Toy Story - CGI making of (1995) HD

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Working on Toy Story was kind of neat because, for us, we were trying to figure out how to take something we had only done in very, very small amounts, short films, TV commercials, and make it 75 minutes long. And, you know, the story was like, wait a minute here, this is a much more difficult thing than I thought. [00:00:27] Speaker 2: When we started with Disney, they had people who had had a lot of experience making films, and they had been through it, they knew what to do. [00:00:34] Speaker 3: So we looked to them as, initially, as they're going to school us, they're going to teach us how to work. [00:00:39] Speaker 4: Here's like the first year on the film was like, we would board a sequence, and then Tom Schumacher and Peter Schneider would fly up, and they would give us tons of notes on the boards, changes to make, ways to improve it to make it better. And then we would crank, turn around those notes, and then we'd fly down to Disney. Pin up our boards, and they'd give us more notes. And we'd even make changes that night, and then, like, at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m. the next morning, very early mornings, we would pitch it to Jeffrey Katzenberg. And then he would rip them all apart. [00:01:11] Speaker 5: Jeffrey Katzenberg, who at the time was chairman of the Disney Studios and had great interest in animation, would always be pushing for what he called edge. And the Woody character became wildly unappealing at one point. [00:01:24] Speaker 6: Uh, Woody? Oh, what? Woody, I'm having a little difficulty. Slink, how hard can it be? [00:01:30] Speaker 4: We assembled this first, it was like maybe first half of the movie on story reels. And then we went down to Disney to screen it. [00:01:44] Speaker 1: And I tell you, I sat there and I was pretty much embarrassed with what was on the screen. I had made it, I directed everybody to do this, but it was like, it was, it was a story filled with the most unhappy, mean people. [00:02:04] Speaker 7: We're, no! All right, all right, all right! Save your batteries, people! [00:02:11] Speaker 5: Jeffrey said, well, why is this so terrible to me in the hallway? I said, well, because it's not their movie anymore. It's completely not the movie that John set out to make. [00:02:21] Speaker 4: Everything kind of fell apart at that point, you know. [00:02:25] Speaker 1: Disney forced us to shut production down. And they wanted us to lay people off, and we refused. [00:02:33] Speaker 8: We were getting threats that because it didn't work well, that you would have to go back down. We were all going to have to go down south and board, re-board the film under their supervision. [00:02:41] Speaker 1: And I said, just, you know, give us two weeks, and we'll turn things around. [00:02:45] Speaker 4: It was really very scary, and I think that's where we really bonded as a group. [00:02:53] Speaker 1: I turned to our guys and I said, let's just make the movie we want to make. We worked day and night, Andrew, Pete, Joe, myself, our story team, our editorial team. [00:03:06] Speaker 8: And so we just really went 100% with our gut. Everybody's helping everybody else. [00:03:10] Speaker 4: It was like we became one mind in a way. I just remember laughing a lot and drawing like crazy. We were drawing for our lives. I remember we got this, like, frenetic overdrive way of working. [00:03:27] Speaker 1: We learned to do the first pass so rough because we collectively would get all these ideas once we saw it up. And we'd change pins. And we'd do what we were looking at. [00:03:35] Speaker 9: And we'd do what we were looking at. Right, right. [00:03:36] Speaker 1: The other thing that was really important for me after that Black Friday screening was to make Woody likable. [00:03:43] Speaker 9: It was a real education to just filmmaking for us that, like, just because a character is, has a problem or he's even not a likable person doesn't mean that they have to be an unlikable person on the surface. [00:03:52] Speaker 1: Right, because our goal was to make Woody so likable. Then when he started kind of becoming a jerk, he was like, oh, Woody, don't make those choices instead of, what a jerk. I don't care about this guy. [00:04:03] Speaker 5: It's not always bad in this process to have things not work. When you have these crashing things that happen, the rebuilding allows the thing to be so much better. [00:04:13] Speaker 1: After this experience, we learned a lot of things. The most important thing we learned was to trust our own instinct and to really to make the movies we wanted to make. Okay, now this is the reel that we showed on Black Friday before we re-envision Woody's character. It's, you know, it's bad, you know, it's really bad. It's kind of rough to watch these days, but hey, for history's sake, I think it's important to see, you know. So this takes place right before they go to Pizza Planet, and all of the other toys are placing bets is to see who Andy's going to take, either Woody or Buzz Lightyear. [00:05:02] Speaker 10: Woody! I'd just like to wish you luck. I know you'd do the same for me. Oh, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, there you go. [00:05:10] Speaker 7: Whoa! Whoa! What? What, what, what, what, what, what, what are you, what's everybody looking at? What? Hey, he slipped. I tried to, he, I couldn't hold that, it wasn't that, he slipped. [00:05:28] Speaker 6: Hey, come on, I don't see him. [00:05:31] Speaker 7: I think he fell onto the street. He was as good as roadkill. He ain't going to Pizza now. [00:05:37] Speaker 11: Woody, you deliberately threw Buzz out the window. [00:05:40] Speaker 12: Hey, it's a toy, toy world. [00:05:43] Speaker 11: Cowboy, where is your honor, dirtbag? You are an absolute disgrace. You don't deserve to wear a ten-gallon hat on your pint-sized head. Men, search and rescue. I want a medevac team on the double. Hustle up. Move it, move it, move it. Hey, hey, spuds for brains. [00:05:59] Speaker 7: What do you think you're doing? Off the bed. Hey. Off the bed. You gonna make us, Woody? No, he is. Slinky, slink, slinky, slinky! Get up here and do your job! [00:06:16] Speaker 6: Are you deaf? I said take care of them! Uh, I'm sorry, Woody, but I have to agree with them. I don't think