When Emron Grover was growing up in Draper, and when he attended at Brigham Young University, he had two passions: art and computers.
“Growing up, I wanted to be an artist. I was an artist drawing, everywhere, everything,” Grover said in a recent interview. But in his teens, as the internet took off, he went the more technical route and enrolled at BYU, where he started out as a computer-science major.
“Little did I know that this mix of artistic and technical was exactly what I needed to excel at 3-D animation,” he said.
Grover has excelled, working for the past 10 years at Pixar Animation Studios — starting as an intern on “Up” and going on to work “Brave,” “Inside Out,” “Finding Dory” and now “Coco,” which opens in theaters nationwide on Wednesday, Nov. 22.
(Courtesy Pixar Animation Studios / Walt Disney Pictures) Miguel is the 12-year-old hero of "Coco," a music-filled story by Pixar Animation Studios centering on the Mexican holiday of Dia de los Muertos. The movie opens Nov. 22, 2017.
In 2003, when Grover returned from his LDS mission in the Czech Republic, he was told by a friend that BYU had launched an animation department, and he jumped right in. Even then, though, “I went back and forth,” going from character animation to the technical side.
He found what “happened to be a perfect blend of artistic and technical” in cloth simulation.
On “Coco,” Grover held the title of “cloth lead,” meaning he’s in charge of the department that figures out how to make the characters’ simulated costumes look like real clothing.
“It’s just like geometry, it’s all made of triangles,” Grover said of “cloth” shown in computer animation. And in a movie where many of the characters are skeletons — departed relatives crossing over during the Mexican celebration of Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead — making the clothes drape right gets rather tricky.
Pixar’s computer simulators are modeled on real physics, Grover said, so objects and characters move as close to reality as possible. But the characters are cartoon caricatures, so “we have to do a lot of cheats to make the real physics do a lot of unreal things,” he said.
(Courtesy Disney/Pixar) Young Miguel (left, voiced by Anthony Gonzalez), an aspiring musician who accidentally crosses over into the Land of the Dead, learns he needs a blessing from a family member to return to the Land of the Living, in a scene from Disney/Pixar's animated "Coco."
Take the main character, Miguel, a Mexican boy who accidentally crosses into the Land of the Dead while trying to learn about his idol, the long-dead musical star Ernesto de la Cruz. Miguel wears a red hoodie, and Grover and his team put in lots of labor to make that hoodie look natural on the character’s exaggerated frame.
“When he doesn’t have [his hood] up, we want it to look exactly like [a regular hoodie], but when you actually put it on his head, it has to be way bigger than that,” Grover said, adding that his team had to put in 61 variations to make the hoodie look right.
For the skeletal Land of the Dead characters, things got even trickier. The skeletons are all anatomically correct, “but we didn’t want the cloth to fill up that space and look all gaunt,” Grover said. So more programming tricks were used.
Ernesto, for example, “actually has virtual underwear, and pillows inside of his pelvis,” Grover said.
Director Lee Unkrich, Grover said, “really wanted to see the contrast, the difference between human and skeleton.” The crew even had a mantra: “Embrace the skeleton.”
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