The 15th Annual Visual Effects Society Awards took place on Tuesday evening with Pixar artists taking home top honors in Outstanding Animated Performance for Hank, Finding Dory. Pixar Animation Studios received a total of four nominations including Outstanding Visual Effects in an Animated Feature (“Kubo and the Two Strings”), Outstanding Created Environment in an Animated Feature (“Moana” – Motunui Island), and Outstanding Effects Simulations in an Animated Feature (“Moana”).
The artists honored with the VES statuette for Outstanding Animation Performance for Hank in Finding Dory were — Jonathan Hoffman, Steven Clay Hunter, Mark Piretti, and Audrey Wong.
Although we would have loved to have seen Finding Dory take home a few more accolades, we completely agree with the win for Hank. As we pointed out in our “Getting Geeky With Finding Dory” post in May 2016, Hank contained a fair amount of technical and artistic challenges — for example:
- Hank had 11,041 rigging prims, whereas the average character has about 20.
- There were approximately 118 weeks of time spent building and articulating Hank.
- It took an average of 22 weeks shading Hank — the average character takes less than 8 weeks.
Also, the studio readily admitted that Hank was the most complex character that Pixar had ever created and there’s even a special feature on the Blu-ray titled, The Octopus That Nearly Broke Pixar — so you know he was quite the challenge.
Of course, it doesn’t matter how technically great a character is or how great they may look, but the team also executed his movements brilliantly, and their hard work definitely paid off —Congratulations to the Finding Dory team on this well-deserved VES Award.
