird when you think about the fact that the horse is the horse of the main guard.
* A lot of the designs and poses in drawings that were made by Jin Kim that were made during character development and influenced the design of the characters were eventually discarded because they didn't go with the vision the directors had for the characters.
* A lot of the techniques that they used have improved the work they can do in animation and those will be worked on in the future and even further improved. They will be using those in Disney's future projects, which he didn't talk about.
* At the end of the presentation was a Q&A session with the audience and the most important question was why the title of the project had been changed from "Rapunzel" to "Tangled". Barbosa didn't know why but he did say at Disney everyone still reffers to the movie as "Rapunzel", because that is what brought everyone together on this project and under which name they had been working on the movie for the past couple of years.
That's all about the presentation... Hope that gets you all excited as much as it does me!
