The Science of Pixar


 

Today I had a day off, so we decided to have another museum day. Some of the other things to do around us still require reservations and while I understand and appreciate their dedication to safety, I do like that the museum has dropped that requirement which means we can go when we feel like it without having to plan it out in advance. We usually visit the children's part of the museum to play and learn and while we did do that today as well, we also did something special...


The museum currently has a really cool special exhibit going on called The Science of Pixar. Every time we get in the elevator Evie talks about how much she wants to go see it and points out her favorite characters on the poster so today we finally did it.


 

...and it was pretty cool! Evie got to meet Wall-E, Buzz, Dory, Edna, and Mike and Sully which was really cool and then we got to play with all sorts or rigs, lights, cameras, and computers to see how Pixar takes her favorite stories from ideas to movies.



Evie had a lot of fun playing with the different controls to see how they set up light and how they do rendering and even how they use 3D objects and skins to create food and other objects in the films.




Her favorite one was the computer that could make multiple different objects out of one rendered item. She loved that she could create 100 mice that all looked just SLIGHTLY different out of one little computer mouse. We did it with buildings too and saw how they create WHOLE cities that way in the films.



At the end she got to pretend to be an action figure which was pretty fun too. It was a nice change from our norm and a really interesting experience. A lot of work goes into the Pixar movies, and it was really cool to see how they create some of the magic we see onscreen.




We were both pretty sad that it's not summer anymore so we couldn't take our usual walks around the city afterward, but it was a really nice way to spend our day off together! :)

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