I love passing along opportunities to meet Pixarians!
This time you might just get to see Jay Shuster of Cars and WALL•E fame. The art director on Cars 2: World Grand Prix will be giving a lecture called "Pixar: A Design Story" presented by the University of Oklahoma.
The event is free of charge and will be held at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. "A Design Story" is scheduled for next Thursday at 3 PM in the Mary Eddy and Fred Jones Auditorium. If you’re a local, don’t even think about missing this free presentation, it’s sure to be good!
To learn more about Shuster and the museum, check out this article from NewsOK.
Last modified: August 29, 2009
Jay wound up having two presentations in the area, one in Norman, one in OKC. I went to the latter at 7 tonight.
It was a great presentation, chronicling pretty much every outstanding detail of Shuster’s journey to his current art director status.
A lot of artwork that I had never seen was shown off (both for Pixar material, and sketches of his own initiative), as well as some cool behind-the-scenes video/pics of life at Pixar.
There were several stabs at George Lucas which were hilarious: “Star Wars changed my life… Episode 1 changed it back.”
There was even a side-by-side comparison of Wall-E and Johnny 5 to explain how dissimilar they were. On the other hand, he did acknowledge that the triangle shaped tire tread was pretty close -this got a lot of laughs.
As I was getting his autograph at the end, I asked him what he thought about the Marvel acquisition and the accompanying Pixar rumors. He replied: “Confused.” He didn’t seem to think that a Marvel/Pixar crossover was a realistic thing to expect, what with Pixar’s reputation of brand-creation to uphold.
Thanks to Pixarplanet for the heads up!