Speaker 1: Get Technology with text stuff from dot com. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to text Stuff, and the second part of
Speaker 1: the Pixar Story. So when I first started recording this,
Speaker 1: I thought it was going to be a two parter,
Speaker 1: but as I started to fill out more and more
Speaker 1: notes about the various things that went on at Pixar
Speaker 1: over the last couple of decades, I realized that it
Speaker 1: was gonna be bigger than two parts. So this will
Speaker 1: actually be the second part of a three part series,
Speaker 1: and some of these episodes might go a little long.
Speaker 1: So um, I think Pixar is a fascinating company, had
Speaker 1: some really interesting people go in and out of it,
Speaker 1: So I apologize for getting rather verbos, but I think
Speaker 1: it's important to really explore some of the cool thing
Speaker 1: things going on within Pixar, not just from a technological standpoint,
Speaker 1: but from a creative one and from a business standpoint
Speaker 1: as well, a lot of interesting lessons to learn. So
Speaker 1: with the last episode, I left off just before Pixar
Speaker 1: was going to debut its first feature length computer animated film,
Speaker 1: which of course is Toy Story, and I left it
Speaker 1: off as a fake cliffhanger. Would the company succeed? Of
Speaker 1: course they did, But one thing I want to point
Speaker 1: out is that Toy Story itself was partly made possible
Speaker 1: because of another movie, not a Pixar film, but the
Speaker 1: movie A Nightmare Before Christmas. And the reason I say
Speaker 1: this is A Nightmare Before Christmas was a stop motion
Speaker 1: animated film produced by Tim Burton, and it was the
Speaker 1: first animated film that Disney agreed to distribute, even though
Speaker 1: the animation itself was not done by Walt Disney Animation Studios,
Speaker 1: and that actually laid the ground own work for Pixar
Speaker 1: to follow along with Toy Story. Also, one other connection
Speaker 1: between the two, John Lasseter of Pixar fame and Tim
Speaker 1: Burton both attended cal Arts at the same time. So
Speaker 1: that's kind of cool, little little kind of a connection.
Speaker 1: So one thing I gotta get off the bat, this
Speaker 1: is gonna be true for all the different movies that
Speaker 1: I talked about the Pixar has worked on. Each film
Speaker 1: required many years to finish. A team might work on
Speaker 1: a movie for five years at a time. It's not
Speaker 1: that unusual, particularly with these computer animated films, and during
Speaker 1: the development of Toy Story, the characters and script went
Speaker 1: through lots and lots of changes. Also, not unusual with Pixar.
Speaker 1: They've always said that story comes first. They have to
Speaker 1: get the story right, and if they don't have the
Speaker 1: story just right, people don't care how good your animation is.
Speaker 1: If the story doesn't hold your attention, you eventually just say, well,
Speaker 1: that was pretty and flashy. But I didn't really care
Speaker 1: about anything. Back in the original run, when they were
Speaker 1: first drafting out the story for toy story, buzz light
Speaker 1: Year had a totally different name. He was called Tempest,
Speaker 1: which was a reference to the classic arcade machine and wood.
Speaker 1: He originally wasn't a pull string toy. He was a
Speaker 1: Ventriloquists dummy, but Michael Eisner, who at the time was
Speaker 1: Disney's CEO, stepped in and asked Pixar to change it
Speaker 1: because he said dummies are inherently creepy, and it is
Speaker 1: difficult for me to disagree with that. I don't agree
Speaker 1: with a lot of things that Michael Eisner did, but
Speaker 1: I definitely agree that ventriloquist dummies are are creepy. And
Speaker 1: another major change was Buzzes whole worldview. In those early drafts,
Speaker 1: buzz Lightyear knew that he was a toy, and he
Speaker 1: knew that there was a television show that tied in
Speaker 1: with the toy, but then they had Tim Allen come
Speaker 1: in to do the the voiceovers acting, and Tim Allen's
Speaker 1: take on Buzz was that the character was completely oblivious.
Speaker 1: He lived the role of a space ranger. That is
Speaker 1: what Buzz was. He wasn't a toy of a space ranger.
Speaker 1: He was a space ranger. And the writers thought, well,
Speaker 1: that's way more interesting. So they actually reworked the story
Speaker 1: based upon Tim Allen's performance and they started to change things.
