south Hillsborough Library
south Hillsborough Library
On December 18th, South students in kindergarten through second grade had the pleasure of listening to Mr. Arjun Rihan talk about his first book, The Wrong Stripes, a story about a zebra named Rudy who is concerned about his stripes and is trying to find out where he fits in.
Mr. Rihan shared his journey of becoming a visual artist. His journey started in India, and students loved seeing Mr. Rihan’s elementary school photo (where he was dressed in a uniform but through his body language he showed personal flair and style!). As a boy, he liked superheroes, and he shared illustrations he had created of Captain America, the Green Arrow, and Electra as a boy.
While attending college at Stanford, Mr. Rihan became interested in photography and video games. He attended film school at USC, and students enjoyed the clip from one of his graduate school films, Abridged, where the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge make eyes at each other! Today, Mr. Rijan works for the Director of Photography at Pixar where he puts together scenes for Pixar movies using a virtual camera. South students were delighted to see how hand drawn sketches for individual scenes from the recent Pixar movie Coco (about a boy named Miguel who takes a trip to the world of the dead) are refined and transformed by Mr. Rihan and his team using computers. He also shared that it takes about six years to make a Pixar movie.
Pixar encourages its employees to pursue passion projects in their free time, and Mr. Rihan took a class on writing books for children. He liked the new medium for how he could share his visual ideas because he believes that together the words and the pictures do a dance. He worked on and off for five years to create The Wrong Stripes; the version that was finally published was the 12th version! South students look forward to a possible sequel about Rudy and his friends on the African savannah.
Arjun Rihan--First Time Writer and Pixar Creative Genius
Saturday, February 17, 2018