WEBVTT - TechStuff Classic: The Pixar Story: Part 2 0:00:04.440 --> 0:00:12.280 Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, 0:00:12.320 --> 0:00:15.320 and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. 0:00:15.360 --> 0:00:18.000 I'm an executive producer with iHeartRadio and how the tech 0:00:18.040 --> 0:00:22.079 are you? It is time for a tech Stuff classic episode. 0:00:22.120 --> 0:00:25.479 So last Friday I brought you The Pixar Story Part one, 0:00:25.880 --> 0:00:28.480 so it should come as no surprise that today we're 0:00:28.520 --> 0:00:32.880 going to listen to The Pixar Story Part two. This 0:00:33.159 --> 0:00:37.480 episode originally published on August third, twenty sixteen. 0:00:38.159 --> 0:00:38.920 Hope you enjoy. 0:00:40.120 --> 0:00:43.479 So with the last episode, I left off just before 0:00:44.280 --> 0:00:47.920 Pixar was going to debut its first feature length computer 0:00:48.000 --> 0:00:51.920 animated film, which of course is Toy Story, and I 0:00:52.000 --> 0:00:56.000 left it off as a fake cliffhanger. Would the company succeed? 0:00:57.360 --> 0:00:59.800 Of course they did. But one thing I want to 0:01:00.200 --> 0:01:03.120 out is that Toy Story itself was partly made possible 0:01:03.200 --> 0:01:06.720 because of another movie, not a Pixar film, but the 0:01:06.760 --> 0:01:10.400 movie A Nightmare Before Christmas, And the reason I say 0:01:10.400 --> 0:01:13.720 this is a Nightmare Before Christmas was a stop motion 0:01:13.800 --> 0:01:17.000 animated film produced by Tim Burton, and it was the 0:01:17.040 --> 0:01:21.160 first animated film that Disney agreed to distribute. Even though 0:01:21.720 --> 0:01:25.640 the animation itself was not done by Walt Disney Animation Studios, 0:01:26.720 --> 0:01:30.240 and that actually laid the groundwork for Pixar to follow 0:01:30.240 --> 0:01:34.960 along with Toy Story. Also one other connection between the two, 0:01:35.720 --> 0:01:40.720 John Lassiter of Pixar fame and Tim Burton both attended 0:01:40.760 --> 0:01:44.240 cal Arts at the same time. So that's kind of cool, 0:01:44.360 --> 0:01:47.120 little kind of a connection. 0:01:48.760 --> 0:01:51.480 So one thing I got to get off the bat, 0:01:51.520 --> 0:01:51.920 this is going. 0:01:51.920 --> 0:01:53.920 To be true for all the different movies that I 0:01:54.040 --> 0:01:57.520 talk about that Pixar has worked on. Each film required 0:01:57.840 --> 0:01:59.360 many years to finish. 0:01:59.600 --> 0:02:00.000 A team. 0:02:00.000 --> 0:02:02.440 He might work on a movie for five years at 0:02:02.440 --> 0:02:05.800 a time. It's not that unusual, particularly with these computer 0:02:05.880 --> 0:02:09.920 animated films, and during the development of Toy Story, the 0:02:10.040 --> 0:02:13.560 characters and script went through lots and lots of changes. 0:02:13.720 --> 0:02:17.840 Also not unusual with Pixar. They've always said that story 0:02:17.880 --> 0:02:20.400 comes first. They have to get the story right, and 0:02:20.840 --> 0:02:24.600 if they don't have the story just right, people don't 0:02:24.639 --> 0:02:28.800 care how good your animation is. If the story doesn't 0:02:28.840 --> 0:02:31.120 hold your attention, you eventually just say, well that was 0:02:31.200 --> 0:02:33.960 pretty and flashy, but I didn't really care about anything. 0:02:35.240 --> 0:02:38.520 Back in the original run, when they were first drafting 0:02:38.520 --> 0:02:42.280 out the story for Toy Story, buzz Light Year had 0:02:42.280 --> 0:02:44.799 a totally different name. He was called Tempest, which was 0:02:44.840 --> 0:02:48.360 a reference to the classic arcade machine, and Woody originally 0:02:48.440 --> 0:02:52.400 wasn't a pull string toy. He was a Ventriloquists dummy. 0:02:53.200 --> 0:02:57.600 But Michael Eisner, who at the time was Disney's CEO, 0:02:57.800 --> 0:03:00.560 stepped in and asked Pixar to change it because he said, 0:03:00.639 --> 0:03:04.560 dummies are inherently creepy, and it is difficult for me to. 0:03:04.600 --> 0:03:05.359 Disagree with that. 0:03:05.440 --> 0:03:07.359 I don't agree with a lot of things that Michael 0:03:07.400 --> 0:03:12.200 Eisner did, but I definitely agree that ventriloquist dummies are creepy. 0:03:13.120 --> 0:03:14.800 And another major change. 0:03:15.080 --> 0:03:18.360 Was Buzz's whole worldview. In those early drafts, Buzz light 0:03:18.440 --> 0:03:21.240 Year knew that he was a toy, and he knew 0:03:21.280 --> 0:03:23.480 that there was a television show that tied in with 0:03:23.560 --> 0:03:26.200 a toy. But then they had Tim Allen come in 0:03:26.240 --> 0:03:30.839 to do the voiceovers the acting, and Tim Allen's take 0:03:30.880 --> 0:03:34.800 on Buzz was that the character was completely oblivious. He 0:03:35.040 --> 0:03:38.760 lived the role of a space ranger. That is what 0:03:38.920 --> 0:03:41.440 Buzz was. He wasn't a toy of a space ranger. 0:03:41.480 --> 0:03:44.480 He was a space ranger. And the writers thought, well, 0:03:44.600 --> 0:03:47.880 that's way more interesting, So they actually reworked the story 0:03:48.040 --> 0:03:52.600 based upon Tim Allen's performance, and they started to change things. 0:03:52.600 --> 0:03:55.840 So this whole process goes on for a long time, 0:03:56.720 --> 0:03:59.320 and according to people at Pixtar, those characters were really 0:03:59.320 --> 0:04:03.240 tough to nail down. Disney executives found the initial characters 0:04:03.240 --> 0:04:05.520 a little too wholesome and boring, which is kind of 0:04:05.560 --> 0:04:07.920 interesting to think that Disney execs would say. 0:04:08.520 --> 0:04:10.600 Yeah, you know, these guys, there's not a lot. 0:04:10.680 --> 0:04:12.320 There's not a lot going on here. We need some 0:04:12.400 --> 0:04:15.760 more conflict, We need them to not be these just 0:04:15.840 --> 0:04:19.520 perfect toys. So the next iteration went a little too 0:04:19.560 --> 0:04:22.240 far in the other direction, and Pixar says, yeah, we 0:04:22.320 --> 0:04:25.320 kind of accidentally turned Woody into a real jerkface. 0:04:26.440 --> 0:04:28.680 He became just unlikable. 0:04:29.120 --> 0:04:30.960 So they had to figure out where was the balance 0:04:31.040 --> 0:04:33.760 between these two extremes, and fortunately the writers were able 0:04:33.800 --> 0:04:36.279 to come up with that balance, though for a while 0:04:36.320 --> 0:04:38.919 it actually looked like Disney might pull the plug on 0:04:39.040 --> 0:04:43.080 toy story. Keep in mind, Disney was providing the funding here. 0:04:43.800 --> 0:04:49.120 Disney was giving Pixar twenty well not giving, but providing 0:04:49.160 --> 0:04:53.120 twenty one million dollars for Pixar to produce three movies, 0:04:53.839 --> 0:04:56.599 and they were Disney was also going to provide the 0:04:56.680 --> 0:05:00.400 distribution for Pixar, and in return, Disney was taking an 0:05:00.680 --> 0:05:04.440 enormous share of the revenue should these movies prove to 0:05:04.480 --> 0:05:09.040 be successful. The whole project required way more resources than 0:05:09.120 --> 0:05:12.279 Picks are anticipated. They had only been working on short 0:05:12.320 --> 0:05:15.640 films up to that point and did not realize what 0:05:15.760 --> 0:05:21.040 a different creature a feature length film can be. It's 0:05:21.080 --> 0:05:25.880 not just oh, this one short we did require ten people, 0:05:26.279 --> 0:05:28.760 but this movie is four times longer, so we'll need 0:05:28.839 --> 0:05:33.440 forty people. It's way more complicated than that. They originally 0:05:33.440 --> 0:05:36.800 thought they could get away with just using eight animators 0:05:37.200 --> 0:05:40.200 for toy story, and on top of that, they would 0:05:40.240 --> 0:05:44.640 have people in lighting and textures, but eight animators to 0:05:44.880 --> 0:05:47.960 actually create the animation. They ended up with thirty three 0:05:48.160 --> 0:05:50.520 by the end of the production, and all the other 0:05:50.560 --> 0:05:54.359 departments also needed more people than they originally estimated, so 0:05:54.520 --> 0:05:57.960 with each film, Pixar would typically add a few more animators. 0:05:58.160 --> 0:05:59.280 By the time Monsters Inc. 0:05:59.360 --> 0:06:03.400 Rolls around, for example, there were fifty animators working on 0:06:03.440 --> 0:06:07.400 that movie. So it became clear that this feature link 0:06:07.480 --> 0:06:11.239 game was different and not a big surprise that Pixar 0:06:11.279 --> 0:06:13.599 had to learn this. It was new territory for them. 0:06:15.560 --> 0:06:15.839 Now. 0:06:16.160 --> 0:06:18.720 They also had to make sure that everyone who was 0:06:18.800 --> 0:06:22.159 working on animation was going to animate the characters in 0:06:22.200 --> 0:06:27.520 a consistent way. You couldn't have different animators manipulate characters 0:06:27.520 --> 0:06:30.560 so that they have their own quirks. When one animator 0:06:30.600 --> 0:06:33.280 is working on it but not on another, it's inconsistent 0:06:33.360 --> 0:06:37.960 and disorienting. So typically a lead animator would be assigned 0:06:38.040 --> 0:06:41.719 to every major character to create the desired performance, but 0:06:42.160 --> 0:06:45.359 an individual animator might work on every single character in 0:06:45.400 --> 0:06:48.359 a film at some point or another. It may just 0:06:48.440 --> 0:06:51.880 be that the characters in the background for that sequence, 0:06:51.920 --> 0:06:54.120 but they still have to act in character. 0:06:54.680 --> 0:06:57.880 Acting is interesting because normally. 0:06:57.640 --> 0:07:00.680 We think of it as a creation between an actor 0:07:00.720 --> 0:07:03.279 and maybe a director, or perhaps a couple of actors 0:07:03.279 --> 0:07:06.719 and a director, but in this case, it's an entire 0:07:06.800 --> 0:07:11.040 department of people coming together to determine what acting is 0:07:11.400 --> 0:07:16.160 for each individual character, sometimes multiple departments of people, so 0:07:17.160 --> 0:07:19.160 much more complicated than a live. 0:07:19.000 --> 0:07:20.080 Action sort of production. 0:07:22.600 --> 0:07:25.360 The first bit that they actually animated for Toy Story 0:07:26.080 --> 0:07:29.840 was the sequence in which the toy soldiers deploy to 0:07:29.840 --> 0:07:32.920 see what Andy is getting for his birthday. So to 0:07:32.920 --> 0:07:35.680 get an idea of how those soldiers would actually move around. 