Speaker 1: So this whole process goes on for a long time,
Speaker 1: and according to people at Pixar, those characters were really
Speaker 1: tough to nailed down. Disney executives found the initial characters
Speaker 1: a little too wholesome and boring, which is kind of
Speaker 1: interesting to think that Disney exects would say, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: these guys, there's there's not a lot, there's not a
Speaker 1: lot going on here. We need some more conflict, We
Speaker 1: need them to not be these just perfect toys. So
Speaker 1: the next iteration went a little too far in the
Speaker 1: other direction, and Pixar says, yeah, we kind of accidentally
Speaker 1: turned Woody into a real jerk face. He became just
Speaker 1: likable so they had to figure out where was the
Speaker 1: balance between these two extremes, and fortunately the writers were
Speaker 1: able to come up with that balance. Though for a
Speaker 1: while it actually looked like Disney might pull the plug
Speaker 1: on Toy Story. Keep in mind, Disney was providing the
Speaker 1: funding here. Disney was giving Pixar twenty well not giving,
Speaker 1: but providing twenty one million dollars for Pixar to produce
Speaker 1: three movies, and uh they were. Disney was also going
Speaker 1: to provide the distribution for Pixar, and in return, Disney
Speaker 1: was taking an enormous share of the revenue should these
Speaker 1: movies prove to be successful. The whole project required way
Speaker 1: more resources than Pisar anticipated. They had only been working
Speaker 1: on short films up to that point and did not
Speaker 1: realize what a different creature a feature length film can be.
Speaker 1: It's not just oh, this one short we did required
Speaker 1: ten people, but this movie is four times longer, so
Speaker 1: we'll need forty people. It's way more complicated than that.
Speaker 1: They originally thought they could get away with just using
Speaker 1: eight animators for Toy Story, and on top of that,
Speaker 1: they would have people in lighting and textures, but eight
Speaker 1: animators to actually create the animation. They ended up with
Speaker 1: thirty three by the end of the production, and all
Speaker 1: the other departments also needed more people than they originally estimated,
Speaker 1: so with each film, Pixar would typically add a few
Speaker 1: more animators. By the time Monsters Inc. Rolls around, for example,
Speaker 1: there were fifty animators working on that movie. So it
Speaker 1: became clear that this feature link game was different and
Speaker 1: not a big surprise that Pixar had to learn this.
Speaker 1: It was new territory for them. Now. They also had
Speaker 1: to make sure that everyone who was working on animation
Speaker 1: was going to animate the characters in a consistent way.
Speaker 1: You couldn't have different animators manipulate characters so that they
Speaker 1: have their own quirks. When one animator is working on
Speaker 1: it but not on another, it's inconsistent and disorienting. So
Speaker 1: typically a lead animator would be assigned to every major
Speaker 1: character to create the desired performance, but an individual animator
Speaker 1: might work on every single character in a film at
Speaker 1: some point or another. It may just be that the
Speaker 1: characters in the background for that sequence, but they still
Speaker 1: have to act in character. Acting is interesting because normally
Speaker 1: we think of it as a creation between an actor
Speaker 1: and maybe a director or perhaps a couple of actors
Speaker 1: and a director, but in this case it's an entire
Speaker 1: department of people coming together to determine what acting is
Speaker 1: for each individual character, sometimes multiple departments of of people,
Speaker 1: so much more complicated than a live action sort of production.
Speaker 1: The first bit that they actually animated for Toy Story
Speaker 1: was the sequence in which the toy soldiers deployed to
Speaker 1: see what Andy is getting for his birthday. So to
Speaker 1: get an idea of how those soldiers would actually move around,
Speaker 1: the animators ended up strapping their feet to boards, and
Speaker 1: then they tried to move around with their feet connected
Speaker 1: to each other on these these solid wooden boards. Supposedly
Speaker 1: the first person to try this actually was nailing their
Speaker 1: shoes to the boards and did so the wrong way,
Speaker 1: in other words, nailing up from the board through the shoe,
Speaker 1: which seems to be a little uh, poorly thought out
Speaker 1: in my mind. But at any rate, you had these
Speaker 1: these animators trying to get around so that they could
Speaker 1: get a good basis for how the character should move
Speaker 1: in the actual film, and apparently was quite the scene
Speaker 1: that Pixar HQ. Now. Computer animation takes several steps to complete,
Speaker 1: just like traditional animation does, so In computer animation, you
Speaker 1: have to build the computer models for the characters, so
Speaker 1: this is the three dimensional representation of your character. You
Speaker 1: have to also do that for sets and props. You
Speaker 1: can't just do it for just the characters, otherwise everything
Speaker 1: else is flat, and you animate the sequences according to
Speaker 1: the storyboard and performances. But at that point, even after
Speaker 1: you've modeled everything and you've figured out the physics and
Speaker 1: you know how different parts move in relation to each other,
Speaker 1: you still end up with kind of a featureless and
Speaker 1: plastic figure. Everything looks kind of like it's just like
Speaker 1: simple solid body plastic. So then you have to overlay
Speaker 1: color textures and shading to give more definition to the characters.