what you did was right. What? Am I hearing correctly? [00:06:28] Speaker 7: You don't think I was right? Who said your job was to think, spring wiener? [00:06:33] Speaker 13: Well, I just thought that you... [00:06:34] Speaker 7: Just use this vast reserve of brain power to consider this for a moment. If it wasn't for me, Andy wouldn't pay any attention to you at all. In fact, my sketchy friend, you would have been hauled away to Goodwill a long time ago, so shut your mouth and get them off the bed! Do it. Now, slink, or I'm throwing you off! You're gonna have to throw the two of us off! Make that three. Count me in. No, Woody. You get your butt off the bed. Yeah, I don't believe this. Are you... Are you threatening me? Yeah. Get off the bed, ranch hand, or we're throwing you off. Huh! You and what army? Here he is, that dirtbag! Frag him! Move, move, move! Take no prisoners! Go for him! Go for him! Go for him! [00:07:20] Speaker 6: Kill! Kill! Kill! One! Two! Stop! Don't throw him off the bed! Yeah! Throw him out the window like he did to Bud! Come on, we go! Come on, we go! [00:07:37] Speaker 1: The goal of this group has been to do an animated feature from the day I started. [00:07:42] Speaker 2: This was the holy grail of computer graphics, to get to the point where you can do the feature film. [00:07:47] Speaker 14: It was the first feature any of us had had any weighty creative control over. We just never thought about that because that would just get too intimidating. [00:07:58] Speaker 15: The biggest thing this film does to advance computer animation, I believe, is it tells a story. [00:08:04] Speaker 6: You are a toy! [00:08:07] Speaker 16: This film is driven by characters and story first. And even though it is the first ever computer animated film, the technique that we're using is secondary to the story that we want to tell. [00:08:15] Speaker 5: I think if there had been another movie done in this technology, you'd still feel like you were seeing the first of this kind of film because of what John does with his characters. It's a very different thing. [00:08:29] Speaker 1: I remember the moment when I first saw computer animation of any kind. I was working at Disney as an animator and two very close friends of mine were working on Tron. And the moment I saw it, I was like, "This is it. This is the next step, the next plateau. This is the future." I knew that computer animation wasn't a whole new medium. It was just new tools within the medium of animation. So all the things that I learned as far as principles of animation and film grammar still apply. And so when we started working with it and making short films, the most important thing to every one of my films was story and the characters. That drove everything. [00:09:13] Speaker 2: What we wanted to do was every year do another piece and keep advancing the state of our animation tools so that he could do better and better animation. And that's the way we all looked at it. He was part of the development team. [00:09:29] Speaker 1: I had all these things that I wanted the system to be able to do. And Tintoy was the very first use of the new animation system and the new rendering system. They went on to be RenderMan. Also with Tintoy, I first started developing this notion of a juxtaposition with the audience. It's where you can show them something that they are so familiar with. And then all of a sudden you make them look at it from a different point of view, like looking at a cute little baby from a toy's perspective. From a toy, that's a monster. And we were inspired from Tintoy with the ideas that we had developed in there of toys being alive. So we came up with the idea for the buddy picture with two toys. In the original idea, Tinney was on a family vacation with his owner and he gets lost at a rest stop. There he is found by a junk man who chucks him into the back of his truck. In the back of his truck is this old ventriloquist dummy and they decide to stick together. But at the end, they finally end up in kind of a toy heaven at a preschool where they'll never get lost or never get outgrown. But then the storyline changed to a kid's room and the kid gets a new toy for his birthday and is brought into the room with all the old toys. But it didn't make sense that an old fashioned Tin Toy like Tinney was would become a kid's new favorite toy. So we had to come up with our own action figure. The goal was to make Buzz the toy that any boy would just die to have. We actually went through all of our favorite toys and added everything we could think of. And everybody had their own coolest toy, but we tried to incorporate as many things as we could into one toy. We started out with the name Lunar Larry, but then it evolved to Tempest from Morph and ultimately became Buzz Lightyear. Woody, the older toy, was based on here, was based on him. This is my Casper from when I was a little boy. This is probably 37 years old and see he has a pull string. See, that's "Can I stay with you?" It's like a parent understanding their child's, you know, words. See, that's "I'm a friendly ghost." [00:11:50] Speaker 14: We felt it makes sense that Woody doesn't look immediately like a kid's favorite toy and that he's a little bit more antiquated. [00:11:57] Speaker 1: Then that made us think, "Well, maybe the old toy shouldn't be a ventriloquist dummy with top hat and tails." It was Bud Lucky that said, "Well, why don't you make him a cowboy?" And I thought, "That's perfect. You've got the frontier of space and then the frontier of the west." And so, for a while, he was a ventriloquist dummy that was a cowboy. [00:12:19] Speaker 3: We did these tests early on of Buzz and Woody, A, to test the models, the puppets themselves. You know, how do they move? Are we going to be able to use this model through a whole feature film? But then, B, and more importantly, what is this character all about? How does the inner personality that we've created in the storyboard get expressed through movement? We were just trying to find the character, basically. [00:12:43] Speaker 1: We made this test because a lot of people thought that an audience would not sit through 70 minutes of computer animation. People were used to hand-drawn animation, and I knew that when our imagery was lit, textured, and rendered, and rendered. No one had ever seen anything like