Help:Gallery

Gallery pages are exceedingly popular in wiki culture. No less especially when focusing on entertainment franchises, for which artwork and screenshots are both abundant and easily accessible, they can often lose direction, becoming little more than a haphazard collection of loosely related images. Used purposefully however, they provide the perfect avenue for building transformative content around the collection and preservation of assets.

Our gallery pages exist within a dedicated Gallery: namespace. Inspired by the Super Mario Wiki, this is to emphasize their content as fully distinct from that of the base subject page, and which ideally can even stand on its own.

Artwork

Page sample from the FH14 Cars: Hometown Heroes portfolio, demonstrating how "CG characters" (personality poses) and 2D "vector characters" are typically both generated for a given style set.

Character art should be ordered by date of creation, with respect to the specific project for which it was created. An image of Vitaly Petrov should only be labeled Cars 2 if it was verifiably present during the original marketing run for the film - otherwise, identify the exact style concept of debut e.g. Cars: Speed Circuit (2013). Captions welcome any valuable information available about the image, including specific artists who contributed, context of their generation, etc.

If there are at least 2-3 of each type detailed below, they should probably be sorted into distinct sections.

CG/3D art

An independent artwork drawn and rendered using the official Pixar model rig is called a personality pose. They are central to marketing, and strive to capture the essence of a character in one single composition. Batches are traditionally produced for each project, and assembled into a full kit for press and licensee distribution. After primary marketing for a film has died down, Disney Global Creative frequently develops style guides and branding portfolios for sake of refresh and to continue developing the property - For Cars (and likely other franchises), existing personality poses often are lifted and re-decorated to fit new theming. Other new poses are consistently generated more or less each year, seemingly in direct conjunction with Mattel and characters they choose for their die-cast model lines.

Known leaks of style documents refer to traditional character poses as merely "CG characters" (see left). As many such artworks derive from the films' core marketing runs, both terms are acceptable to use interchangeably. There are odd situations where an isolated, CG character representation might not be considered a personality pose – namely film cutouts a la 2007's Car Finder Game, or the in-universe racer poses displayed on Natalie Certain's show in Cars 3.

2D/Vector art

Most if not all branding guides which incorporate 3D art, also include a "vector" counterpart - sometimes styles even exclusively feature 2D art. Book illustrations should not go here but in "other appearances."

Final Frames

An iconic Final Frame from Cars (2006). Its composition does not match the film, but concisely represents the opening scene: The setting, characters, even their personalities and relation to one another.

A Final Frame is Emeryville lingo for an isolated instance of CG animation, which encapsulates the premise or theme(s) of a given scene. Much like a personality pose, they are created for the marketing and promotion phase of a project. They are typically compiled into packages, from which they can be issued to licensees, collaborators, press kits, and so on.

At a glance, a Final Frame may seem indistinct from—and sometimes, technically is—an ordinary screen-grab from the direct work, clear only of motion blur. Many times though, the exact presentation is absent from the film, or modified from its original state. Unwavering loyalty to the final product would understandably limit attempts to capture a multi-frame medium in a single image; Rarely will "alterations" do other than help deliver the intended message.

Pages of any media for which Final Frames are created should collect them in a dedicated section, ordered (to the best of ability) by date of first publication. If (ever) possible, they should also identify the precise kit to which they belong. Note as these sets are not meant to be public, we will often be trying only to re-construct them based on what knowledge we can gather.

Individual subject pages seldom benefit from a dedicated section, primarily because our approach to screenshots (as detailed in the next section) often incorporates them anyway. In any instance of co-existing, the ★ {{FF}} icon should precede the title or caption text, to identify it as such. 1:1 Final Frames should be placed here over the regular screenshots section. These sorts may require even stronger sourcing than usual: Much easier to notice when one isn't in the film than vice versa. Don't assume any article with an image makes it a Final Frame.

Screenshots

Screenshots meanwhile are viewer-generated copies of film frames. As we use them, the end goal is not to collect each and every possible capture - other sites exist for that purpose, and unlike pieces designed for single-frame view, it's rare an adjacent frame accomplishes what its predecessor alone could not. In short, we are pickier than normal about what screenshots are allowed, and in what situations.

Key frames

A key frame is our invented term to refer a sufficiently notable screenshot of mainline Pixar animation. On principle, gallery pages require at least some degree of amplitude with regard to potential content: A prerequisite which inherently draws first subjects with large roles, or at the very least screen time in franchise installments. A background character (say, Costanzo Della Corsa) benefits from showing every scene in which they hide – but bring that framework over to Lightning McQueen, we'll find ourselves pirating every film in the form of a shot-by-shot recreation. Needless to say, we have some trimming to do. But how? What makes any screenshot more "meaningful" than another?

All screenshots of the Cars and Planes feature and short films must be accompanied by a citation of first-party reference material where it appears. What may first sound like pretentious overkill, actually lends a solid framework not only for weeding out the essentials, but for describing them as well. Many such material assign a brief, descriptive title to either the image directly, or the blurb which it illustrates: Please provide it whenever possible, quoted and with a page-specific citation, as to avoid wrongful self-attribution. Aforementioned "blurbs" should not be copied and do not necessarily need to be the basis for your own alternative.

If nothing else, studying how official media describes itself may provide useful information toward our own attempts to do so - not to mention our search algorithm. Please note that key frames do not need to be an exact, pixel-by-pixel match to their reference source – only the wider shot to which they pertain. That said, the margin of error may grow tighter the more specific an image's purpose: One covering an item or building tends to leave more leeway than where a very specific action or expression is central.

Currently, screenshot sections on pages for source media themselves (e.g. Gallery:Cars 2) are not allowed. They will be in the future, once a suitable ruleset can accommodate them.

Design variants

A design variant describes an officially recognized "version" of a character, most typically distinguished as such for merchandising purposes. Among those where memorabilia partly or fully drives interest in the franchise, one may wish to find where each one takes origin. A contributing image may be cropped to its focus if useful, but should take advantage of, as well as become priority location for, any existing "key frames" on the page.

Other categories

If beneficial, several other types of images often lend to interesting content:

• Posters
• Concept art
• Decals (relevant icons from style sets, graphics from the films, etc.)
• Game sprites and models

Each may be given more detailed rules in the future.