0:07:35.720 --> 0:07:39.200 The animators ended up strapping their feet to boards, and 0:07:39.240 --> 0:07:43.040 then they tried to move around with their feet connected 0:07:43.080 --> 0:07:48.200 to each other on these solid wooden boards. Supposedly the 0:07:48.240 --> 0:07:51.560 first person to try this actually was nailing their shoes 0:07:51.600 --> 0:07:55.640 to the boards and did so the wrong way, in 0:07:55.680 --> 0:07:58.440 other words, nailing up from the board through. 0:07:58.280 --> 0:08:03.040 The shoe, which seems to be a little poorly thought 0:08:03.080 --> 0:08:04.320 out in my mind. 0:08:04.480 --> 0:08:08.800 But at any rate, you had these animators trying to 0:08:08.800 --> 0:08:12.440 get around so that they could get a good basis 0:08:12.480 --> 0:08:15.520 for how the characters should move in the actual film, 0:08:15.600 --> 0:08:18.080 and apparently it was quite the scene it pisar HQ. 0:08:19.000 --> 0:08:20.520 Now, computer animation. 0:08:20.200 --> 0:08:24.559 Takes several steps to complete, just like traditional animation does. 0:08:25.120 --> 0:08:28.200 So in computer animation, you have to build the computer 0:08:28.280 --> 0:08:31.000 models for the characters, so this is the three dimensional 0:08:31.040 --> 0:08:35.240 representation of your character. You have to also do that 0:08:35.280 --> 0:08:37.800 for sets and props. You can't just do it for 0:08:37.920 --> 0:08:41.240 just the characters, otherwise everything else is flat, and you 0:08:41.280 --> 0:08:45.520 animate the sequences according to the storyboard and performances. But 0:08:45.640 --> 0:08:48.840 at that point, even after you've modeled everything and you've 0:08:48.960 --> 0:08:51.840 figured out the physics and you know how different parts 0:08:51.920 --> 0:08:54.760 move in relation to each other. You still end up 0:08:54.760 --> 0:08:59.000 with kind of a featureless and plastic figure. Everything looks 0:08:59.080 --> 0:09:03.400 kind of like it's just a simple solid body plastic. 0:09:04.040 --> 0:09:07.280 So then you have to overlay color textures and shading 0:09:07.360 --> 0:09:09.480 to give more definition to the characters. And then you 0:09:09.480 --> 0:09:12.880 have to add lighting sequences to create the mood you 0:09:12.920 --> 0:09:16.120 want for that scene and the effects you need, and. 0:09:16.120 --> 0:09:17.600 This gets really complicated. 0:09:18.360 --> 0:09:23.480 In a physical space where you're actually shooting live action, 0:09:24.600 --> 0:09:27.080 you can move lights around and see what sort of 0:09:27.080 --> 0:09:29.520 effects you get. You know what happens if you light 0:09:29.559 --> 0:09:31.960 the scene from the back as opposed to from the front. 0:09:32.360 --> 0:09:35.240 But in computer animation you have to actually program all 0:09:35.280 --> 0:09:38.520 that in, at least initially. You might eventually come up 0:09:38.520 --> 0:09:42.600 with a lighting software suite that does most of this automatically, 0:09:43.200 --> 0:09:45.480 and then you can make minor tweaks at that point, 0:09:45.960 --> 0:09:50.520 but when you start out, you have to program how 0:09:50.559 --> 0:09:54.960 the light behaves. The computer doesn't magically know that light 0:09:55.040 --> 0:09:57.960 from one direction is going to create a different effect 0:09:58.320 --> 0:10:00.640 than light from another direction. You have to build all 0:10:00.640 --> 0:10:05.760 that in, so it's incredibly time consuming and work intensive. 0:10:05.840 --> 0:10:09.520 It involves a lot of technical know how and artistic 0:10:09.640 --> 0:10:13.040 know how as well, so it's not an easy job. 0:10:13.840 --> 0:10:14.000 Now. 0:10:14.000 --> 0:10:17.400 Originally Pixar employees thought they could render the entire film 0:10:17.559 --> 0:10:21.679 in twenty months using fifty three processors. That's just the 0:10:21.720 --> 0:10:24.880 rendering stage, mind you, that's not the animation, but twenty 0:10:24.920 --> 0:10:27.320 months just to render the work that they had created. 0:10:28.000 --> 0:10:30.560 But turned out they needed three hundred machines to do 0:10:30.600 --> 0:10:34.160 the job, not fifty three processors, three hundred computers, and 0:10:34.240 --> 0:10:38.360 today Pixar has more than twenty thousand processors to work 0:10:38.400 --> 0:10:41.560 on render jobs, which means they could take that raw 0:10:41.600 --> 0:10:45.280 footage from Toy Story and render it in real time 0:10:46.520 --> 0:10:49.280 by the end of If you were to start rendering 0:10:49.360 --> 0:10:52.960 all that footage and you started the DVD of Toy 0:10:53.000 --> 0:10:55.400 Story at the same time, you would be done with 0:10:55.559 --> 0:10:59.280 both at around the same time. Not necessarily true with 0:10:59.640 --> 0:11:02.959 later Pixar films, which are more complicated than that first 0:11:02.960 --> 0:11:05.760 Toy Story movie, but it does illustrate how much more 0:11:05.800 --> 0:11:10.480 sophisticated things have become since then. And once again we 0:11:10.520 --> 0:11:12.880 see that Moore's law has brought down the cost of 0:11:12.920 --> 0:11:15.320 computing to a point where this sort of thing is possible. 0:11:15.360 --> 0:11:20.000 It's not outside the reach of a production studio now. 0:11:20.080 --> 0:11:21.880 At the time that would have been impossible. It would 0:11:21.920 --> 0:11:25.880 have been too expensive to have twenty thousand processors, let 0:11:25.920 --> 0:11:28.679 alone the idea of well, how do we power them 0:11:28.679 --> 0:11:31.040 and keep them cold enough so that they work, and 0:11:31.120 --> 0:11:33.400 where do we put them and all that kind of stuff. 0:11:34.520 --> 0:11:38.720 But we've seen the chips get smaller, we've seen them 0:11:38.880 --> 0:11:45.480 get more powerful, we've seen more sophisticated processors with multiple cores, 0:11:45.520 --> 0:11:49.760 including graphics processors, and of course we've seen that price 0:11:49.800 --> 0:11:53.920 come down over time, so now it's less of an 0:11:54.080 --> 0:11:59.360 insurmountable obstacle. Still expensive, just not as expensive as it 0:11:59.360 --> 0:12:03.160 would have been back then. So after making Toy Story, 0:12:03.280 --> 0:12:06.960 John Lassiter realized that a feature link computer animated film 0:12:07.360 --> 0:12:10.480 was way too much work for a single director. He 0:12:10.559 --> 0:12:12.760 was the director for Toy Story, but he realized this 0:12:12.840 --> 0:12:15.679 is too big a job for one person to head up. 0:12:16.040 --> 0:12:19.160 So from that point forward, the Pixar films would have 0:12:19.240 --> 0:12:22.439 multiple directors, with normally one acting as kind of the 0:12:22.480 --> 0:12:24.600 primary director to steer the vision of the film, and 0:12:24.679 --> 0:12:30.600 others to oversee specific aspects of the production like cinematography 0:12:30.640 --> 0:12:33.560 and lighting and that sort of stuff. The movie came 0:12:33.559 --> 0:12:37.360 out on November twenty second, nineteen ninety five, and it 0:12:37.480 --> 0:12:41.199 was directed by John Lassiter. Several writers worked on the story, 0:12:41.720 --> 0:12:45.320 including Joss Whedon, who is of course the creator of 0:12:45.360 --> 0:12:48.720 Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly and Angel and things 0:12:48.800 --> 0:12:51.280 like that. Whedon, by the way, wrote a couple of 0:12:51.280 --> 0:12:54.840 my favorite lines, including You're a sad, strange little man 0:12:55.080 --> 0:12:57.960 and you have My Pity and one of my favorite 0:12:57.960 --> 0:13:02.920 lines of all time, wind the Frog. This movie also 0:13:02.960 --> 0:13:06.920 marked the first time Pixar worked with the musician Randy Newman, 0:13:06.960 --> 0:13:09.360 who would go on to compose the music for six 0:13:09.480 --> 0:13:13.200 more Pixar movies. So he hasn't worked on all of them, 0:13:13.200 --> 0:13:16.000 but he worked on a lot of them. And also 0:13:16.040 --> 0:13:19.559 on a personal note, Toy Story was the first movie 0:13:19.640 --> 0:13:22.120 I saw while dating the woman who would later on 0:13:22.320 --> 0:13:25.839 become my wife. It took some convincing to get her 0:13:25.840 --> 0:13:28.679 to the theater to go and see a movie called 0:13:28.760 --> 0:13:31.640 Toy Story, but I eventually convinced her to do so, 0:13:31.800 --> 0:13:34.280 and afterwards she became a lifelong Pixar fan. 0:13:35.000 --> 0:13:40.640 So I did something right. Nineteen years woo now, Toy 0:13:40.720 --> 0:13:44.120 Story was a really big hit. 0:13:44.840 --> 0:13:48.600 According to box office Mojo, Toy Story's global box office 0:13:48.600 --> 0:13:52.440 amounted to three hundred and sixty two million dollars, but 0:13:52.720 --> 0:13:56.360 Pixar's deal with Disney meant it only received a small 0:13:56.400 --> 0:13:59.760 percentage of the profits. Between ten and fifteen percent of 0:13:59.800 --> 0:14:02.960 the profits. Most of that money went to Disney, not 0:14:03.040 --> 0:14:06.000 to Pixar. Some folks over at Pixar felt that this 0:14:06.200 --> 0:14:10.520 was kind of unfair that Disney was providing the distribution 0:14:10.640 --> 0:14:14.600 in marketing and that initial maybe seven million dollars you 0:14:14.600 --> 0:14:17.360 could argue for the budget of the movie, but otherwise 0:14:17.440 --> 0:14:21.080 wasn't responsible for the actual success of the movie. Disney, 0:14:21.480 --> 0:14:24.440 apart from giving some notes, didn't determine the story. They 0:14:24.480 --> 0:14:27.040 didn't do the animation, they didn't do the effects, they 0:14:27.040 --> 0:14:28.760 didn't hire the voice actors. 0:14:29.520 --> 0:14:32.400 So some folks over at Pixar were. 0:14:32.320 --> 0:14:36.000 A little not happy with this arrangement, but that's how 0:14:36.080 --> 0:14:40.840 things were at the time. Shortly after Toy Story premier, 0:14:41.040 --> 0:14:45.120 like a week after Toy Story came out, Steve Jobs 0:14:45.320 --> 0:14:48.240 made the big move and took Pixar public with an 0:14:48.280 --> 0:14:53.160 initial public offering or IPO. It ended up being the 0:14:53.200 --> 0:14:57.720 biggest technology IPO in nineteen ninety five, which was also 0:14:57.800 --> 0:15:01.080 a year that saw Netscape go public. If you don't 0:15:01.080 --> 0:15:04.120 know what Netscape is, go look it up. It used 0:15:04.120 --> 0:15:06.680 to be the name in computer. 