Those wonderful Spline Doctors have posted The Virgin Voyage in it's entirety (something like 3 minutes and 4 seconds). The short animation was made by students up Pixar way and showcases the talents of animation's next generation.
There's no music (yet) and the sound FX are incomplete, but visually, this is the full monty.
Personally, I think it's pretty darn good and that you'll be sorry if you don't download and watch it.
Lee Unkrich has spoken to Entertainment Weekly about Toy Story 3 and let slip some fascinating details.
For example, the film isn't due for release until 2010, not 2009 as was previously reported. This means that another, different film from Pixar will come following W.A.L-E. Looking at all available evidence, this one is most likely to be Pete Docter's new film. It appears to have been in development for at least a couple of years now and is still completely and utterly secret - apart from the fact that, according to comments in an old Splinecast at least, the lead character is a human adult.
Michael Arndt has been working with Pixar on the Toy Story 3 script since before Little Miss Sunshine was sold at Sundance last year: those Pixar folk, they can smell talent half a world away, I tell you.
Four clips of student work from upcoming Pixar animators are online now, courtesy of the Spline Doctors.
Ben Kerr's clip, Decision, is an example of the 'subtext from a hat' exercise, in which he was allocated a line of dialogue and a randomly matched emotion, which he then had to capture in the performance's subtext.
Curran Giddens' Crazy, Julie Choi's hilarious snippet, and Chris Turner's wonderful example of animated acting are all the result of the 'two person dialogue' assignment.
As we can see, the calibre of student - and of teaching - at Pixar remains consistently impressive. Turner's might be my favourite piece but Ghostbusters fans will get a real kick out of Giddens'.
[EDIT: There's more on Giddens' offical site, where you can also find links to plenty of other animators and their showreels. These are the Doug Sweetlands of the future]
I've commented before, many a time, about how the average level of filmmaking talent at Pixar is almost unfeasibly high. Of course, that's because every member of staff there, every animator and every story artists, is trained, nurtured, taken seriously and assisted in reaching their full potential.
Now you can see just how talented the students of a Pixar animation class are. We're still waiting for fully rendered version of the whole thing (coming soon!) but The Spline Doctors have popped up an animation clip from The Virgin Voyage, a 'Level 3 class' exercise. Of course, it's wonderful stuff and I recommend you watch it right away, lest it suddenly vanish.
