Ratatouille - Synesthesia - HD - FX Animation by Michel Gagné

In the Fall of 2006, I was contacted by Brad Bird to create a series of animated vignettes for his movie Ratatouille. The concept was to design and animate abstract representations of what the character was tasting. Once we had agreed on a general direction for the visuals, a music score was composed. The dialogue and music was mixed and I was provided with the soundtracks. Using my spreadsheets as guideline, I moved on to the next phase: Hand drawings the animation. Around 1400 drawings were created for the animation. Each one was scanned, painted and composited using two softwares: Animo and Photoshop. Once all the drawings were scanned, I started compositing everything in Animo Director, adding blurs, shimering effects, and various digital filters. Each of the animation clips were sent to Brad Bird for comments and approval. Once the pieces were done and approved, they were rendered as a set of Tiffs (with alpha channel) and sent to Pixar for final compositing with the