0:15:06.400 --> 0:15:08.480 Browsers for the Internet back in the day. 0:15:09.720 --> 0:15:12.800 Now before the IPO, the estimated value of a share 0:15:12.920 --> 0:15:17.480 of Pixar stock was between twelve and fourteen dollars. That's 0:15:17.520 --> 0:15:22.040 what analysts were predicting that Pixar shares would be between 0:15:22.080 --> 0:15:24.960 twelve and fourteen bucks per share, But when trading opened, 0:15:24.960 --> 0:15:28.120 the initial share price was actually twenty two dollars, and 0:15:28.680 --> 0:15:33.680 toy Story's incredible opening was probably part of the reason 0:15:33.720 --> 0:15:37.280 why it was higher than originally estimated. During that first 0:15:37.360 --> 0:15:40.240 day of trading, the stock reached its highest point at 0:15:40.280 --> 0:15:42.920 forty six dollars per share, which means it more than 0:15:43.000 --> 0:15:49.680 doubled its value from the opening bell of the stock exchange. Now, 0:15:49.720 --> 0:15:52.920 granted it didn't end at forty six dollars per year 0:15:52.960 --> 0:15:55.480 on that first day. It actually settled to thirty nine 0:15:55.560 --> 0:15:59.520 dollars per year, so still higher than what it opened at. 0:16:00.160 --> 0:16:01.880 Because Steve Jobs. 0:16:01.520 --> 0:16:05.280 Owned practically all the shares in the company before taking 0:16:05.280 --> 0:16:10.800 it public, it turned him into a billionaire a billion 0:16:11.200 --> 0:16:16.280 air overnight. He had spent fifty million dollars on this 0:16:16.400 --> 0:16:20.000 company over time trying to keep it afloat. That gamble 0:16:20.800 --> 0:16:24.680 paid off big time and of course, it gave Pixar 0:16:24.800 --> 0:16:25.840 a bit more leverage. 0:16:25.880 --> 0:16:27.920 It was a force to be reckoned with a. 0:16:27.960 --> 0:16:34.440 One point four six billion dollar market value force. So 0:16:34.520 --> 0:16:37.680 imagine that. Imagine that you were working for a company that, 0:16:38.840 --> 0:16:41.840 over the course of a week, has its first feature 0:16:41.880 --> 0:16:45.720 length film come out and then is valued at one 0:16:45.800 --> 0:16:51.560 point four to six billion dollars. It must have been incredible. Also, 0:16:51.600 --> 0:16:55.600 in nineteen ninety five, David di Francesco, whom we talked 0:16:55.600 --> 0:16:59.600 about in the last episode, received an Academy Award for 0:16:59.640 --> 0:17:03.400 the develop element of a film input scanning technique. And 0:17:03.560 --> 0:17:08.159 Pixar was continuing to develop new technologies in the film industry, 0:17:08.680 --> 0:17:11.960 and eventually it was also licensing those technologies out to 0:17:12.040 --> 0:17:14.480 other companies. So it wasn't just that they were developing 0:17:14.520 --> 0:17:16.680 tools in house to get their stuff done. 0:17:17.240 --> 0:17:18.400 They were innovating in. 0:17:18.359 --> 0:17:21.480 Technology and then making money through licenses so that other 0:17:21.560 --> 0:17:24.640 production companies could take advantage of those advancements. 0:17:25.200 --> 0:17:28.440 We'll be back with more about Pixar after this quick break. 0:17:37.760 --> 0:17:41.919 In nineteen ninety seven, Pixar completed work on their short 0:17:41.960 --> 0:17:46.880 animated film Jerry's Game, which would win a Best Animated 0:17:46.920 --> 0:17:49.719 Short Film Oscar for Pixar that would be their second 0:17:50.480 --> 0:17:55.520 best animated short film, Oscar. They would win many, many more. 0:17:56.520 --> 0:18:01.760 And also in nineteen ninety seven, Pixar hired Randy S. Nelson, 0:18:02.480 --> 0:18:07.639 who would become the dean of Pixar University. Now this 0:18:07.760 --> 0:18:11.359 is not like a giant college campus somewhere akin to 0:18:11.480 --> 0:18:12.639 Monsters University. 0:18:12.960 --> 0:18:14.480 This is Pixar's. 0:18:13.960 --> 0:18:18.640 Internal skills development department, which gives Pixar employees the opportunity 0:18:18.680 --> 0:18:21.600 to take classes in all sorts of fields and disciplines, 0:18:21.640 --> 0:18:27.040 from story development and screenwriting to drawing and sculpting. And 0:18:27.160 --> 0:18:30.640 this Nelson guy, he sounds like someone I'd really get 0:18:30.680 --> 0:18:35.240 along with. He was a founder of the Flying Karamtsov Brothers, 0:18:35.440 --> 0:18:38.720 so he's a juggler, and as a juggler, if you 0:18:38.720 --> 0:18:40.520 didn't know, I'm also a juggler. 0:18:40.600 --> 0:18:42.159 I really respect that. 0:18:43.000 --> 0:18:45.480 He had also worked with Steve Jobs both at Apple 0:18:45.960 --> 0:18:50.360 and at Next. Remember Jobs had been essentially forced out 0:18:50.359 --> 0:18:53.679 of Apple and had founded a new company called Next Computers, 0:18:53.960 --> 0:18:58.760 eventually abandoning the hardware side of Next Computers and developing 0:18:58.800 --> 0:19:02.439 software instead. Now, according to Nelson, if you were to 0:19:02.480 --> 0:19:06.399 take all the courses, or to take a full suite 0:19:06.480 --> 0:19:10.520 of courses at Pixar University, you would have the equivalent 0:19:10.680 --> 0:19:15.399 of a bachelor's degree education in fine arts. That's how 0:19:15.560 --> 0:19:22.439 comprehensive their internal development department was. They were dedicated to 0:19:22.560 --> 0:19:26.600 making certain that employees had the opportunity to learn new 0:19:26.640 --> 0:19:30.399 skills and develop ones that they had already started to 0:19:30.480 --> 0:19:36.240 create or to build on previously. And this included all 0:19:36.280 --> 0:19:41.639 sorts of different types of activities, including improvisational acting. So 0:19:41.760 --> 0:19:44.200 you might end up finding yourself sitting next to the 0:19:44.240 --> 0:19:49.320 head of the company, but you're both classmates at that class. 0:19:49.560 --> 0:19:54.120 So it also helped break down the hierarchical barriers between 0:19:54.200 --> 0:19:59.879 bosses and employees. The motto of Pixar University is alienis not, 0:20:02.680 --> 0:20:06.960 which I know I'm terribly mispronouncing because I have little 0:20:07.040 --> 0:20:10.639 Latin and less Greek, just like a mister Shakespeare Shakespeare, 0:20:10.640 --> 0:20:15.119 but the Latin phrase actually means alone no longer. And 0:20:15.200 --> 0:20:18.880 it also is a secondary Latin inscription on the Pixar 0:20:19.000 --> 0:20:25.560 University crest, which says tempus pecunia somnum, which means time, money, sleep. 0:20:27.240 --> 0:20:29.080 The three of those, I think sleep is the one 0:20:29.119 --> 0:20:32.600 that the typical Pixar employee has the least. 0:20:32.320 --> 0:20:35.800 Of, maybe time. It's kind of hard to say. 0:20:37.320 --> 0:20:40.640 Moving on over to talk about nineteen ninety seven a bit. 0:20:40.760 --> 0:20:44.119 Pixar and Disney renegotiated their agreement at that time. 0:20:45.200 --> 0:20:45.640 So if you. 0:20:45.600 --> 0:20:48.840 Remember, they originally had come up with an I this 0:20:48.960 --> 0:20:51.440 deal that that Pixar was going to make three movies 0:20:51.520 --> 0:20:56.040 for Disney, after which there would be time to negotiate 0:20:56.080 --> 0:21:03.159 a new relationship instead, and in return, Disney was going 0:21:03.200 --> 0:21:07.439 to get the massive majority of the profits from those movies. 0:21:07.480 --> 0:21:11.840 But the renegotiation went a little better for Pixar. They 0:21:11.880 --> 0:21:17.000 agreed to do a ten year, five film deal and 0:21:17.440 --> 0:21:20.040 in that deal, Pixar would receive fifty percent of the 0:21:20.080 --> 0:21:23.480 profits from the films. The New York Times reported on 0:21:23.520 --> 0:21:25.880 the change in agreements and revealed that the new Pixar 0:21:26.000 --> 0:21:26.880 film was going to. 0:21:26.800 --> 0:21:28.320 Be called Bugs. 0:21:29.560 --> 0:21:32.280 So this was before the movie had come out. Obviously, 0:21:32.320 --> 0:21:34.280 they were still working on it. It was still in development, 0:21:34.320 --> 0:21:37.880 so the title had not been finalized. Now that arrangement, 0:21:38.880 --> 0:21:41.520 with the new deal of being a ten year, five 0:21:41.640 --> 0:21:46.040 film contract, answered some of the criticisms industry analysts had 0:21:46.119 --> 0:21:49.879 about the Pixar IPO, because when Pixar went public, some 0:21:49.960 --> 0:21:54.920 analysts were saying, this seems really like investors are pushing 0:21:54.960 --> 0:21:59.000 this company beyond its actual value, because keep in mind, 0:21:59.320 --> 0:22:01.800 while they're doing great work, and while their movies are 0:22:01.800 --> 0:22:04.600 making huge amounts of money in the box office, that 0:22:04.640 --> 0:22:06.640 most of that money is not going to Pixar, it's 0:22:06.680 --> 0:22:11.280 going to Disney. So maybe you shouldn't drive the value 0:22:11.320 --> 0:22:14.000 of this company up so high since it's really not 0:22:14.080 --> 0:22:17.960 earning money for itself. Once this new arrangement came in, 0:22:18.000 --> 0:22:21.520 that took some of that criticism away. Bugs of course 0:22:21.640 --> 0:22:24.040 ended up being A Bugs Life, which would come out 0:22:24.119 --> 0:22:26.879 in nineteen ninety eight, and it broke the record for 0:22:26.960 --> 0:22:31.439 a Thanksgiving weekend film opening in the United States. The 0:22:31.480 --> 0:22:35.320 movie combines a couple of famous stories you got ESOPs 0:22:35.359 --> 0:22:38.320 the Ant and the Grasshopper as part of it, and 0:22:38.400 --> 0:22:43.919 a very healthy dose of the Seven Samurai as the 0:22:44.119 --> 0:22:46.720 various core story elements. 0:22:47.240 --> 0:22:51.720 And the Pixar team said that A Bugs Life was particularly. 0:22:51.200 --> 0:22:55.280 Challenging and rewarding. The movie called for a lot of 0:22:55.400 --> 0:22:58.640 characters on screen at once. I mean hundreds and hundreds 0:22:58.680 --> 0:23:01.600 of insects all on screen at the same time, which 0:23:02.040 --> 0:23:04.760 requires a lot of processing power. You're talking about a 0:23:04.760 --> 0:23:07.119 ton of animation. You don't want your characters all just 0:23:07.359 --> 0:23:12.320 standing still, and that requires a lot of computer power. Also, 0:23:12.720 --> 0:23:15.240 on top of that, the characters had lots of limbs. 