this before. It had the feeling like you could reach up there and touch those toys. And that's what we wanted to show the Disney folks and others, what Toy Story was really going to look like. And once we showed it, all the doubts went away. [00:13:24] Speaker 17: Hi, pal. What you doing? I'm Kempis from Moore. [00:13:27] Speaker 18: Yeah, what's this button? Say, you weren't thinking of flying, were you? Well... You know, Andy loves toys that can fly. Really? Well then, to infinity and beyond. [00:13:42] Speaker 19: You know, Andy loves toys that he can find. [00:13:47] Speaker 1: We knew that this was something that they hadn't done before. [00:13:51] Speaker 5: We've never made a buddy movie. We've never made a movie set with this level of contemporary human-type characters. [00:13:58] Speaker 1: Typically, a Disney film is fairy tales, retelling of fairy tales. [00:14:02] Speaker 5: So what we're doing with John is something we've never had the license to do before. [00:14:05] Speaker 14: Here's a chance to put our money where our mouth is and say, "Okay, you've been complaining about this feature and that feature, and if I were to do an animated feature, here you go, and let's do it." And, um, so we kind of took that attitude and, uh, and just did what we felt was right, regardless of if it bucked the system. [00:14:24] Speaker 12: I think I know what to do. We're going to have to break a few rules, but if it works, it'll help everybody. They took a line from Turner and Hooch, which was a movie I'd made for Disney, and they actually did have a small piece of computer animation, which was Woody, saying the line. It was kind of amazing. [00:14:42] Speaker 7: Oh, no, no, no, you're eating the car! Don't eat the car, not the car! Oh, you stupid dog! [00:14:52] Speaker 12: It fit. You know, if I had come in and seen something that didn't make quite as much sense, I don't know if I'd be doing the movie, but I saw, I saw Woody, and he talked like I did, so it all made perfect sense. Tim Allen, as the voice of Buzz Lightyear, [00:15:06] Speaker 1: he is really appealing, and he can play the macho guy, but with a soft underbelly, you know? [00:15:12] Speaker 11: No, no, no! Go, go! Just go! I'll catch up! [00:15:16] Speaker 10: I was actually acting in there a little bit. There's a whole bunch of... you hated it, though. [00:15:19] Speaker 1: It's very interesting, because in the beginning, Buzz Lightyear was much more superhero-like, much more Dudley Do-right. And when we started getting Tim in for the recording sessions, he was putting a spin on it that was much more realistic, so we evolved the character, and it's much better to where he is just like a cop. [00:15:37] Speaker 20: Watch yourself! Buzz! Who goes there? Do you know these life forms? Yes! They're Andy's toys. [00:15:44] Speaker 1: Every animator in his heart is a toy nut. Every animator is a child at heart. I mean, I think you have to be to be in this medium, and so you walk around Pixar, you walk around Disney, for that matter. Every desk is practically filled with toys. I think even if we were making a movie [00:16:00] Speaker 14: about whales, we would be talking about our toys in the off hours or at lunchtime every day. So we really picked probably the most apropos subject to be making a picture about. I mean, how good you can tell a story is so much about research, and every one of us is an authority on toys. We focused on each toy, [00:16:19] Speaker 1: and looked at the toy, studied the toy, thought about how it was manufactured with quality of plastic, whether it was a cheap toy, whether it was an expensive toy, all these things, and combined these together to draw the personality out of it, you know? Rex. How are you doing, Rex? We had a number of toy dinosaurs around, and they were like cheap plastic, puny arms, cheesy spray painting, you know, yet he's supposed to be this fearsome meat eater. So we thought, this is where the personality could come from, of a very neurotic, insecure dinosaur. [00:16:52] Speaker 6: I just don't think I can take that kind of rejection. Mr. Potato Head, his facial features fall off, [00:16:59] Speaker 1: and that's where his personality comes from. I mean, I think you would be mad at the world if your face kept falling off all day. One of the great moments in Toy Story is the green army man scene. Everybody knows these toys. There's a few, you know, basic characteristics that we had to have. One, gun barrels always bent. Two, they have the mold flashing, the bits of extra plastic around their head. Three, their feet attached to the base. So when we were putting green army men in our film, [00:17:30] Speaker 3: we had to have those three things. I got some old sneakers, I got a piece of plywood, and I nailed the shoes down to the board, and we tried walking in this thing and videotaped animators doing this. It was that experience and the analysis that allowed us to convincingly [00:17:48] Speaker 1: animate the green army men. While all this is going on, Ralph Eggleston and his amazing staff designed all the sets in the film. And we're talking about the neighborhood, the street, the trees, the leaves on the trees, the houses. One of the things we tried to do with this film [00:18:04] Speaker 15: was to remove it from its computer look. You have so many choices on the computer. It's not the choice. It's what you leave out. In a lot of ways, it's not what you put in because you have a bazillion colors. Do you really want to use every one of them? The thing that a computer does easiest is straight lines, and we have our share of straight lines because this is a film with a lot of architecture. But we tried to soften it by rounding the corners slightly here and there and using a lot of specialized [00:18:33] Speaker 1: lighting. What we wanted to do was make it believable. One of the things that makes Toy Story so unique is the collaboration between traditionally trained artists and animators and these amazing computer geniuses. In computer animation, you get nothing for free. Every object you see on the screen has to be created from scratch. We start with blueprints. We call them model packs and then that's given to a modeler and they create the model within the computer. My ship! And that's how we created the box [00:19:04] Speaker 21: that Buzz Lightyear came in. Blast! This will