Monsters University back k

The school year officially kicks-off at Monsters University June 21. Long before acceptance letters were even mailed out, the filmmakers up at Pixar Animation Studios were already hard at work. Even before animators begin to perfect Sulley’s blue fur or create what seems like a never-ending assortment of colorful scales for a University of diverse monsters, the story team was already busy creating the blueprint for the film.

“We’ve been in story for about three or four years on ‘Monsters University’, ” recounts story supervisor Kelsey Mann. Mann oversees a team of storyboard artists whose role it is to visually mock-up drawings of exactly what is happening in a film as the story begins to take shape. Mann describes it as “shadowing” director Dan Scanlon’s idea of what he wants for the film, ultimately creating an almost comic book-form of what the finished product will look like.

To get all those details about the look and feel of the film’s location and what stories might be found there, the story team starts their research as early as possible. “Half of our job is what we do before we get the script. The other half is executing the storyboarding of that script, ” Mann describes of the process. Some productions take Pixar writers to the Scottish Highlands, others to the sewers of Paris, others under the sea. This time, Mann and team found themselves back in school. If Monsters University looks or feels at all like your alma mater, that’s exactly what they were going for: “We took a lot of trips to different universities and different colleges just to come up with ideas and try to capture the feeling of a place.”