Speaker 1: And then you have to add lighting sequences to create
Speaker 1: the mood you want for that scene and the effects
Speaker 1: you need, and this gets really complicated. In a physical
Speaker 1: uh space where you're actually shooting live action, you can
Speaker 1: move lights around and see what sort of effects you get.
Speaker 1: You know what happens if you light the scene from
Speaker 1: the back as opposed to from the front. But in
Speaker 1: computer animation you have to actually program all that in.
Speaker 1: At least initially. You might eventually come come up with
Speaker 1: a lighting software suite that does most of this automatically,
Speaker 1: and then you can make minor tweaks at that point.
Speaker 1: But when you start out, you have to program how
Speaker 1: the light behaves. The computer doesn't magically know that light
Speaker 1: from one direction is going to create a different effect
Speaker 1: from than light from another direction. You have to actually
Speaker 1: build all that in. So it's incredibly time consuming and
Speaker 1: work intensive. It involves a lot of technical know how
Speaker 1: and artistic know how as well, so it's it's not
Speaker 1: an easy job. Now. Originally Pixar employees thought they could
Speaker 1: render the entire film in twenty months using fifty three processors.
Speaker 1: That's just the rendering stage, mind you, that's not the animation,
Speaker 1: but twenty months just to render the work that they
Speaker 1: had created. But it turned out they needed three hundred
Speaker 1: machines to do the job, not fifty three processors. Three
Speaker 1: D computers, and today Pixar has more than twenty thousand
Speaker 1: processors to work on render jobs, which means they could
Speaker 1: take that raw footage from Toy Story and render it
Speaker 1: in real time by the end of if if you
Speaker 1: were to start rendering all that footage and you started
Speaker 1: the DVD of Toy Story at the same time, you
Speaker 1: would be done with both at around the same time. Uh.
Speaker 1: Not necessarily true with later Pixar films, which are more
Speaker 1: complicated than that first Toy Story movie, but it does
Speaker 1: illustrate how much more sophisticated things have become since then.
Speaker 1: And once again we see that Moore's law has brought
Speaker 1: down the cost of computing to a point where this
Speaker 1: sort of thing is possible. It's not outside the reach
Speaker 1: of a production studio now. At the time that would
Speaker 1: have been impossible. It would have been too expensive to
Speaker 1: have twenty thousand processors, let alone the idea of well
Speaker 1: how do we how do we power them and keep
Speaker 1: them cold enough so that they work, and where do
Speaker 1: we put them and all that kind of stuff. But
Speaker 1: we've seen the chips get smaller, we've seen them we
Speaker 1: get more powerful, we've seen more uh sophisticated processors with
Speaker 1: multiple cores, including graphics processors, and of course we've seen
Speaker 1: that price come down over time, so now it's less
Speaker 1: of a an insurmountable obstacle. Still expensive, just not as
Speaker 1: expensive as it would have been back then. So after
Speaker 1: making Toy Story, John Lasseter realized that a feature link
Speaker 1: computer animated film was way too much work for a
Speaker 1: single director. He was the director for Toy Story, but
Speaker 1: he realized this is too big a job for one
Speaker 1: person to head up. So from that point forward, the
Speaker 1: Pixar films would have multiple directors, with normally one acting
Speaker 1: as kind of the primary director to steer the vision
Speaker 1: of the film, and others to oversee specific aspects of
Speaker 1: the production, like like cinematography and lighting and that sort
Speaker 1: of stuff. The movie came out on November twenty two,
Speaker 1: n and it was directed by John Lasseter. Several writers
Speaker 1: worked on the story, including Josh Weeden, who is of
Speaker 1: course the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly
Speaker 1: and Angel and things like that. Wheed and by the way,
Speaker 1: I wrote a couple of my favorite lines, including You're
Speaker 1: a sad, strange little man, and you have my pity
Speaker 1: and uh one of my favorite lines of all time,
Speaker 1: wind the Frog. This movie also marked the first time
Speaker 1: Pixar worked with the musician Randy Newman, who would go
Speaker 1: on to compose the music for six more Pixar movies.
