A new short film from Pixar is planned to premiere at SIGGRAPH this year, which is a five-day long conference that celebrates the latest innovations in technology, animation, and video games.
Purl is an eight-minute long short film that was created under Pixar’s experimental shorts program. The initiative commenced back in 2017 with the short film Smash and Grab, which also debuted at SIGGRAPH last year. Purl is directed by Kristen Lester, one of Pixar's story artists who has worked for them for five years.
The screening for Purl will be held on August 13th, followed by a panel featuring Kristen Lester, Steven Clay Hunter, David Lally, Matthew Silas, Farhez Rayani, and David Munier from Pixar.
The SIGGRAPH program guide depicts Purl as follows:
“Last year, SIGGRAPH ’17 featured “Smash and Grab: Off the Rails Filmmaking at Pixar,” kicking off the results of a new, experimental storytelling initiative at Pixar Animation Studios. This initiative enables new creative voices and explores new storytelling techniques, pipelines, and workflows in production. The program’s second short film, Purl, directed by Kristen Lester, continues to raise the bar for the program, and creates another example of what’s possible when filmmakers are granted this type of creative freedom within a fully functioning studio. Purl is an eight-minute short film that explores the use of “digital backlot” management, an evolution of Smash and Grab’s motion capture application, shareable animation libraries, our real-time shading software Flow, and production practices that allow a busy feature animation studio to continue telling even more stories. This talk looks at the team’s process in creating Purl, as well as the impact of maintaining the initiative at Pixar.”
More information about Vancouver’s SIGGRAPH conference, which takes place this year from August 12th to the 16th, can be found here.