take weeks to repair. For organic shapes like Buzz's face, we get them in the computer a different way. I'm entering some data from the surface of this clay model. We want to accurately capture the shape of it by sampling points on the surface with this digitizer wand. Once we have enough of these points, we can fit a mathematical surface through the points. [00:19:29] Speaker 22: We built the system that allowed us to build in essentially facial muscles, you know, to sort of represent muscles in a simple form. I mean, it's not the full complexity of the human body by any means, but still facial muscles that could allow him to lift the side of his mouth, to twinkle his nose, eyebrow movement, you know, all sorts of things that are part of character expression. Then to give that to the [00:19:55] Speaker 1: animator and give them that level of control. Our system is designed for these traditionally trained animators with no computer experience whatsoever to sit down within a couple weeks, [00:20:06] Speaker 3: start animating. To move Woody, I just move the controls. This is his elbow. I can move his elbow up or down. The next one down is the wrist. I can move his wrist however I want him to look. I think if you can actually make it work and read and communicate without any facial expressions, without the use of, you know, your face, then you've done a really successful job. So actually, what we tried to do is get everything to read just in the acting, the pantomime. And then when you stick the face on, it'll only plus that. Buzz, look, an alien. Where? [00:20:45] Speaker 15: The story led the art direction, the lighting, the music. We knew that we had a great process, [00:20:51] Speaker 23: a technique that looked really different and it was unusual. But we knew also that what really was going to, you know, sell the picture was a story. And we felt that the palette was really limited in [00:21:01] Speaker 14: animations up to that point of what kind of stories we were getting. And so it was a real conscious effort with Toy Story to just do something different. I remember early on just saying, wouldn't it be funny if we just showed a film where they were stuck in our world. And when the doors close, they're stuck in that room for who knows how long until somebody calls on them. And we thought that's kind of an adult slant that people can relate to. And then to put even more on that, you know, give them sort of a hierarchy and an attitude towards their job, basically, [00:21:31] Speaker 7: that's like the workforce. What matters is that we're here for Andy when he needs us. That's what [00:21:36] Speaker 1: we're made for, right? We worked out the story shot by shot with the writers and the storyboard artists. [00:21:42] Speaker 4: We spent about three years storyboarding and re-storyboarding the movie over and over again, which is our way of rewriting. You know, we don't stay with the script form for too long. Once we think we got something working, then we want to see it and react to it on the screen. So we draw storyboards like comic book panels. Once we have a scene storyboarded the way we like it, [00:22:02] Speaker 12: then we go and record the actors. You do every line probably 17 times until the next time you come back and then you do it another 17 times. All those 17 ways have to be different one from the next. [00:22:13] Speaker 1: And each time he's giving us choices, you know, each time is slightly different. And in this, you know, we've much of his lines we've pieced together out of like three or four different [00:22:23] Speaker 24: takes. I'll try one of these big ones here at the beginning. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, I think I'll use that one last little bit. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, so that's four. Right. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'll cut the storyboards together with the voices and then add music and sound effects and we'll look at it up on the big screen. And then instead of feeling like we're just watching a bunch of still storyboards, it has the feeling of a real movie. Once we're happy with the storyboard and we feel like the story's being told well, we can finally move into the world of the computer. We begin a process called layout where we essentially figure out which models, which characters we need in the scene, where we're going to put the camera, whether the camera's moving or not. And once we're happy with that, we can then pass the footage off to the animators and they can do their magic and bring the characters to life finally. The next step is to bring the image to life. We add lighting and shadows and textures and colors all the color, all the things that will ultimately make the image believable. [00:23:28] Speaker 3: When it came time to animate Scud, I really wanted to have that sense of a believable run. And to get that, we looked at the Edward Muybridge book, which gives you all sorts of information on the order of the feet placement on the ground, the push-off with the neck, the arch reversal on the back. Because before you can caricature it, you have to know what is reality. [00:23:50] Speaker 23: Ready, set, go! [00:23:53] Speaker 14: A lot of us really played hard with our toys. But even though in our eyes in the movie, Sid's a bad guy and he does bad things to toys, it's somewhat more true to how we were. [00:24:03] Speaker 1: We all agreed that Sid was the kind of kid who would grow up to be an animator. [00:24:08] Speaker 15: I burned her head the other day with a magnifying glass. Did you really? Oh, that's great! Everything you see on the screen has to be defined in terms of color and texture. Once the textures and colors are chosen, the painter would take those and caricature them slightly. And then they'll work with the technical director to actually apply those paintings onto the objects, and that's what you'll end up seeing in the final film. The technical director will work with the painter on what kind of aging do we need? Does he have dirt on his pants? Is it shiny? Is it matte? Is it furry? Is it fuzzy? Is it cloth? What do we, as artists, want to project to the audience that this object feels like? [00:24:48] Speaker 17: Strange things are happening to me. Ain't no doubt about it. [00:24:57] Speaker 1: With Disney animated films, they're always