0:23:15.320 --> 0:23:19.080 I mean, insects have lots of legs, so most of 0:23:19.119 --> 0:23:21.639 these creatures had six legs. Some of them also had 0:23:21.680 --> 0:23:25.680 wings or also antenna. On top of that, these settings 0:23:25.680 --> 0:23:28.600 were on uneven surfaces, and those surfaces had to have 0:23:28.640 --> 0:23:31.920 an organic look to them. There was also fire and 0:23:32.080 --> 0:23:36.359 smoke in the movie, which is notoriously difficult to get 0:23:36.560 --> 0:23:38.919 just right with computer animation, or at least it was 0:23:38.960 --> 0:23:44.000 at that time, and so it was very resource heavy. 0:23:44.640 --> 0:23:47.639 It was a very ambitious project to take on after 0:23:47.840 --> 0:23:50.399 toy story. Now, one of the defining looks of the 0:23:50.400 --> 0:23:54.280 film is the translucent nature of the various leaves and flowers. 0:23:54.680 --> 0:23:57.200 So John Laster said it was like characters were living 0:23:57.280 --> 0:24:01.359 in a world of stained glass, and that the animators 0:24:01.400 --> 0:24:04.679 had to create ways for light to behave properly to 0:24:04.760 --> 0:24:09.000 shine through these surfaces. And again it meant creating new rules, 0:24:10.119 --> 0:24:14.399 making up new rules so that things looked right. They 0:24:14.400 --> 0:24:17.399 didn't just look pretty, but they looked natural. And the 0:24:17.440 --> 0:24:19.360 story of a bug's life changed a lot too over 0:24:19.400 --> 0:24:21.960 the course of its production. Originally, the main character was 0:24:22.040 --> 0:24:25.040 the head of the circus bugs, and that was an 0:24:25.080 --> 0:24:29.200 ant named Red. But the film didn't find a voice 0:24:29.200 --> 0:24:32.640 with that main character in place. They couldn't figure out, well, 0:24:32.640 --> 0:24:35.480 what's the story here, where's the character arc? Why would 0:24:35.520 --> 0:24:40.359 this character stick with this plan of pretending to be 0:24:41.119 --> 0:24:43.879 a group of warriors to fight off grasshoppers. 0:24:43.920 --> 0:24:46.639 He has no steak, he could just leave. 0:24:47.440 --> 0:24:50.280 And that's when they realized that perhaps a couple of 0:24:50.280 --> 0:24:54.359 the ants that would be asking the circus performers for 0:24:54.400 --> 0:24:58.240 help are the real main characters. And eventually those ants 0:24:58.320 --> 0:25:02.800 were reduced to a single ant, Flick, and that became 0:25:02.880 --> 0:25:03.719 the main character. 0:25:03.840 --> 0:25:08.560 So it was interesting to see that story remained the 0:25:09.359 --> 0:25:11.440 chief concern. These other technical. 0:25:11.040 --> 0:25:17.840 Issues, while really fascinating, they were secondary. It wouldn't matter 0:25:17.880 --> 0:25:20.760 how pretty the screen was. Again, if you went and 0:25:20.800 --> 0:25:24.600 saw it, you didn't care about the characters. Now, while 0:25:24.640 --> 0:25:27.000 A Bug's Life was in production, a team led by 0:25:27.119 --> 0:25:30.760 David D. Francesco created a new way to transfer computer 0:25:30.800 --> 0:25:32.359 animation onto film stock. 0:25:32.600 --> 0:25:34.160 Now remember this. 0:25:34.040 --> 0:25:38.800 Is before most theaters were able to have digital projectors. 0:25:38.840 --> 0:25:42.280 There were only a few digital projectors in place in 0:25:42.359 --> 0:25:45.720 a couple of theaters around North America. So we're still 0:25:45.760 --> 0:25:49.280 talking about an era in which physical reels of film 0:25:49.880 --> 0:25:54.679 are produced and projected onto screens. So Defrancesco's method was 0:25:54.800 --> 0:25:59.040 using a laser recording system that became known as Pixar Vision. 0:26:00.119 --> 0:26:04.520 Used solid state lasers to record images onto film. So 0:26:04.640 --> 0:26:08.199 film is photo reactive, meaning that when light hits it, 0:26:08.520 --> 0:26:11.240 there's a chemical change, and that's where we're able to 0:26:11.400 --> 0:26:16.920 capture images on film. Lasers are really really precise, way 0:26:17.000 --> 0:26:20.120 more precise than cathode ray tubes, which was the typical 0:26:20.160 --> 0:26:24.320 way to transfer computer animation over to film. So using 0:26:24.359 --> 0:26:27.960 lasers allowed for a much higher quality color reproduction and 0:26:28.160 --> 0:26:32.560 sharper images on film than the earlier versions did. Plus 0:26:32.640 --> 0:26:37.399 d Francesco's invention was faster than the cathode ray tube method. 0:26:38.000 --> 0:26:41.200 If you wanted to use a CRT method, it would 0:26:41.200 --> 0:26:44.879 take thirty five seconds to record a single frame of 0:26:44.920 --> 0:26:49.000 computer animation onto film. With the laser method it took 0:26:49.080 --> 0:26:55.280 eight seconds, so much much faster, four times faster than 0:26:55.359 --> 0:26:59.960 the traditional method. So DeFrancesco would receive a Technical Academy 0:27:00.040 --> 0:27:02.600 Award for this invention. He started he was starting to 0:27:02.640 --> 0:27:07.080 rack up those those Academy awards for his technological contributions 0:27:07.359 --> 0:27:10.600 to the film industry. Now, the big advantage of using 0:27:10.640 --> 0:27:13.520 that laser recording system is that allowed for that much 0:27:13.600 --> 0:27:17.560 higher quality transfer of an image onto film, and the 0:27:17.600 --> 0:27:20.440 first time it was used was on A Bugs Life, 0:27:20.960 --> 0:27:23.800 So the transfers that were made for A Bugs Life 0:27:23.960 --> 0:27:26.560 relied upon the system, and it would be used on 0:27:26.600 --> 0:27:27.760 lots of future films. 0:27:27.800 --> 0:27:30.320 Though by the time we get around to Monsters. 0:27:29.840 --> 0:27:34.440 Incorporated, Pixar was really starting to push for digital projectors 0:27:34.560 --> 0:27:38.240 in more movie theaters, saying that the digital projection is 0:27:38.440 --> 0:27:41.800 just superior. You get more vibrant colors and sharper images 0:27:41.840 --> 0:27:44.080 than you ever will with film. You don't have the 0:27:44.200 --> 0:27:47.000 jitter that you would have with film, you don't have 0:27:47.119 --> 0:27:52.120 other physical limitations of film. There, you would have pure 0:27:52.200 --> 0:27:56.280 digital experience, which for computer animated film makes perfect sense. 0:27:56.600 --> 0:27:58.800 If you're talking about other types of movies, you can have. 0:27:58.800 --> 0:28:02.800 A legitimate argument that the film creates a certain sensibility 0:28:02.840 --> 0:28:07.880 that you cannot easily replicate using digital projection. Quentin Tarantino 0:28:07.800 --> 0:28:11.440 would go bonkers if you told him from now on 0:28:11.520 --> 0:28:14.520 you can only do movies in digital, you cannot do 0:28:14.640 --> 0:28:18.680 them in film, and it does have a very different effect. 0:28:18.840 --> 0:28:22.920 But in computer animated movies, that's less of a problem 0:28:23.000 --> 0:28:27.600 because the whole film is digital. It's only when you 0:28:27.760 --> 0:28:30.919 put it onto film that it becomes analog. There was 0:28:31.040 --> 0:28:34.880 never a physical object for you to shoot on film in. 0:28:34.800 --> 0:28:38.560 The first place. Now, in nineteen ninety nine. 0:28:38.840 --> 0:28:41.719 Toy Story two comes out that would end up being 0:28:41.800 --> 0:28:44.120 a bit of a point of contention a little bit 0:28:44.200 --> 0:28:48.320 later between Disney and Pixar, and this development process was 0:28:48.440 --> 0:28:52.560 uneasy from the beginning, actually, because Disney originally wanted this 0:28:52.600 --> 0:28:54.800 to be a direct to video sequel. 0:28:55.200 --> 0:28:56.640 If you remember the nineties. 0:28:56.680 --> 0:29:01.200 In the early two thousands, Disney was really into creating 0:29:01.800 --> 0:29:05.480 directive video sequels of a lot of its very popular 0:29:05.680 --> 0:29:10.400 feature length films, so much so that it became. 0:29:10.360 --> 0:29:12.280 A bit of a joke in the industry. 0:29:13.360 --> 0:29:16.560 But John Laster and his team fought for a cinematic release, 0:29:16.560 --> 0:29:19.000 and eventually Disney agreed. They said, all right, fine, we 0:29:19.080 --> 0:29:23.200 will make this a theatrical release film, not a directive 0:29:23.280 --> 0:29:26.680 video sequel. Now, during the making of the movie, there 0:29:26.720 --> 0:29:31.480 were some really huge setbacks. A terrible sequence of events happened. 0:29:32.040 --> 0:29:35.000 So first, the files for the film were all saved 0:29:35.040 --> 0:29:39.080 on a Linux system and someone ran the function r 0:29:39.480 --> 0:29:43.560 M star on the hard drive holding all the Toy 0:29:43.600 --> 0:29:48.520 Story two files. Our M stands for remove, essentially, it's 0:29:48.560 --> 0:29:53.000 to delete stuff, and STAR pretty much means everything you find. 0:29:53.240 --> 0:29:58.520 So someone was essentially deleting all the material off of 0:29:58.520 --> 0:30:00.239 a hard drive, and that hard drive happened to have 0:30:01.360 --> 0:30:07.480 all of Toy Story two's assets on it, including reference files, animation, 0:30:08.400 --> 0:30:11.120 the completed movie. Up to that point, all of it 0:30:11.200 --> 0:30:15.880 was on this hard drive. So when this was detected, 0:30:15.920 --> 0:30:20.360 people saw that various assets were starting to disappear, including 0:30:20.560 --> 0:30:25.240 entire sequences and even characters. They began to get deleted, 0:30:25.320 --> 0:30:28.480 and to make matters worse, the official backup for the film. 0:30:29.080 --> 0:30:31.680 They found out it hadn't been backing up for a 0:30:31.680 --> 0:30:34.120 couple of months. There had been a failure that had 0:30:34.160 --> 0:30:38.200 not been corrected or addressed. Instead, the team which was 0:30:38.200 --> 0:30:41.040 working furiously to try and get this movie done on time, 0:30:41.960 --> 0:30:46.160 was relying on the primary copy of the movie and 0:30:46.360 --> 0:30:50.640 the backup was outdated. Now, if this is where that 0:30:50.760 --> 0:30:53.560 story ended, things would have turned out very differently. The 0:30:53.600 --> 0:30:55.760 whole film would have been set back a huge amount. 0:30:56.320 --> 0:31:00.880 But the technical director for the movie happened to have 0:31:00.920 --> 0:31:04.760 a copy of all the files on her work computer. 