Several weeks ago I went to a math conference in Banff, Alberta. Firstly, I highly recommend the Canadian Rockies if you get a chance to visit. Not only, are they striking giant mountains with sweeping glacial vallies, they differ from the American Rockies in that they are mostly sendimentary (sandstone and limestone). The limestone means that there are all these trees growing out of the rock in bizarrely improbably locations on the montains, and both kinds of sendimentary rock mean that there are these sawlike erosian patterns along the peaks, and strange lines running accross all the mountains.

Coincidentally, at the same time that we were there, there was a conference for animated story-boarders. I think it was Calarts graduating students and proffessionals. The first night at dinner, afterwards there was a speaker in the dining hall. It took quite a while for us to figure out who he was or what the conference was, but as it turns out he is a top story-boarder for Pixar.

For those of us who didn't know, story-boarding is the step between the script and actual animation. In a live-action film much of the interesting interpretations are done by actors. But in animation, it's the story-boarders who decide which characters will look which direction, what the scuffle will actually look like, which schools of fish will go accross the screen in which order, etc.

This man was the head of story for Finding Nemo. Anyway, the most intersting thing I found out was an answer to the question Alec and I have long asked: "Why are all Pixar films so good, and every other film with that many writers and directors suck?" This guy said that the biggest difference between Pixar and the other large animation studios he'd worked at (in television, and with Dreamworks), is that at Pixar there's always one particular person who has written the story and is responsible for holding everything up to their vision. The people making the film know whose story it is, and what story they're trying to tell. It isn't done by committee even if the credits were done by committee (before The Incredibles).