musicals. And the music in ours, we wanted to be slightly different. [00:25:04] Speaker 17: You got a friend in me. You got a friend in me. [00:25:12] Speaker 1: Instead of the characters breaking out into song, we have the songs that are written about the emotion of the moment in the film. But it's sung by Randy Newman. [00:25:21] Speaker 17: You just remember what your old pal said, or you got a friend in me. [00:25:29] Speaker 25: Coming out of doing the short films for John, there was a specific style that the sound took based on the images having weight and three dimensions and a reality to them. You see Mr. Potato Head and Woody and these characters walking, and they look real, they look three-dimensional, so they need realistic sound in a way that traditional animation doesn't. Every character in Toy Story had a unique sound signature because most of them were toys we would recognize. This movie has a combination of sound approaches, some of which are a little more cartoony because the sound effects are funny. But sometimes it's real, it's big, it's heavy, and it's like an action film when it needs to be. [00:26:20] Speaker 1: It looks so great. We were like pioneers, and it was so exciting. Every day you would go to work, and there would be like something new on the monitor, on the screen, and you're like, "Wow, that's great!" When we were starting Toy Story, we knew that we would probably be making the first computer animated feature film. When it got animated, it was even more exciting. But nothing prepared us for the step that it took after it got fully rendered. My jaw was on the floor. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. And, I mean, I directed the movie. I knew what was coming up, and I couldn't believe how amazing it looked. [00:26:59] Speaker ?: Ah! [00:27:04] Speaker 17: Hey, boss, you're flying! [00:27:06] Speaker 10: This isn't flying, this is falling with style. [00:27:09] Speaker 16: Toy Story is just the very beginning of what can be done in this medium. And it's just the first inkling of what can achieve here. [00:27:16] Speaker 2: There isn't often one can say, "I had a lifelong dream, and we've fulfilled it." And now in fulfilling that, we can look and say, "We've now started something extraordinarily new, and it's going to forever change the way that animated films are made." [00:27:33] Speaker 1: Everybody's going to notice and talk about the fact this is the very first computer animated feature film. But the computers are just tools. They didn't create this picture, it's the people that created the picture. And we had such a fantastic group of people. And I had so much fun working with them. And that's what I'm going to remember for the rest of my life. [00:27:59] Speaker 26: It was never a computer movie in our sense. It was never a computer movie. It was in the way we're making a film. And it happened to be that we had the coolest pencils in the world because we had these great computers. And we could construct these things that no one else had the opportunity to construct. Don't forget this. [00:28:16] Speaker 15: The computer animation at the time was flying metal things with the camera. Just because you could do anything with the computer, people did everything with the computer. [00:28:23] Speaker 27: When I first started talking about computer animation, all I saw was this wireframe stuff. And I wasn't too impressed. [00:28:32] Speaker 28: At that time, I couldn't have cared less about computers. I just liked drawing. [00:28:42] Speaker 29: Our director, John Lasseter, really had a good vision going into this whole thing about what he wanted. There was the magical world of these toys coming to life, juxtaposed with this real world that we live in, this suburban world. [00:28:59] Speaker 19: For most people you were kind of keying off of just something about your own childhood. It's just like the sound of it, the kind of basic feel of it was like you remembered when you were a kid on a Saturday morning or something. [00:29:11] Speaker 28: In a way, the look of the whole movie is very sort of toy-like. Even though it's very grounded in reality, it's very believable. We only put in as much detail as we needed to convince people that it was real. Everything sort of became symbols of the real world. [00:29:24] Speaker 27: We did many, many drawings. I think everything in animation takes many, many drawings. [00:29:40] Speaker 26: Nothing's for free. We have to design everything. We had to be architects, interior designers, furniture designers, industrial designers, costume designers, hair stylists, and of course toy designers. And that's a huge job. I'm amazed we did it. [00:29:58] Speaker 10: Star Command, come in. Do you read me? [00:30:00] Speaker 26: Why don't they answer? We all know toys, and it's something you kind of are familiar with, but you don't even maybe recognize it. So when we built Buzz, we wanted to make sure he was put together like a regular toy with the little Phillips screw heads in there and all the little details. So it felt really believable. [00:30:17] Speaker 10: And there seems to be no sign of intelligent life anywhere. Hello? [00:30:21] Speaker 28: Woody started out as a ventriloquist dummy. He started out as sort of a sarcastic, comedic character, which to some degree stayed. Bud Lucky basically had the core concept of making Woody a cowboy. [00:30:30] Speaker 27: I just thought a cowboy would be more interesting working with a spaceman. [00:30:35] Speaker 28: That sort of sent shockwaves through the whole movie because that just made the contrast so vivid and so powerful. Woody's a little bit more like rag dolls little girls used to play with, whereas Buzz is much more like the modern toys with chips and special effects. They're just naturally going to clash. It's almost like the older detective and the young rookie. [00:30:56] Speaker 10: You are a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity. [00:31:00] Speaker 26: Farewell. Oh yeah, well-- Story is the locomotive in our train. The story changes always affect design. Like originally, Andy and the toys went to Pizza Putt, a miniature golf pizza place. But when Buzz became a spaceman and wanted to get home, it was perfect for him to think of the restaurant as a spaceport. So we had to start all over. But that was cool because we had a great design