0:31:05.480 --> 0:31:08.800 Her computer that she used to work from home. She 0:31:08.920 --> 0:31:13.640 had requested that computer so that she could occasionally spend 0:31:13.640 --> 0:31:16.160 time at home with her family and not just live 0:31:16.240 --> 0:31:21.040 at the office, And so the team actually sent people 0:31:21.920 --> 0:31:27.320 to her house to physically take her computer, secure it 0:31:27.360 --> 0:31:31.880 in the backseat of her car, and then very gently 0:31:32.080 --> 0:31:35.840 transport it back to Pixar so that they could recapture 0:31:35.920 --> 0:31:39.680 all the assets that had been lost in the Great 0:31:39.920 --> 0:31:40.760 file deletion. 0:31:41.640 --> 0:31:43.560 And they were able to do it, and the. 0:31:43.520 --> 0:31:46.640 Movie was able to continue in development and not suffer 0:31:46.680 --> 0:31:50.920 this terrible setback. But then they had another major challenge 0:31:50.960 --> 0:31:54.080 when Disney executive, seeing an early cut, said they didn't 0:31:54.280 --> 0:31:57.600 like where it was headed, so the team had to 0:31:57.640 --> 0:32:02.560 rework the film, but Disney said, we are not going 0:32:02.600 --> 0:32:07.080 to change the release date. You still have the same 0:32:07.200 --> 0:32:10.200 deadline to get the movie finished, even though you have 0:32:10.280 --> 0:32:11.800 to go back and rework a lot. 0:32:11.760 --> 0:32:12.360 Of this stuff. 0:32:13.160 --> 0:32:15.600 So teams would start putting in as many as thirty 0:32:15.640 --> 0:32:18.640 six to forty eight hours in a row of work, 0:32:18.800 --> 0:32:23.680 so just working for two days non stop, like not 0:32:23.760 --> 0:32:27.560 even to take a real night's sleep, just working on 0:32:27.640 --> 0:32:31.120 sequences to get this movie finished in time for the deadline. 0:32:33.000 --> 0:32:37.160 Lee Unkrich who oversaw cinematography for the film, said that 0:32:37.240 --> 0:32:42.400 while they were technically capable of putting a camera anywhere 0:32:42.440 --> 0:32:45.040 within a scene and have it do anything that could 0:32:45.320 --> 0:32:48.000 disobey the laws of physics, because it's a virtual camera, 0:32:48.560 --> 0:32:50.960 you can place the virtual camera anywhere you want. 0:32:51.080 --> 0:32:53.840 It doesn't have to follow the rules of a real 0:32:53.880 --> 0:32:54.560 world camera. 0:32:55.360 --> 0:32:57.800 He said that if you did that, they found that 0:32:57.880 --> 0:33:03.320 audiences responded as if things weren't right. If it didn't 0:33:03.320 --> 0:33:06.760 behave the way an actual camera did, you lost the audience. 0:33:07.840 --> 0:33:10.880 So you actually had to restrict the virtual camera, give 0:33:10.880 --> 0:33:13.880 it the same limitations a physical camera would have, which 0:33:13.920 --> 0:33:16.040 is pretty interesting that despite the fact you have the 0:33:16.080 --> 0:33:19.760 technical capability, you couldn't really take advantage of it in 0:33:19.760 --> 0:33:23.680 that way and still manage to keep your audience. Now, 0:33:23.720 --> 0:33:26.160 Toy Story two was the first sequel to earn more 0:33:26.320 --> 0:33:30.720 money than the original film. It broke opening weekend records 0:33:30.760 --> 0:33:33.880 in the UK and the US and in Japan, and 0:33:33.920 --> 0:33:36.360 it was the first film to be created, mastered, and 0:33:36.680 --> 0:33:43.400 exhibited digitally. Now not exclusively digitally, because again at this time, 0:33:43.720 --> 0:33:46.400 not that many theaters had digital protectors, but the ones 0:33:46.440 --> 0:33:51.560 that did showed Toy Story two in digital format. In 0:33:51.600 --> 0:33:55.160 two thousand, Pixar would premiere the short for the Birds, 0:33:55.480 --> 0:33:58.120 which would of course go on to win an Oscar 0:33:58.200 --> 0:34:03.080 for Best Short Animated Film, and Pixar would relocate to 0:34:03.160 --> 0:34:08.120 a new headquarters in Emeryville, California. In two thousand and one, 0:34:08.480 --> 0:34:12.880 they debuted Monsters Inc. Now, this was the first Pixar 0:34:12.960 --> 0:34:16.200 film not directed by John Lassiter. He had worked on 0:34:16.360 --> 0:34:18.680 Toy Story, A Bugs Life and Toy Story two, but 0:34:18.840 --> 0:34:22.600 Pete Doctor came in as the main director and David 0:34:22.640 --> 0:34:25.480 Silverman and Lee Unkrich co directed it. 0:34:27.280 --> 0:34:29.080 Billy Crystal, who voiced the part. 0:34:28.920 --> 0:34:32.200 Of Mike Wazowski, was originally offered the role of Buzz 0:34:32.239 --> 0:34:34.280 light Year for Toy Story, but he turned it down, 0:34:34.880 --> 0:34:37.800 and he said that this was such a huge mistake 0:34:37.880 --> 0:34:41.040 that he leapt at the opportunity to voice a character 0:34:41.120 --> 0:34:44.640 in a new Pixar movie. One of the big advancements 0:34:44.680 --> 0:34:48.040 they made in computer animation for Monsters Inc. Was building 0:34:48.200 --> 0:34:51.880 realistic looking fur, and when you think about it, you 0:34:52.000 --> 0:34:55.520 realize how important it was for them to develop this, 0:34:55.680 --> 0:34:59.319 considering the types of furry creatures they had in Monsters Inc. 0:35:00.200 --> 0:35:01.480 If you don't create a. 0:35:01.440 --> 0:35:04.239 System to animate the fur automatically, it means that you 0:35:04.280 --> 0:35:08.400 would have to animate every strand of fur by hand. 0:35:09.280 --> 0:35:11.000 And if you didn't even. 0:35:10.840 --> 0:35:13.319 Allow it, like maybe maybe you say, all right, let's 0:35:13.320 --> 0:35:18.120 not animate every individual hair. That's ridiculous. Sully has more 0:35:18.160 --> 0:35:23.200 than a million hairs over his entire body and animating 0:35:23.239 --> 0:35:25.600 every single one of those individually by hand. 0:35:25.840 --> 0:35:29.600 Is not possible. Let's group them together. 0:35:29.800 --> 0:35:31.319 Well, if you did that, then you would end up 0:35:31.320 --> 0:35:34.760 with this weird, matted look where hair still wouldn't seem 0:35:34.800 --> 0:35:36.919 to move naturally. So they had to find a way 0:35:37.000 --> 0:35:39.960 to solve that, and they did that by building a 0:35:40.080 --> 0:35:44.120 simulator so each hair behaves according to the rules set 0:35:44.239 --> 0:35:46.480 in this simulator. It took Home a long time to 0:35:46.480 --> 0:35:49.400 get the simulator just right so that hairs would behave properly, 0:35:50.840 --> 0:35:53.160 So the team had to test the program to make 0:35:53.239 --> 0:35:56.320 sure that the fur and hair is moving in the 0:35:56.400 --> 0:35:58.600 right way. They'd had to make tweaks whenever it didn't 0:35:58.600 --> 0:36:01.120 look right, and I had to work very hard to 0:36:01.160 --> 0:36:05.680 solve collision problems with the fur. And some of the 0:36:05.719 --> 0:36:08.400 other issues were that if a character moved too quickly, 0:36:08.880 --> 0:36:12.160 the fur would sometimes go crazy and stretch too far 0:36:12.320 --> 0:36:15.880 like it suddenly it would act like a rubber band 0:36:15.960 --> 0:36:19.160 and stretch across the screen, and it wasn't until later 0:36:19.200 --> 0:36:22.720 that they figured out where that problem was coming from. Also, 0:36:22.760 --> 0:36:24.960 they went ahead and made a decision that certain fur, 0:36:25.400 --> 0:36:29.640 like the fur around Sully's face, wouldn't be animated by 0:36:29.680 --> 0:36:33.160 this dynamic computer simulation. 0:36:32.800 --> 0:36:35.840 Because they wanted to have really tight. 0:36:35.719 --> 0:36:41.680 Control for the purposes of performance and expression. They didn't 0:36:41.680 --> 0:36:45.200 want the fur to be distracting. So for those cases 0:36:45.719 --> 0:36:48.800 the fur was not dynamic. It was actually static and 0:36:49.640 --> 0:36:52.520 could be animated by hand if necessary. But the rest 0:36:52.520 --> 0:36:54.920 of the fur, the stuff that was over Sully's body 0:36:54.920 --> 0:36:59.400 in general, that followed the rules of the simulation they 0:36:59.440 --> 0:37:01.600 also want to have then created a program to simulate 0:37:01.680 --> 0:37:04.960 the natural movements of clothing. In Toy Story two, they 0:37:04.960 --> 0:37:08.320 had to animate all of Awl of Owl's toy barn. 0:37:08.560 --> 0:37:10.920 They had to animate all of his clothing by hand, 0:37:11.320 --> 0:37:13.359 and according to the animators, this was a real pain 0:37:13.400 --> 0:37:16.799 in the butt because not only did it take a 0:37:16.840 --> 0:37:19.960 lot of time to get clothes to animate in the 0:37:20.000 --> 0:37:23.880 way that they looked right and they behaved according to 0:37:24.400 --> 0:37:28.160 the contours of the person wearing the clothing, and. 0:37:28.200 --> 0:37:30.239 So the worst part is if you do your job right, 0:37:30.320 --> 0:37:33.200 no one notices. They only notice if you don't do. 0:37:33.200 --> 0:37:38.279 Your job right because it doesn't look right. So it's 0:37:38.320 --> 0:37:40.279 a frustrating thing to think you spend a lot of 0:37:40.280 --> 0:37:42.960 time to get something to work just right so that people. 0:37:42.760 --> 0:37:44.080 Do not notice it. 0:37:44.840 --> 0:37:47.800 And so as a result, they created this automated program 0:37:47.840 --> 0:37:50.719 that would save time and frustration and the animators could 0:37:50.719 --> 0:37:54.920 work on other stuff that was more important from a 0:37:54.960 --> 0:37:56.120 performance standpoint. 0:37:56.920 --> 0:37:59.320 We're going to take a quick break for some messages 0:37:59.360 --> 0:38:01.680 from our sponsor and be back with more about the 0:38:01.719 --> 0:38:14.440 Pixar story. Glenn McQueen, who was a supervising animator for 0:38:14.600 --> 0:38:17.560 Monsters Zinc, spoke to an interview about how the increase 0:38:17.560 --> 0:38:18.600 in computer power was. 0:38:18.600 --> 0:38:20.680 Both good and bad. 0:38:21.080 --> 0:38:23.520 It was good in that it gave animators more power 0:38:23.520 --> 0:38:27.440 to create visual complexity, but with that complexity comes the 0:38:27.520 --> 0:38:30.240 challenge of making sure all the details in the frame 0:38:30.360 --> 0:38:33.880 are working properly. And as we've seen in all realms 0:38:33.880 --> 0:38:37.880 of computers, not just in animation, if you add more power, 0:38:38.520 --> 0:38:42.719 programmers or animators or directors will find ways to make 0:38:42.920 --> 0:38:46.160 use of that power, so you're never actually ahead of 0:38:46.200 --> 0:38:46.600 the game. 0:38:47.800 --> 0:38:47.960 You know. 0:38:48.040 --> 0:38:52.040 This is why when we get a new computer with 0:38:52.080 --> 0:38:55.279 an even more powerful processor. You start to think, well, 0:38:55.320 --> 0:39:01.000 this thing isn't isn't faster than what my old computer was, Like, well, 0:39:01.200 --> 0:39:04.400 that's not because the processor isn't more powerful. It is 0:39:04.880 --> 0:39:08.400 the problem is that software developers are building software to 0:39:08.440 --> 0:39:11.560 take advantage of that power, and they may not be 0:39:11.680 --> 0:39:17.520 taking the most efficient path to doing that. So you 0:39:18.280 --> 0:39:21.279 have this constant issue with the fact that software is 0:39:21.320 --> 0:39:25.439 taking up all the power that the new shiny processors 0:39:25.480 --> 0:39:29.200 can generate, and it feels like we're kind of treading water. 