Last month I had the honor of being part of a special group of bloggers who went on a special tour of Disney Animation Studios to learn all about how Wreck-It Ralph was created and so much more.

It was an amazing day and I have so much to share with you.

First I was given the cutest press pass ever!  I mean how cute is Vanellope Von Schweetz?!?!
Then were were ushered into the screening room where Wreck-It Ralph was introduced to us by Director Rich Moore and Producer Clark Spencer.  It was such an amazing experience to gain insights about a movie right from the people who created it.  I love how the Director, Rich Moore said that “Movies are never finished.  We  just release them.”   I’ll be posting more from our interview session with Rich Moore and Clark Spencer soon so check back.
So back to the movie.  It was phenomenal!  The version we saw was a screening version so it wasn’t 100% complete.  There were scenes that weren’t completely finished being animated and parts did not have the final music scores and sounds with them, and yet I LOVED every minute of it!  It was amazing to see a movie in several stages of development to really see what goes into making a movie.  I can’t wait to see the final version and I am excited that I will be taking my family to a sneak preview locally this week.  I know my children and husband are going to love it as much as I do.  It comes out in theaters on November 2nd so be sure to take your whole family!  I will be sharing my review of the movie in the upcoming weeks so make sure to check it out.

After the movie we were divided into 2 groups.  One group had an interview session with Wreck-It Ralph Director Rich Moore and Producer Clark Spencer while the second group went into another screening room to meet Producer Kristina Reed and see a screening of the movie short, Paperman.   After our session was done the groups switched.  I will be posting more about Paperman and our interview sessions soon, but again I loved being able to put a faces to the movies.  I always used to get up as soon as the movie credits rolled and gave little thought or consideration to all those names scrolling by.  After meeting with so many amazingly talented people at Disney Animation Studios and realizing just how many people it takes to create a movie, I will never look at that list of names as just a list of names again.  Each one of those names is of someone who had a hand in the magic of making that movie.   And there are MANY, MANY individual people and teams who work on each movie.
It’s not ALL work at the Disney Animation Studios.  The team for each movie that is in development works in their own “pod” area that is themed based on that movie to give the team the feeling of the movie.  
The Wreck-It Ralph “pod” was complete with classic video games.  
I even got to try my hand at playing an actual Wreck-It Ralph game.  I can’t wait until they come out with the version for Wii.  My kids are already asking me to add it to their holiday/birthday list.
 I just love this piece of Wreck-It Ralph artwork. 
Check out how many different “versions” of Ralph were considered.

It must be easy to be inspired working in such a creative atmosphere!

It didn’t take long for inspiration to hit me among all the candy they had out for our Sugar Rush race car building competition.  Look at all the amazing cars my fellow bloggers and I created:
I’m a little embarrassed to show you my sad looking car but in my defense I made it to have a steering wheel that really turned and wheels that really spun on axles.  I was going for function over style.  LOLCan you imagine having all this candy on your wall at work in the name of “research”?

Next we were treated to 3 special learning sessions.   I started with an animated acting demo with Art Director, Mike Gabriel and Visual Development Artist,  Lorelay Bove.  They told us just how much research goes into making a movie.  One of the worlds of the Wreck-It Ralph takes place in a game made with lots of candy.  They art department actual went on field trips to candy stores to research what candy styles would look best and they choose the colors for those scenes based on colors found in Japanese candies.  Imagine going on a candy field trip for your job!  YUM!
When it was time to decide how to create the buildings for the Sugar Rush parts of the movie, the artists went on a trip to Lorelay’s hometown in Spain to take pictures of some of the beautiful architecture to get ideas.  The art department also went to visit an automobile factory to learn how cars are made because they needed to create a candy car factory for the movie.  Nothing was left to chance or taken for granted.  Everything was researched, researched, researched.  And then the photos were studied again and again to see how the light reflects on certain parts of the building or how a character’s hair would sit.  Every little detail is scrutinized and the designs go through MANY redesigns over a period of years before it gets to the final movie.  It’s not all fun and games but all of those “research trips” sound like fun.

My next session was a Drawing Demo with Head of Animation on Wreck-It Ralph, Renato dos Anjos and Animator, Kira Lehtomaki.  Kira Lehtomaki showed us how scenes are created using the computer.  Each scene goes through many changes before it reaches the final movie.  One 30 second clip can take weeks to create.  I was interested to learn that the animators actually videotape themselves acting out scenes so they can play them back and see how the animation should look.  Then Renato dos Anjos gave us a fun lesson on how to make Wreck-It Ralph’s hands and Vanellope Von Schweetz.  It was fun learning how to draw but as you can see from my drawing above, I’ll be sticking to blogging. 😉

Shhhh, sneak peek…….For the third session we went to the recording studio to learn how they add the voices to the movies and we even got to create our own voice over.  More on that in a few days when I will share the video of me making the voice over clip and the actual finished clip.  No, I won’t be in the actual movie BUT this was pretty cool nonetheless.  
After our sessions we all met up and went to the Disney store on site to make some purchases.  I won’t say what I got because my daughters read my blog and I got them some presents that I am not telling them about.  😉
We finished our fun filled day outside in Disney’s own Walk of Fame.
 “Like” WRECK-IT RALPH on Facebook
“Follow” WRECK-IT Ralph on Twitter
Visit the official site
Wreck-It Ralph comes to theaters November 2nd, 2012.

Disclosure: Thank you to Disney who paid for transportation, food, and accommodations for this event.  No other compensation was given.  All opinions are 100% my own.