theme to work on, this rocket ship spaceport. We thought everything. We thought of the guards at the door, these robots, the crane game with the aliens, and it became this really cool spaceship. The themes of the style and the look of the different video games change. Even the little rocket on the top of the Pizza Planet truck. [00:31:36] Speaker 7: I found a spaceship! It's a spaceship, Bob! [00:31:41] Speaker 26: These guys are toys, and they have a perspective on the world that is much lower and much smaller than a human would. [00:31:49] Speaker 19: A lot of what I was doing was, like, I'd go home and I'd be kind of like touching the molding and looking at everything. Oh, that's what it's doing! Because you never think about those parts of the details. But from a toy's perspective, you had to get down next to all this stuff and have it make some kind of a sense. [00:32:04] Speaker 29: It's very easy in the computer to create something that's perfect. What they really wanted from me was to beat up this world. And so when I got my first business card from Pixar, it said, "Tia Cratter, imperfectionist." Scuff marks, splats, scrapes, divots, dirt, that kind of thing. Sid's room was easily the funnest area to work on as far as messing up things. I mean, I got to hammer things and stain things and create all kinds of divots and scratches. [00:32:33] Speaker 15: There's so much stuff. You got the lava lamp with the doll heads in it. You know, you got the waffle iron. It's a torturer! It's a torturer, you know. [00:32:41] Speaker 26: I grew up, I was more like Sid. I had a glue gun, duct tape, my dad's tool bench, and we cut everything up. [00:32:49] Speaker 19: I think a lot of stuff was generated for the mutant toys because it was just fun. Like, "Oh, God, I got an idea for a toy." [00:32:58] Speaker 26: It was hard for me, at least sometimes, not to make them too cute. Because they got really cute. [00:33:03] Speaker 19: After working on it, you realize, God, villains, first of all, are more interesting often than the straight guys. You know, they're just, uh, they have more going on, more you can explain or show about them. And then you realize, he's really an artist. He's kind of a sculptor, even if he's a little twisted and messed up. [00:33:19] Speaker 26: That was a great opportunity to kind of be Sid, but in drawings. We had these great tools in which we could, uh, kind of describe this, this world, which we all believed in, and we've lived in, we kind of grew up in. And, uh, tell this wonderful story of these toys that everybody knows that come alive. I mean, I knew it growing up, everybody knew it growing up, is that you're, there's, there's life in things. [00:33:48] Speaker 15: I remember lots of people saying to me, "Gosh, it looks so real. It looks so real." It's not real. People believe it. That's better. [00:34:02] Speaker 23: We did it! We did it! Yes! [00:34:11] Speaker 24: Before I was one of the co-directors of Toy Story 2, I was actually one of the editors of the original Toy Story movie. One of the most difficult decisions that an editor ever has to make, especially on one of our films here at Pixar, is cutting out animation that's already been completed, because the animation is so expensive and time-consuming, and the animators really just pour their hearts into a lot of this stuff. We really try not to cut any of it out of the film. But unfortunately, occasionally, we do need to. The first scene is a scene with Sid, right after Pizza Planet, when Sid has first brought Buzz and Woody back to his house. And the way we originally conceived the scene, we had this whole thing where Sid was torturing Buzz and Woody really pretty violently. And we ultimately decided to just cut into the scene right when Sid is interrogating, and to remove all the kind of torturing stuff at the beginning. And the main reason we did that was we realized that our audience was going to be loving Buzz and Woody at this point, and the last thing they really wanted to see was them being completely beaten up and tortured. The other scene that we didn't really cut out of the movie, but we shortened quite a bit, was the scene at night in Sid's bedroom when it's raining, and Woody is trapped under the milk crate and trying to get Buzz's attention. The scene was originally much longer than what's in the final film. And at the time that we made the cuts, we made them because we were worried that the scene was playing too long, and was just kind of losing the energy of the movie. Now that it's a few years later, looking back, we actually kind of regret that we made a lot of the cuts, because we think that it was a really effective emotional scene, and it probably could have stood up in the film as is. But you can decide for yourself when you watch the scene. [00:35:54] Speaker 17: It's blowing some good chief forces now! Mayday! Mayday! He's breaking off! He's breaking off! [00:36:19] Speaker 23: Oh, a survivor! Where's the rebel base? Talk! [00:36:27] Speaker 18: I'd like to join your posse boys, but first I'm gonna sing a little song. Liar! [00:36:35] Speaker 23: I can see your will is strong. Well, we have ways of making you talk. [00:36:46] Speaker 15: When I first got here, I read the script and talked with John, and made a lot of notes on the film and the characters and what was going on. And then found the two key contrasting sequences, one of which is where Woody pushes Buzz out the window. Buzz! [00:37:04] Speaker 7: Buzz! Buzz! [00:37:06] Speaker 15: One where they reconcile at the end of the film. [00:37:09] Speaker 7: Buzz, I can't do this without you. I need your help. [00:37:17] Speaker 15: I've kind of worked up a palette for those and talked to John a lot about those. And a lot of his ideas on the color for this film were from, like, Maxfield Parrish and illustrators like William Joyce and Kevin Hawks and Steve Johnson, children's book illustrators. So, you know, he had a pretty good idea of what he wanted color-wise. And there was a lot of saturated colors, a lot of bounce light and things like that. And our main character's home, because we wanted it to be a safe environment and something that just said warmth, you know. And then we have Sid's house, which is kind of dark, stuck in 1972, which was kind of fun. You know, we have paneled walls, really cheap paneled walls and avocado