Celebrate Aviation History Month – Giving Disney’s PLANES Its Wings #DisneyPlanesBloggers

I was provided an all expense paid trip by Disney to Los Angeles.  All opinions are my own.

As part of my recent trip to LA I had the opportunity to visit DisneyToon Studios, and get a behind the scenes look at Disney’s Planes! The lobby of the building was setup to look like an airport runway, how cool is that? This visit was a chance to see how animated movies are made, and I was amazed at how complicated and time consuming the process is.

We spend some time learning about Pre-Vis Development with Jason McKinley, the Flight Supervisor, and Thomas Leavitt, an Aerial Pre-Vis Artist. Pre-Vis is one of the intermediate steps in making an animated movie. In this step they take a storyboard developed from a script, and change it into an animatic, a 2-D animation with timing to get a feel for how long an entire sequence will take, and how it will flow.

Now it surprised me that there is actually a Flight Supervisor for the movie, but it turns out that making planes fly realistically is very difficult.  So Disney developed a specific flight team that was tasked to make the planes fly.

The Pre-Vis department found that the while the storyboards looked cool, they included lots of things that a real plane couldn’t do, or had the planes turning to sharply or quickly.  They also found that when the flying was unrealistic it was very obvious to the viewer! So they built a computer model of a full sized airport, and used that to make the planes’ flight realistic. As McKinley explained:

Everyone sees planes fly every day.  So they really have it in their heads what they look like. The second it does something that it can’t do you, you would pick it up and that pulls you out of the story.

After the Pre-Vis team gets the flying right they send the sequence over to animation, where they do things like make the mouth shapes and add detail and texture.  The process from storyboards through Pre-Vis to animation takes about a year! McKinley told us:

It’s a pain staking process. Plus what you don’t see is the dozens and dozens of iterations that we went through trying to get it right.  We try stuff and it  we go, “Let’s try this, you know it doesn’t work. Let’s try that, and that doesn’t work.” And then, “Oh this one works. So it’s a very much collaborative building process between us and the Director and Editorial.

Planes will be out on BluRay on 11/19, and this is perfect month to release it, since November is National Aviation Month, a month-long celebration of U.S. aviation’s glory and past.  Disney has an educational partnership with many aviation museums around the country, which includes Planes inspired learning materials.

In addition there are a number of special features on the BluRay tied to Aviation History month.  Check out this clip from one of the bonus features, “Top 10 Flyers” presented by ESPN’s Colin Cowherd.

You can learn more about Planes on Facebook or at the Planes website!