Speaker 1: So he hasn't worked on all of them, but he
Speaker 1: worked on a lot of them, and also on a
Speaker 1: personal note, Toy Story was the first movie I saw
Speaker 1: while dating the woman who would later on become my wife.
Speaker 1: It took some convincing to get her to the theater
Speaker 1: to to go and see a move V called Toy Story,
Speaker 1: but I eventually convinced her to do so, and afterwards
Speaker 1: she became a lifelong Pixar fan. So I did something right.
Speaker 1: Uh nineteen years woo Now, Toy Story was a really
Speaker 1: big hit. According to box office Mojo, Toy Stories global
Speaker 1: box office amounted to three hundred sixty two million dollars,
Speaker 1: but Pixar's deal with Disney meant it only received a
Speaker 1: small percentage of the profits. Between ten and fifteen percent
Speaker 1: of the profits. Most of that money went to Disney,
Speaker 1: not to Pixar. Some folks over at Pixar felt that
Speaker 1: this was kind of unfair, that Disney was providing the
Speaker 1: distribution and marketing, and that initial maybe seven million dollars
Speaker 1: you could argue for the budget of the movie, but
Speaker 1: otherwise wasn't responsible for the actual success of the movie. Disney,
Speaker 1: apart from giving some notes, didn't determine the story. They
Speaker 1: didn't do the animation, they didn't do the effects, they
Speaker 1: didn't hire the voice actors, so some folks over Pixar.
Speaker 1: We're a little not happy with this arrangement, but that's
Speaker 1: how things were at the time. Shortly after Toy Story premiered,
Speaker 1: like a week after Toy Story came out, Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: made the big move and took Pixar public with an
Speaker 1: initial public offering or i p O. It ended up
Speaker 1: being the biggest technology i p O in which was
Speaker 1: also a year that saw Netscape go public. If you
Speaker 1: don't know what Netscape is, go look it up. Used
Speaker 1: to be the name and computer browsers for the Internet
Speaker 1: back in the day. Now, before the i p O,
Speaker 1: the estimated value of a share of Pixar stock was
Speaker 1: between twelve and fourteen dollars. That's what analysts were predicting
Speaker 1: that Pixar shares would be between twelve and fourteen bucks
Speaker 1: per share, but when trading open, the initial share price
Speaker 1: was actually twenty two dollars. Toy stories incredible opening was
Speaker 1: probably part of the reason why it was higher than
Speaker 1: originally estimated. During that first day of trading, the stock
Speaker 1: reached its highest point at forty six dollars per share,
Speaker 1: which means it more than doubled its value from the
Speaker 1: opening bell of the stock exchange. Now, granted it, it
Speaker 1: didn't end at forty six dollars per year on that
Speaker 1: first day. It actually settled to thirty nine dollars per year,
Speaker 1: so still higher than what it opened at. And because
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs owned practically all the shares in the company
Speaker 1: before taking it public, it turned him into a billionaire
Speaker 1: a billion air overnight. He had spent fifty million dollars
Speaker 1: on this company over time trying to keep it afloat.
Speaker 1: That gamble paid off big time, and of course it
Speaker 1: gave Pixar a bit more leverage. It was a force
Speaker 1: to be reckoned with a one point for six billion
Speaker 1: dollar market value force. So imagine that. Imagine that you're
Speaker 1: working for a company that, over the course of a
Speaker 1: week has its first feature length film come out and
Speaker 1: then is valued at one point for six billion dollars.
Speaker 1: It must have been incredible. Also in n David Di Francesco,
Speaker 1: whom we talked about in the last episode, received an
Speaker 1: Academy Award for the development of a film input scanning technique,
Speaker 1: and Pixar was continuing to develop new technologies in the
Speaker 1: film industry, and eventually it was also licensing those technologies
Speaker 1: out to other companies. So it wasn't just that they
Speaker 1: were developing tools in house to get their stuff done.
Speaker 1: They were innovating in technology and then making money through
Speaker 1: licenses so that other production companies could take advantage of
Speaker 1: those advancements. Moving ahead to nine John Laster received a
Speaker 1: Special Achievement Oscar for directing the first feature length computer
Speaker 1: animated film, and ed Capbell Alvi, Ray Smith, Thomas Porter,
Speaker 1: and Tom Duff received a Technical Academy Award for their
Speaker 1: work in Digital Image compositing. Inn picks Are completed work
Speaker 1: on their short animated film Jerry's Game, which would win
Speaker 1: a Best Animated Short Film Oscar for Pixar. That would
Speaker 1: be their second Best Animated Short Film Oscar. They would
Speaker 1: win many many more and also in nine seven, Pixar
Speaker 1: hired Randy S. Nelson, who would become the dean of
Speaker 1: Pixar University. Now this is not like a giant college
Speaker 1: campus somewhere akin to Monsters University. This is Pixar's internal
Speaker 1: skills development department, which gives Pixar employees the opportunity to
Speaker 1: take classes and all sorts of fields and disciplines, from
Speaker 1: story development and screenwriting to drawing and sculpting, and this
Speaker 1: Nelson guy, he sounds like someone I'd really get along with.