green sculptured carpet and rusty beds and barbed wire on the beds and torture devices, you know. And, you know, a lot of wild angles. But the biggest thing this film does to advance computer animation, I believe, is it tells a story. It tells a very simple story with really developed personalities and relationships. The story led the art direction, the lighting, the music, you know. It challenged the technical crew on this film to things that maybe they, I don't know, maybe they didn't think they could do or hadn't thought of before. And then there's a lot of little technical advances on the way, I mean, there's no better way of learning new things and doing new things than just doing them or having a problem presented that you have to solve, you know, rather than just sitting in a room and saying, well, let's try this or let's try that. You know, what if, oh, my God, we designed something in the story that we need to do in a certain way, how do we do it? And there's nothing like challenging one of the technical directors because they could solve anything here. You know, they really can solve anything. But also, one of the things we tried to do with this film was to remove it from its computer look, you know. The thing that a computer does the easiest is straight lines, and we have our share of straight lines because this is a film with a lot of architecture. But we tried to soften it by rounding the corners slightly here and there and using a lot of specialized lighting, a lot of bounced light and a lot of very, very careful lighting. We had a really great lighting crew on this film. And, you know, just planning a palette and planning a color for the entire film. And we didn't really try so much to make everything so realistic and the toys realistic and the humans realistic. What we wanted to do was make it believable, you know, and create an entire world versus trying to create reality. In a lot of ways, we've tried to make it hyper real, you know, and I don't mean like more than real. It's just a kind of a heightened sense of reality. And what we tried to do was a cartoon. It was still a tremendous challenge and something that I haven't seen anywhere in computer animation. [00:40:24] Speaker 1: This is where we're going to explain the animation process of how we make films here at Pixar. This is a scene from Toy Story 1. This is when Buzz and Woody first meet. Now, the first stage is the storyboard stage. And you'll see the drawing, still drawings done for the scene. It's kind of like a comic book version. [00:40:41] Speaker 7: All right, that's enough. Look, we're all very impressed with Andy's new toy. Toy? T-O-Y. Toy. [00:40:48] Speaker 10: Excuse me, I think the word you're searching for is Space Ranger. [00:40:52] Speaker 30: This next step is the layout phase of production. Once the storyboards and the models are ready, they come into layout. This is where we first build the film on the computer, our first step into 3D. There's no performance yet, that's what the animators do. Here we concern ourselves with the basic composition and blocking of the film. All right, that's enough. [00:41:12] Speaker 7: Look, we're all very impressed with Andy's new toy. Toy? T-O-Y. Toy. [00:41:19] Speaker 10: Excuse me, I think the word you're searching for is Space Ranger. [00:41:23] Speaker 13: The next step in the process is animation. And this is where the animators take the story ideas and the layout and really bring the characters to life. And this is where they take good story ideas and truly make them great with their really amazing performances. [00:41:36] Speaker 7: All right, that's enough. Look, we're all very impressed with Andy's new toy. Toy? T-O-Y. Toy. [00:41:44] Speaker 1: Excuse me, I think the word you're searching for is Space Ranger. This is the final stage in the production. This is when we've taken the animation and we've added the shading and the lights to it. And this is where everything comes together and we get the final, final images. [00:42:02] Speaker 7: All right, that's enough. Look, we're all very impressed with Andy's new toy. Toy? T-O-Y. Toy. [00:42:09] Speaker 10: Excuse me, I think the word you're searching for is Space Ranger. [00:42:17] Speaker 30: Layout is the basic filmmaking part of the process. We build the foundation of the film. We take the models and the storyboards and we construct each shot. We grab the sets, the characters, the cameras, put everything together, get it ready for animation. In this process, we face a lot of problems. So problem solving is a big part of our day. And I'd like to show you some of the tricks we used to solve problems we found on Toy Story. There's a right and a wrong way to compose over-the-shoulder shots. This is a typical movie situation. So you put an imaginary line between the heads of the two characters and make sure the camera doesn't cross that line. It sometimes gets called the stage line, sometimes the line of action. If the camera crosses the line, notice how Woody is suddenly replaced by Buzz. Just as in live-action filmmaking, keeping the camera on the correct side of the line makes sure that, well, in this case, Woody stays on the right and Buzz stays on the left and the audience doesn't get lost. What do you do when you have one character who's a lot taller than the other and they have to talk together? Well, this problem was faced in old Alan Ladd films where his leading lady was often much taller than he was. They would dig a little trench for her to walk in as they paced along in a two-shot. So we called this trenching. We would bury Woody two or three centimeters into the ground to get his face down closer to Buzz. And in this view, you can also see that animators don't animate what isn't in the frame. For this shot in the Army Man sequence, we had to do a substitution. One paratrooper model had the parachute rolled up and on his back and a completely different model had the parachute that could open. We needed to swap them during the shot. So the two who jump off at the head of the shot are pulled in underneath the stairs and waiting below just out of camera view were the two with the opening chutes. This side view shows that the first two paratroopers get pulled out of the way and there are two with parachutes waiting just out of camera view. The audience never knows what happened. For this