0:39:29.400 --> 0:39:30.600 Same thing's true with animation. 0:39:30.719 --> 0:39:33.440 You can do more stuff, but once again you just 0:39:33.480 --> 0:39:36.600 start pushing up against the boundaries of what the technology 0:39:36.640 --> 0:39:39.719 is capable of doing. Now, the most difficult sequence for 0:39:39.800 --> 0:39:44.000 the team to nail down, both from a story perspective 0:39:44.040 --> 0:39:48.520 and technical challenges, was the sequence inside the Yeti's Cave, 0:39:49.080 --> 0:39:51.040 and it was so hard for them to get that 0:39:51.120 --> 0:39:55.080 scene right that they started using the phrase Yeti's Cave 0:39:55.840 --> 0:39:59.680 as code for any scene in any Pixar film that 0:39:59.800 --> 0:40:04.520 is near impossible to get right. They would say, oh, 0:40:04.760 --> 0:40:08.239 this is turning into another Yeti's Cave, just to explain, like, 0:40:08.520 --> 0:40:11.759 we know this isn't where it needs to be yet 0:40:12.640 --> 0:40:13.760 and we Need to Fix. 0:40:13.560 --> 0:40:16.839 It Monsters, Inc. Did really well. 0:40:16.880 --> 0:40:19.560 It hit one hundred million dollars in domestic box office 0:40:19.560 --> 0:40:22.719 in just nine days, which was faster than any other 0:40:22.880 --> 0:40:26.880 animated film in history up to that point. Edwin Cattmull 0:40:26.960 --> 0:40:30.560 officially became the president of Pixar again, and the company 0:40:30.800 --> 0:40:35.720 had six hundred employees at that point. Now two thousand 0:40:35.719 --> 0:40:39.200 and one would see ed Edwin Catmull, Lauren Carpenter, and 0:40:39.320 --> 0:40:42.640 Rob Cook receive an Academy Award of Merit for the 0:40:42.680 --> 0:40:47.719 Pixar in house rendering software package known as Pixar's RenderMan, 0:40:48.640 --> 0:40:50.920 which have been used in many other films to render 0:40:51.000 --> 0:40:53.880 CGI effects, not just Pixar's movies. They had licensed it 0:40:53.920 --> 0:40:57.320 out to other production companies, and this would. 0:40:57.200 --> 0:41:01.520 Represent the first OSCAR ever awarded specifically for the development 0:41:01.600 --> 0:41:05.240 of software. In two thousand and two. 0:41:05.200 --> 0:41:08.720 Pixar would debut a new short film called Mike's New Car, 0:41:08.920 --> 0:41:11.120 and this was the first time Pixar had ever released 0:41:11.120 --> 0:41:13.680 a short film starring characters from one of their feature 0:41:13.800 --> 0:41:17.000 length films. It was nominated for an Academy Award, but 0:41:17.040 --> 0:41:19.960 it did not win one. But that same year, the 0:41:19.960 --> 0:41:23.280 first Disney Park attraction based off of Pixar property opens, 0:41:23.680 --> 0:41:27.320 that would be a bugs Land at Disney California Adventure Park. 0:41:27.960 --> 0:41:31.440 Of course, Disney's California Adventure would eventually become home for 0:41:31.800 --> 0:41:35.520 the Car's Ride, which if you've not had the chance 0:41:35.560 --> 0:41:38.520 to go on it, if you ever do go to Disneyland, 0:41:39.600 --> 0:41:42.200 I would say that a trip over to California Adventure 0:41:42.239 --> 0:41:44.560 is completely worth it just for the Car's Ride. It 0:41:44.640 --> 0:41:48.080 is really really well done. In two thousand and three, 0:41:48.200 --> 0:41:51.960 Finding Nemo premieres with a remastered version of the classic 0:41:52.040 --> 0:41:55.120 Pixar short Nick Knack. That was one of the ones 0:41:55.160 --> 0:41:57.400 that they had made back when they were trying to 0:41:57.480 --> 0:42:01.759 sell hardware. Nick Knack was kind of their demo for saying, hey, 0:42:02.160 --> 0:42:04.520 look at the kind of stuff we can do. So 0:42:04.560 --> 0:42:07.440 this time a remaster version comes out with Finding Nemo, 0:42:07.640 --> 0:42:10.880 and Finding Nemo would break more opening weekend box office 0:42:10.880 --> 0:42:13.720 records for an animated film and would win an Oscar 0:42:13.800 --> 0:42:15.120 for Best Animated Feature. 0:42:16.120 --> 0:42:17.440 And back in Monsters, Inc. 0:42:17.719 --> 0:42:21.239 Where the fur effects were the big challenge with Finding Nemo, obviously, 0:42:21.440 --> 0:42:24.919 the big challenge was getting those underwater effects just right. 0:42:26.440 --> 0:42:28.200 All sorts of stuff need to be right. The way 0:42:28.200 --> 0:42:31.840 that particulates floated in the water had to be modeled correctly. 0:42:31.960 --> 0:42:35.759 The light had to be just right for each of 0:42:35.800 --> 0:42:40.719 the different water environments they were in the colors, how 0:42:40.719 --> 0:42:44.840 those colors and light would affect the way characters appear 0:42:44.920 --> 0:42:48.759 on screen. All of that had to be researched and developed, 0:42:49.200 --> 0:42:53.640 and it was pretty incredible. They were eventually able to 0:42:53.800 --> 0:42:57.960 create underwater scenes so convincingly. They would take some reference 0:42:58.040 --> 0:43:02.440 material some actual film shot underwater an attempt to recreate 0:43:02.480 --> 0:43:06.279 that film using computer generated imagery. They got so good 0:43:06.280 --> 0:43:09.480 at it that you couldn't tell the difference between the 0:43:09.520 --> 0:43:11.799 two if you showed them side by side. It would 0:43:11.800 --> 0:43:15.840 be very difficult to say, this one's the real footage 0:43:16.120 --> 0:43:19.680 and this one's the computer animated footage. At that point, 0:43:19.719 --> 0:43:23.560 they then had to dial back the realism because in 0:43:23.600 --> 0:43:25.719 the world of Fighting Nemo, they wanted it to be 0:43:26.880 --> 0:43:31.000 somewhat like a make believe world, but based in the 0:43:31.120 --> 0:43:34.359 underwater world we know of, so it had to be 0:43:35.040 --> 0:43:37.960 It couldn't be too realistic or it would lose the audience, 0:43:37.960 --> 0:43:40.160 and it couldn't be too cartoony or it wouldn't be 0:43:40.160 --> 0:43:43.719 what they wanted. And they also had to study how 0:43:43.760 --> 0:43:46.320 fish moved through water to make sure that the animation 0:43:46.480 --> 0:43:50.480 made sense. They had to research aquatic life to understand 0:43:50.520 --> 0:43:54.800 their anatomy, and every animator was required by John Lassiter 0:43:55.520 --> 0:43:58.880 to get certified in scuba and to take several dives 0:43:58.920 --> 0:44:03.080 to have first hand ex experience underwater around these environments. 0:44:03.600 --> 0:44:06.320 They also had to develop the color palette that particulate 0:44:06.360 --> 0:44:11.480 movement all of that stuff, and this was a huge undertaking. 0:44:12.160 --> 0:44:13.960 Oh and they also had to figure out how can 0:44:14.040 --> 0:44:18.200 you make a compelling character out of a fish because 0:44:18.480 --> 0:44:23.359 traditionally fish have very limited abilities to emote. They don't 0:44:23.440 --> 0:44:26.359 do a lot of emoting, so they had to cheat 0:44:26.360 --> 0:44:28.240 a bit on that one. They had to give fish 0:44:28.320 --> 0:44:32.080 things like eyelids, which fish do not have, and to 0:44:32.200 --> 0:44:34.600 give them more expressive faces and be able to move 0:44:34.640 --> 0:44:38.040 their brows and things like that so that they could 0:44:38.080 --> 0:44:40.800 have characters have expressions on screen. 0:44:41.960 --> 0:44:43.520 That was a bit of a challenge too to get 0:44:43.520 --> 0:44:46.680 that just right. And of course developing the story was 0:44:46.880 --> 0:44:49.920 a big tough thing to do. It's a story that. 0:44:49.880 --> 0:44:52.600 Begins with a character losing his wife and most of 0:44:52.640 --> 0:44:55.640 his children. Of course, that's not the only time that 0:44:55.719 --> 0:44:58.200 happens in Pixar, and it's not the only time you 0:44:58.239 --> 0:45:00.040 see it in Disney, But you have to be a 0:45:00.160 --> 0:45:02.000 to treat that just right so that it has an 0:45:02.000 --> 0:45:06.600 emotional impact but doesn't become so overpowering that people you 0:45:06.719 --> 0:45:09.160 lose everybody at the very opening of your movie. 0:45:10.000 --> 0:45:11.640 It's a delicate thing. 0:45:12.560 --> 0:45:15.640 Also, in two thousand and three, Pixar debuted the short Bounden, 0:45:16.640 --> 0:45:20.680 and in two thousand and four, Pixar would release The Incredibles, 0:45:21.320 --> 0:45:24.440 which I would say is arguably one of the best 0:45:24.600 --> 0:45:30.440 superhero films ever made. I'm including all the live action films, 0:45:31.000 --> 0:45:34.360 and The Incredibles broke all of Pixar's box office records 0:45:34.360 --> 0:45:37.520 for opening weekend up to that point. It also would 0:45:37.600 --> 0:45:41.760 eventually win the Best Animated Film Oscar. Now, this movie 0:45:41.800 --> 0:45:44.360 was a little bit different from earlier ones. Pixar brought 0:45:44.400 --> 0:45:48.880 on brad Bird. He actually ended up joining Pixar becoming 0:45:48.920 --> 0:45:51.680 part of the company. But when brad Bird came on board, 0:45:51.719 --> 0:45:54.240 he also brought some folks that he had been working 0:45:54.280 --> 0:45:58.960 with in previous productions, and so at first there was 0:45:59.000 --> 0:46:02.759 kind of a Pixar versus brad Bird and his guys 0:46:02.800 --> 0:46:04.719 sort of feeling. It took a while for the two 0:46:04.760 --> 0:46:08.640 groups to meld together and work together effectively, and brad 0:46:08.680 --> 0:46:16.280 Bird was apparently something of a and abrasive is probably 0:46:16.280 --> 0:46:20.440 the wrong word, but he definitely seemed to come across 0:46:20.520 --> 0:46:24.800 as a bit aggressive because in various drawings of brad 0:46:24.800 --> 0:46:28.080 Bird that were made around the time, it always looks 0:46:28.080 --> 0:46:31.920 like he's screaming at everybody, which in the behind the 0:46:31.960 --> 0:46:34.680 scenes footage for The Incredibles, brad Bird seems to take 0:46:34.680 --> 0:46:37.320 a little bit of an exception to He's mostly amused 0:46:37.360 --> 0:46:38.760 by it, but he's like, come on, guys. 0:46:40.120 --> 0:46:42.040 Eisner reportedly didn't. 0:46:41.920 --> 0:46:45.160 Like the pitch for The Incredibles at all and thought 0:46:45.200 --> 0:46:47.520 the film would have to be a live action picture. 