From Blender to Pixar
For Colin Levy, opensource software led to a job at one of the biggest animation studios in the world. Having started experimenting with Blender while he was still in high school, by 2006 he was helping out at CG industry conference SIGGRAPH, where he met the Blender Foundation’s Ton Roosendaal.
“I didn’t interact much with Ton at the time,” says Levy. “But I guess he kept me on his radar, because three years later, I got an email from him, asking if I’d be interested in working on his next project.”
That project was Sintel, the third of the Foundation’s ‘open movies’ – short films made entirely using open-source software, then released under a Creative Commons licence. Partly a showcase for the software and partly a way to develop new tools, Sintel was also the Foundation’s most ambitious production to date – and, with a budget of €400,000, then the second most expensive animated film in Dutch history.
“It came completely out of the blue,” says Levy, who was midway through his studies at Savannah College of Art and Design at the time. “I was lucky: it could have been a foolish decision to hire me.”
The story of a young woman who adopts a baby dragon, Sintel isn’t a typical comedy short. The 15-minute animation explores what Levy describes as “some pretty deep themes – motherhood and loss and death, friendship and letting go”.
It’s also very beautiful. Although clearly the work of a small team (just 14 people at peak), some of the shots in Sintel wouldn’t look out of place in a Hollywood production.
Pixar evidently thought the young director had promise: Levy was accepted for an internship at the studio. “It was actually the third time I’d applied,” he says. “The previous time, as a sophomore in college, I had the worst interview of my life. By the last round, I’d grown a lot, both as a person and artistically. But the main difference was that I had Sintel on my reel, and it definitely wasn’t just a student short.”
It wasn’t the fact that Levy had directed Sintel that interested Pixar. He’d also done the layout work on the film: choreographing the action of the 3D characters within virtual sets, and composing shots to tell the story cinematically. It was those skills that got him the internship – and ultimately, a fulltime job.
For the past five years, Levy has worked as a layout artist for the studio on movies like MonstersUniversity, eventually becoming director of photography on LAVA, the animated short that Pixar released alongside InsideOut.
He also continues to use Blender in his own work. On his current side project – an as-yet-untitled live-action sci-fi short – all the visual effects are being created using it. “I still really enjoy working in Blender,” he says. “It’s a fabulous tool for short film projects with a dozen or so artists.”
“I feel so indebted to Ton, and to the Foundation, and to Sintel,” Levy concludes. “I don’t think I’d be at Pixar today if Blender didn’t exist.”