shot of Buzz and Woody flying, we had an interesting problem. When animation finished with it, they were really moving about five miles an hour and the camera was pointing diagonally up into the sky. So to give the illusion of the right thing happening, I put another camera on the street and zipped it past the trees. We then rendered the background from that camera and composited Buzz and Woody in front. In this sequence we had a little bit of a problem. This is where Buzz has just gone out the window and the toys are really upset. The storyboards were drawn as though Andy's desk were the size of a soccer field. And in fact, we did cheat up the size of the desk for this sequence. But it was so tricky to figure out, we ended up standing up with each other in the screening room doing practically a square dance, figuring out how we were going to block it out. We also had an interesting requirement. Our normal stage line in this movie had Sid's house on the left, Andy's house on the right, and we had moved that line around. We needed to get it back where it belonged before Andy came through the door. So that big whirling camera move around Woody while he's being attacked with the army men was just to put the stage line back where it belonged. [00:45:31] Speaker 18: Okay, Mom, be right down. I've got to get Buzz. [00:45:41] Speaker 13: Believe it or not, we were in the animation pit here at Pixar Animation Studios. And this is where all the animation that you see in the films is created. If you look around, you'll see the animators take their cubicles and they decorate them in really cool ways. But in the end, it all comes down to this. This is an animator's workstation, and these are the tools of his trade. Now at this point, we're going to take you through a progression reel that shows you specifically how the animation is created. The first step is layout, where we block the action of the scene. Sometimes an animator will shoot some live action reference to help him create the performance. Now the animator starts to work out the rough body gestures. [00:46:20] Speaker 20: Uh, nothing. Uh, nothing. I'm sure Andy was just a little excited. That's all. Too much cake and ice cream, I suppose. It's just a mistake. Now the animator continues to refine his overall performance. Uh, nothing. Uh, nothing. I'm sure Andy was just a little excited. That's all. Too much cake and ice cream, I suppose. It's just a mistake. We always feel that if the pantomime performance is working, then the facial animation is the icing on the cake. Uh, nothing. Uh, nothing. I'm sure Andy was just a little excited. That's all. Too much cake and ice cream, I suppose. It's just a mistake. And finally, after weeks of work, the final shot. Uh, nothing. Uh, nothing. I'm sure Andy was just a little excited. That's all. Too much cake and ice cream, I suppose. It's just a mistake. [00:47:05] Speaker 15: This is Andy's room, the late afternoon. And, uh, it's after Buzz Lightyear has gotten here, so you can see kind of the Buzz posters and, uh, the Buzz Lightyear, uh, comforter on Andy's bed. And, uh, if you look very carefully at the book titles, if you've seen some of the other Pixar short films, you'll probably recognize a few of the names. Uh, if not the title of the film itself, then certainly, if you look at the credits, you'll see other people's names on there. One thing that was really hard to do when we started this was, uh, try and find a way to caricature the world and shapes in the world. The one thing about lighting and texturing, uh, that we do here is it really does bring it back more into, uh, a really believable world. And so caricatured shapes, if the world isn't, if the whole world isn't caricatured, that tends to work, uh, not as well. So this is the Dinoco gas station in, uh, Andy's neighborhood. You can see it's kind of a little, uh, brontosaurus in the logo. And what we always wanted to do was kind of a '50s style, uh, leftover gas station in the neighborhood. And, uh, so we got a little bit of that, uh, and we also wanted to get the really harsh fluorescent lighting. It's kind of got a blue tinge to it. And, and just very harsh and very exposing. Um, you can, you can see things like little oil stains and, and tire tracks and, uh, oil can stand there. So if you look here too, some of the things we always struggled with were getting, uh, that cheesy cement rock texture on this trash can right here. If you look also inside the, uh, lobby of the, uh, gas station, you can see a few things like potato chips. And it's actually all there. So there's a lot of detail that sometimes you see in the background. Uh, sometimes we wish we had spent more time on the things we do see than the stuff we really don't see. But the film changes so often and so fast in story that, uh, it's hard to keep up with the, with that. Uh, still I think that it, it looks pretty good. And, um, and I'm pretty proud of it. We had a great art department on this film. This is Sid's room. And, uh, there's things like, uh, I think there's, in the final film, there's underwear and socks hanging out of the, uh, dresser. And then the, if you look very carefully, you can see a waffle iron there with a baby smooshed in it, a little toy doll. And there's a really great poster up there, killing Paul Bunyan in his Blue Ox of Doom. The shooting target is actually one from, uh, layout artists, Craig Good's, uh, office he's had hanging up. Ah, you can see how well he keeps his room locked. And, uh, there's just lots of junk laying around. We modeled a few things like cans and tapes and, uh, uh, cups for other purposes in the film. And we needed it for set dressing so we would sprinkle it throughout the room. One of the things that's really hard to do with the computer, with a computer film is to really get the sense that it's a real space and not just kind of a cold environment. We were able to utilize little bits and pieces from all over the film and kind of cram it into Sid's room so that it looked like a mess. [00:50:15] Speaker ?: And we were able to do it. And we were able to do it. And we were able to do it. And we were able to do it. And we were able to do it. And we were able to do it. And we were able to do it. And we were able to do it. And we were able to do it. And we were able to do it. 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