0:46:47.600 --> 0:46:50.600 He would just essentially dismiss the idea that this should 0:46:50.640 --> 0:46:54.680 be animated, but Lasser was able to change Eisner's mind 0:46:54.760 --> 0:46:56.120 and get the film greenlit. 0:46:56.920 --> 0:46:57.080 Now. 0:46:57.120 --> 0:47:00.000 Early ideas had a slightly different take on a story 0:47:00.400 --> 0:47:02.680 than what we saw in the finished film. For example, 0:47:03.000 --> 0:47:06.200 originally everyone in the family could fly except for the 0:47:06.280 --> 0:47:10.880 dad Bob, which meant that he would end up behind 0:47:10.920 --> 0:47:13.680 the wheel of the family station wagon trying to keep 0:47:13.760 --> 0:47:15.719 up with all the rest of his members who are 0:47:15.840 --> 0:47:20.320 flying away. Brad Bird decided that that didn't make a 0:47:20.320 --> 0:47:22.040 whole lot of sense, and he didn't want any of 0:47:22.040 --> 0:47:25.600 his characters to have unlimited superpowers. He didn't want any 0:47:25.719 --> 0:47:29.080 character to be like Superman because he wanted those characters 0:47:29.120 --> 0:47:31.400 to get into situations that were difficult to get out of. 0:47:31.480 --> 0:47:34.720 And if you make a characters too powerful, it's really 0:47:34.800 --> 0:47:40.200 really tricky to come up with complications that that character 0:47:40.239 --> 0:47:44.760 can't just immediately fix, right. I mean, that's the problem 0:47:44.960 --> 0:47:47.120 with a lot of Superman stories is how do you 0:47:47.200 --> 0:47:52.000 create a situation for Superman that he can't just fix 0:47:52.560 --> 0:47:55.160 right away? And it tends to mean you have to 0:47:55.280 --> 0:47:59.160 escalate everything. So instead of escalating everything to a ridiculous level, 0:47:59.440 --> 0:48:02.920 Brad Bird's and let's make certain that the powers, while 0:48:03.239 --> 0:48:08.640 cool and beyond the capabilities of your typical human, don't 0:48:08.640 --> 0:48:14.920 get to the point where any one character is invincible. Now, 0:48:14.960 --> 0:48:18.760 the animators had the challenge of making unrealistically proportioned characters 0:48:18.800 --> 0:48:21.239 move in a believable way. If you've seen the Incredibles, 0:48:21.239 --> 0:48:25.680 you know, while they're unmistakably human, they don't have the 0:48:25.719 --> 0:48:29.319 proportions of humans. Bob, for example, has these tiny little 0:48:29.360 --> 0:48:34.759 feet and legs compared to a massive, massive Torso it's 0:48:34.800 --> 0:48:38.839 not realistic. It's a stylized version of a human being. 0:48:39.239 --> 0:48:42.200 So animating a character like that so that the character 0:48:42.239 --> 0:48:44.600 appears to move in a natural way when the character 0:48:44.680 --> 0:48:48.840 itself is an unnatural shape is a pretty tough problem. 0:48:49.480 --> 0:48:52.759 And also they had to create a look to the 0:48:52.840 --> 0:48:54.680 character so that they didn't look like toys. 0:48:55.400 --> 0:48:57.279 You know, that was the issue with Toy Story. 0:48:57.280 --> 0:49:01.720 In fact, some people pointed out that in Toy Story 0:49:01.760 --> 0:49:04.279 and Toy Story two kind of toy like himself, he 0:49:04.320 --> 0:49:07.319 didn't look very much like a human. So they had 0:49:07.360 --> 0:49:09.319 those challenges ahead of them. They needed to get that 0:49:09.480 --> 0:49:13.839 just right. But you could argue that maybe by going 0:49:13.880 --> 0:49:17.760 the stylized route they didn't really nail it. I think 0:49:17.880 --> 0:49:21.280 it's perfect for the way the movie is. Two thousand 0:49:21.280 --> 0:49:23.520 and four, Finding Nemo would go on to become the 0:49:23.560 --> 0:49:28.480 best selling DVD of all time, with twenty four million 0:49:28.520 --> 0:49:32.399 copies in North America alone. Also in two thousand and four, 0:49:32.560 --> 0:49:35.960 over at Epcot Walt Disney World, there was a new 0:49:36.000 --> 0:49:40.000 attraction that opened called Turtle Talk with Crush, which was 0:49:40.040 --> 0:49:41.560 part of the Living Seas Pavilion. 0:49:42.080 --> 0:49:44.800 So Turtle Talk with Crush is really cool. 0:49:45.160 --> 0:49:47.600 The basic premise is you go into a little theater 0:49:48.239 --> 0:49:51.800 and Crush from Finding Nemo. That's the sea Turtle shows 0:49:51.880 --> 0:49:55.640 up and he has a conversation with audience, an actual conversation. 0:49:55.760 --> 0:49:59.719 He can talk to specific people in the audience, ask 0:49:59.800 --> 0:50:03.880 them questions and tell jokes and that sort of stuff. 0:50:04.960 --> 0:50:10.319 So it's an incredible thing to see, and it's it 0:50:10.360 --> 0:50:11.919 can at least be It can be a little mind 0:50:11.920 --> 0:50:14.319 blowing at first because it looks like they're doing three 0:50:14.400 --> 0:50:16.640 D computer animation in real time. 0:50:17.400 --> 0:50:20.720 That's not exactly what's happening. It's more like a video game. 0:50:21.040 --> 0:50:22.800 Like think of a video game where you're able to 0:50:22.840 --> 0:50:26.680 control the characters make the move around, and it's similar 0:50:26.680 --> 0:50:29.000 to that. So there's a performer who's behind the scenes 0:50:29.000 --> 0:50:33.719 who can control Crush. They can make the turtle move 0:50:33.760 --> 0:50:37.600 around and do tricks and move his mouth, and then 0:50:37.719 --> 0:50:39.680 the performer actually provides the voice. 0:50:40.760 --> 0:50:43.160 So they always have to have someone on staff. 0:50:43.400 --> 0:50:45.920 Usually a couple of people who could do the Crush 0:50:46.000 --> 0:50:49.720 voice really really well. You need to have a couple 0:50:49.800 --> 0:50:52.440 because sometimes the person's voice isn't up to snuff and you. 0:50:52.400 --> 0:50:54.000 Have to call in the backup. 0:50:54.480 --> 0:50:58.319 So it's kind of interesting that that's become an actual job. 0:50:58.400 --> 0:51:00.480 Like if you can do a good crush voice and 0:51:00.520 --> 0:51:03.520 you can learn this system. You got a good you 0:51:03.640 --> 0:51:06.799 got some good job security there. So this is really 0:51:06.920 --> 0:51:09.640 kind of a type of machinema. That's machinema with a 0:51:09.719 --> 0:51:13.440 lowercase M, and that's machine animation, the idea of using 0:51:13.840 --> 0:51:18.360 a pre existing three D virtual environment in order to 0:51:18.440 --> 0:51:22.319 render animation in real time. In this case, this was 0:51:22.520 --> 0:51:28.400 a custom built system meant just for this this attraction. 0:51:28.960 --> 0:51:31.319 It's not like they bought a video game off the 0:51:31.320 --> 0:51:33.680 shelf and they're using it for that purpose. They developed 0:51:33.719 --> 0:51:36.440 it from the ground up. But it's the same basic principle, 0:51:37.160 --> 0:51:39.520 and the performer can hear audio thanks to a handheld 0:51:39.560 --> 0:51:42.920 mic and possibly some other mics that might be positioned 0:51:42.960 --> 0:51:46.120 around the room, and also can see people through a 0:51:46.200 --> 0:51:50.719 camera system, so that's where that interactivity can come in. 0:51:50.719 --> 0:51:53.600 In two thousand and five, another Pixar short film debuts. 0:51:53.640 --> 0:51:56.440 This one is called One Man Band, and the New 0:51:56.520 --> 0:51:59.359 York Museum of Modern Art would host an exhibition called 0:51:59.440 --> 0:52:03.480 Pixart Twenty Years of Animation in December of two thousand 0:52:03.480 --> 0:52:06.080 and five, though to be fair, the actual twentieth anniversary 0:52:06.160 --> 0:52:09.760 happens in two thousand and six, so the exhibition opened 0:52:09.760 --> 0:52:12.799 a little early, but yeah, Pixar was coming up on 0:52:12.920 --> 0:52:17.520 twenty years as an entity, although it only had been 0:52:17.520 --> 0:52:21.080 making feature length films for about ten years. In a 0:52:21.160 --> 0:52:24.560 sad piece of news from two thousand and five, Joe Raft, 0:52:24.640 --> 0:52:28.040 who had worked both with Disney Animation and with Pixar, 0:52:29.040 --> 0:52:33.120 died in a car accident. Raft had worked on Disney 0:52:33.120 --> 0:52:37.120 films like Who Framed Roger, Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, Beauty 0:52:37.120 --> 0:52:40.400 and the Beast, Aladdin, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and The 0:52:40.480 --> 0:52:44.759 Lion King as a story artist, a storyboard supervisor, and 0:52:44.800 --> 0:52:49.799 occasionally as a voice actor, his specialty being cartoon screams. 0:52:50.560 --> 0:52:52.759 He would go on to work on Toy Story as 0:52:52.760 --> 0:52:55.960 a story supervisor. He provided the voice of Heimlich in 0:52:56.040 --> 0:52:59.239 A Bugs Life, and he also served as story supervisor 0:52:59.280 --> 0:53:02.399 for that movie. He voiced Wheezy the Penguin in Toy 0:53:02.440 --> 0:53:05.600 Story two. He worked on Monsters, Inc. And he voiced 0:53:05.760 --> 0:53:09.440 Jacques the Shrimp in Finding Nemo, and he co directed Cars. 0:53:11.080 --> 0:53:14.760 So it was very tragic Pixar was lost a real 0:53:15.760 --> 0:53:20.480 superstar in Joe Raft when he passed away. Now, that 0:53:20.560 --> 0:53:24.239 same year, Disney did something pretty controversial, at least in 0:53:24.280 --> 0:53:27.320 the eyes of some Pixar employees. So in two thousand 0:53:27.360 --> 0:53:31.640 and five, Disney created a new division of Walt Disney 0:53:31.680 --> 0:53:37.480 Animation called Circle seven Animation. The entire purpose for Circle 0:53:37.520 --> 0:53:42.320 seven Animation was to focus exclusively on developing computer animation 0:53:42.440 --> 0:53:46.000 for Disney, with a primary goal of creating sequels to 0:53:46.160 --> 0:53:50.440 Disney owned Pixar films. Now, that led some folks to 0:53:50.520 --> 0:53:55.040 dismiss Circle seven, calling it picks Aren't instead of Pixar 0:53:55.120 --> 0:53:55.880 It's picks aren't. 0:53:56.880 --> 0:53:59.759 But the studio never actually produced a single film, nor 0:53:59.800 --> 0:54:00.600 were any of. 0:54:00.560 --> 0:54:03.600 The scripts that they wrote at while they were still 0:54:03.640 --> 0:54:07.360 a thing, ever used by Pixar in any of their movies. 