Pixar Animation Studios has launched the first of six free online lessons covering the art of storytelling, led by Pete Docter, Mark Andrews, and other filmmakers from the renowned Disney-owned studio.
The new series is available for free through online-education platform Khan Academy. Directors and story artists providing insights into Pixar’s creative process in the new series include Pete Docter, director of Inside Out, Up and Monsters Inc; Mark Andrews, director and screenwriter of Brave and story supervisor on The Incredibles; Sanjay Patel, director of Sanjay’s Super Team and animator on Ratatouille, Cars and Monsters, Inc; and Domee Shi, story artist on Inside Out.
The first of the storytelling lessons is available now at PixarInABox.org. The Art Of Storytelling series will provide tips on how to make stories emotionally appealing as well as how to create characters and unique worlds. “We hope that by sharing how we tell stories, we’ll inspire students all over the world to tell their own stories,” Docter said in a statement.
The rest of the Art Of Storytelling lessons will roll out through the rest of the year. The Internet classes include videos, exercises and hands-on activities to guide them from an initial idea to a final storyboard.
It’s the third season of Pixar In A Box on Khan Academy, which first launched on the site in 2015. Past lessons from the studio have covered simulation, colour science, virtual cameras, character modeling and rendering. Disney funds the Pixar collaboration with Khan Academy.
Khan Academy, founded in 2007 by Bangladeshi-American educator Sal Khan, is a not-for-profit org dedicated to providing free online educational courses, spanning preschool learning, math, biology, chemistry, physics, economics, finance, history and more. – Reuters/Variety/Todd Spangler