0:54:08.360 --> 0:54:10.680 This was really Disney's move to try and leverage the 0:54:10.680 --> 0:54:15.400 intellectual property that Pixar had created under that agreement for 0:54:15.520 --> 0:54:19.200 those five films, and specifically they wanted it so that 0:54:19.280 --> 0:54:22.920 if Pixar left Disney, Disney could continue to make money 0:54:23.520 --> 0:54:26.520 off of those properties by creating sequels, even though those 0:54:26.520 --> 0:54:29.160 sequels would be made by people not connected to the 0:54:29.200 --> 0:54:35.160 original film. Now, there wasn't really any hard feelings between 0:54:35.600 --> 0:54:38.600 or there weren't, I guess any hard feelings between Pixar 0:54:39.120 --> 0:54:43.560 executives and the folks who were working for Circle seven Animation. 0:54:45.400 --> 0:54:48.920 They I'm guessing that John Lassen wasn't thrilled that Circle 0:54:48.960 --> 0:54:52.160 seven Animation became a thing. He was probably very torn 0:54:52.239 --> 0:54:54.719 up about it, but he didn't hold it against the 0:54:54.719 --> 0:54:57.520 people who had been hired by Disney. It was more 0:54:57.640 --> 0:55:00.560 of a problem with Disney's move in the first and 0:55:00.600 --> 0:55:04.239 in fact, when Circle seven ended up dissolving later on, 0:55:06.200 --> 0:55:09.520 Lasseter would actually bring on a lot of that staff 0:55:10.000 --> 0:55:13.320 and bring them into Walt Disney Animation Studios. 0:55:13.840 --> 0:55:15.399 In fact, Andrew. 0:55:15.040 --> 0:55:18.480 Milstein, who had been the head of Circle seven, became 0:55:18.560 --> 0:55:21.480 the general manager of Walt Disney Animation Studios. 0:55:21.960 --> 0:55:25.040 So there weren't any hard feelings, but it definitely was. 0:55:26.640 --> 0:55:29.759 A tense move, and there were some battles going on 0:55:29.840 --> 0:55:32.200 at the top levels of Disney and Pixar. 0:55:32.239 --> 0:55:32.800 At this time. 0:55:34.000 --> 0:55:38.520 Steve Jobs and Michael Eisner were having some pretty nasty 0:55:38.560 --> 0:55:42.279 fights over which movies were counting toward the deal that 0:55:42.320 --> 0:55:46.799 they had made. Eisner was arguing that Toy Story two 0:55:47.280 --> 0:55:48.280 should not count. 0:55:48.600 --> 0:55:50.320 That is not one of those five. 0:55:50.160 --> 0:55:52.759 Movies that we agreed on because it's a sequel and 0:55:52.840 --> 0:55:57.600 sequels don't count. Jobs said, what are you talking about. 0:55:57.640 --> 0:56:00.800 Of course it counts. It's a full length feature film, 0:56:01.520 --> 0:56:03.719 and ISA are saying, well, it was meant to be 0:56:03.760 --> 0:56:07.400 a direct to video sequel, so it doesn't count. And 0:56:07.600 --> 0:56:10.839 there was this back and forth arguing, and Jobs was 0:56:11.239 --> 0:56:17.960 very visibly looking at other potential partners for Pixar once 0:56:18.120 --> 0:56:23.000 the Disney deal was done. So tension was high at 0:56:23.000 --> 0:56:24.720 this point between Disney and Pixar. 0:56:25.560 --> 0:56:29.160 We'll be back with more about Pixar after this quick break. 0:56:38.120 --> 0:56:40.520 Now. Two thousand and six Rolls Around and Cars. 0:56:40.760 --> 0:56:42.319 It's a film that a lot of kids love, but 0:56:42.520 --> 0:56:45.279 I think it's really just okay. It's not at the 0:56:45.320 --> 0:56:47.920 top of my list for my favorites among Pixar's films. 0:56:48.000 --> 0:56:49.279 It comes out in two thousand. 0:56:49.000 --> 0:56:52.200 And six, it does really well. It actually does very 0:56:52.239 --> 0:56:55.200 well at the box office. But the reason that the 0:56:55.200 --> 0:56:57.680 movie exists in the first place is because John Lassiter 0:56:57.880 --> 0:56:58.600 loves cars. 0:56:59.280 --> 0:57:00.880 And maybe I'm not into. 0:57:00.719 --> 0:57:03.040 The movie so much because I don't like driving. So 0:57:03.480 --> 0:57:07.160 that's perhaps the problem. The whole romanticism of driving doesn't 0:57:07.200 --> 0:57:09.719 do anything for me, and that's on me. That's not 0:57:09.760 --> 0:57:13.120 the fall of the movie. So Bugs Life was a 0:57:13.160 --> 0:57:17.680 new take on Esop's Fables and the seventh Samurai Cars 0:57:17.800 --> 0:57:20.760 is kind of a new take on Doc Hollywood. It's 0:57:20.880 --> 0:57:25.680 really very similar story. So, while Finding Nemo made it 0:57:25.800 --> 0:57:29.320 challenging to create characters from fish, cars presented a new challenge. 0:57:29.320 --> 0:57:33.240 How do you create a character that's a believable entity 0:57:33.760 --> 0:57:37.680 and still recognizably a car like You can't change it 0:57:37.720 --> 0:57:40.200 so much that it doesn't like a car anymore, but 0:57:40.280 --> 0:57:41.800 you have to change it enough so that you can 0:57:41.840 --> 0:57:45.360 have a character there where that can express him or herself, 0:57:45.880 --> 0:57:49.360 that can move around in his or her environment and 0:57:49.400 --> 0:57:53.040 manipulate it. How do they carry and hold things? This 0:57:53.160 --> 0:57:56.800 was actually a really big deal. The animators were saying, well, 0:57:57.920 --> 0:58:03.680 how does a car pick something up? How do they 0:58:03.720 --> 0:58:07.880 carry things around? Apart from Mater who could tow things 0:58:07.920 --> 0:58:11.280 by using the hook on the end of his cable, 0:58:12.240 --> 0:58:14.040 how do you have these characters move things around? 0:58:14.200 --> 0:58:16.520 And they experimented with that a lot, with. 0:58:16.440 --> 0:58:24.280 Things like prehensile antenna or windshield wipers, or the ability 0:58:24.320 --> 0:58:27.400 to hold onto things with a car door, and eventually 0:58:27.480 --> 0:58:32.360 they just decided it wasn't important and they dropped all that. So, 0:58:32.520 --> 0:58:34.800 like Finding Nemo, the acting had to be focused in 0:58:34.840 --> 0:58:38.440 the face, even more so since, with a few exceptions, 0:58:38.480 --> 0:58:40.160 most of the characters didn't have a lot of ways 0:58:40.160 --> 0:58:44.000 to communicate. They couldn't do big gestures with their tires. 0:58:44.000 --> 0:58:46.600 They could do little ones, you know. They took a 0:58:46.640 --> 0:58:49.560 lot of liberties with the way stuff moves, but mostly 0:58:49.600 --> 0:58:53.600 it had to be the acting had to be concentrated 0:58:53.600 --> 0:58:55.800 in the face, and the team had to figure out 0:58:55.840 --> 0:59:00.880 how to make chrome look realistic. Chrome's very which means 0:59:01.240 --> 0:59:03.520 it's reflective, so that means you should be able to 0:59:03.520 --> 0:59:06.200 see reflections in the chrome, and that actually was a 0:59:06.240 --> 0:59:08.800 big technical challenge for the crew, but they were able 0:59:08.840 --> 0:59:11.040 to figure that all of that out and they were 0:59:11.120 --> 0:59:14.280 able to get the movie together and release it. And 0:59:14.440 --> 0:59:17.040 two thousand and six, when the movie came out, ended 0:59:17.120 --> 0:59:20.360 up being a huge year for Pixar. It wasn't just 0:59:20.440 --> 0:59:24.680 when Cars debuted, it was also when Pixar and Disney 0:59:24.680 --> 0:59:28.280 were able to come to an agreement. Disney announced that 0:59:28.360 --> 0:59:32.360 it intended to purchase Pixar, and under this new arrangement, 0:59:33.040 --> 0:59:35.880 Edwin Capmoll would become the president of Pixar and John 0:59:36.000 --> 0:59:39.760 Lassiter would become the chief creative officer of Disney and 0:59:39.800 --> 0:59:41.560 Pixar Animation Studios. 0:59:42.200 --> 0:59:43.680 So a huge change. 0:59:43.360 --> 0:59:47.680 Here where Lassiter the man who had been fired from 0:59:47.800 --> 0:59:53.320 Disney because he had been too enthusiastic about computer animation, 0:59:54.800 --> 0:59:58.200 was going to become the chief creative officer of that 0:59:58.320 --> 1:00:03.840 animation department. Huge Turnaround, Crazy Story, And in September of 1:00:03.880 --> 1:00:07.520 two thousand and six, Pixar debuted the short film Lifted, 1:00:08.280 --> 1:00:10.880 just one of my favorite short films Pixar has ever done, 1:00:11.800 --> 1:00:16.000 and Pixar employee and story artist Joe Raft would be 1:00:16.160 --> 1:00:20.640 named a Disney Legend, which is an actual designation within Disney. 1:00:20.680 --> 1:00:24.520 It's not just it's not just a term. It actually 1:00:24.560 --> 1:00:27.960 really means something. It's like a hull of fame within Disney, 1:00:28.440 --> 1:00:31.919 and they induct only a few people every year, and 1:00:32.720 --> 1:00:33.800 he joined that. 1:00:33.800 --> 1:00:34.600 List that year. 1:00:35.200 --> 1:00:37.400 Well, guys, I've got a lot more to talk about 1:00:38.080 --> 1:00:40.240 with Pixar, but I figured this is a good place 1:00:40.240 --> 1:00:42.240 to end in two thousand and six. End of two 1:00:42.280 --> 1:00:46.520 thousand and six, when Disney and Pixar joined forces, and 1:00:46.600 --> 1:00:52.520 Pixar becomes an integrated part of Disney, still largely independent 1:00:52.680 --> 1:00:56.760 in the sense that it can develop its own movies internally, 1:00:58.120 --> 1:01:00.760 but now officially part of this company, no longer a 1:01:00.880 --> 1:01:04.400 separate thing. So we'll pick up in two thousand and 1:01:04.440 --> 1:01:06.560 seven for our next episode. 1:01:08.040 --> 1:01:12.160 All right, that wraps up the Pixar Story Part two. 1:01:12.280 --> 1:01:18.040 Next week we will conclude this retroactive classic series about 1:01:18.080 --> 1:01:21.919 Pixar with the Pixar Story Part three. And as I said, 1:01:21.960 --> 1:01:25.360 maybe I'll do a part four now because enough time 1:01:25.400 --> 1:01:29.040 has gone by that there's other stuff to chat about. 1:01:29.080 --> 1:01:31.080 So if you want me to talk about Pixar some more, 1:01:31.200 --> 1:01:33.880 let me know and I'll do a follow up to 1:01:33.880 --> 1:01:37.120 talk about what's been going on since twenty sixteen. In 1:01:37.160 --> 1:01:39.520 the meantime, I hope you are all well and I'll 1:01:39.520 --> 1:01:48.560 talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an 1:01:48.560 --> 1:01:54.120 iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, 1:01:54.240 --> 1:01:59.280 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. 1:02:00.240 --> 1:02:00.280 No