Speaker 1: He was a founder of the Flying Kara Matzov Brothers,
Speaker 1: so he's a juggler, and as a juggler, if you
Speaker 1: didn't know, I'm also a juggler, I really respect that.
Speaker 1: He had also worked with Steve Jobs both at Apple
Speaker 1: and at Next. Remember Jobs had been essentially forced out
Speaker 1: of Apple and had founded a new company called Next Computers,
Speaker 1: eventually abandoning the hardware side of Next Computers and developing
Speaker 1: software instead. Now, according to Nelson, if you were to
Speaker 1: take all the courses, or or to take a full
Speaker 1: suite of courses at Pixar University, you would have the
Speaker 1: equivalent of a bachelor's degree education in fine arts. That's
Speaker 1: how comprehensive there in Nal Development department was. They were
Speaker 1: dedicated to making certain that employees had the opportunity to
Speaker 1: learn new skills and develop ones that they had already
Speaker 1: started to to create or to build on previously. And
Speaker 1: this included all sorts of different types of of activities,
Speaker 1: including improvisational acting. So you might end up finding yourself
Speaker 1: sitting next to the head of the company, but you're
Speaker 1: both classmates at that at that class, so it also
Speaker 1: helped break down the hierarchical barriers between bosses and employees.
Speaker 1: The motto of Pixar University is alienis non deus, which
Speaker 1: I know I'm terribly mispronouncing because I have little Latin
Speaker 1: and less Greek, just like a Mr. Shakespeare Shakespeare, but
Speaker 1: the Latin phrase actually means alone no longer. And it
Speaker 1: also has a secondary Latin inscription on a Pixar University
Speaker 1: crest which says tempest pecunia sumnum, which means time, money, sleep.
Speaker 1: The three of those, I think sleep is the one
Speaker 1: that the typical Pixar employee has the least of. Maybe time,
Speaker 1: It's kind of hard to say. Moving on over to
Speaker 1: uh talk about a bit, Pixar and Disney renegotiated their
Speaker 1: agreement at that time. So if you remember, they originally
Speaker 1: had come up with a night uh this deal that
Speaker 1: there that Pixar was going to make three movies for Disney,
Speaker 1: after which there would be time to negotiate a new
Speaker 1: a new relationship instead, and in return, Disney was going
Speaker 1: to get the massive majority of the profits from those movies.
Speaker 1: But the renegotiation went a little better for Pixar. They
Speaker 1: agreed to do a ten year five film deal uh
Speaker 1: and in that deal, Pixar would receive fifty of the
Speaker 1: profits from the films. The New York Times reported on
Speaker 1: the change in agreements and revealed that the new Pixar
Speaker 1: film was going to be called Bugs. So this was
Speaker 1: before the movie had come out. Obviously, they were still
Speaker 1: working on it. It was still in development, so the
Speaker 1: title had not been finalized. Now that arrangement, with the
Speaker 1: new deal of being a ten year five film contract,
Speaker 1: answered some of the criticisms industry analysts had about the
Speaker 1: Pixar I p O. Because when Pixar went public, some
Speaker 1: analysts were saying, this seems really like investors are pushing
Speaker 1: this company beyond its actual value, because keep in mind,
Speaker 1: while they're doing great work, and while their movies are
Speaker 1: making huge amounts of money in the box office, that
Speaker 1: most of that money is not going to Pixar, it's
Speaker 1: going to Disney. So maybe you shouldn't drive the value
Speaker 1: of this company up so high since it's really not
Speaker 1: earning money for itself. Once this new arrangement came and
Speaker 1: that took some of that criticism away, Bugs, of course,
Speaker 1: ended up being a Bug's Life, which would come out
Speaker 1: in and it broke the record for a Thanksgiving weekend
Speaker 1: film opening in the United States. The movie combines a
Speaker 1: couple of famous stories You've got ESOPs, the ant and
Speaker 1: the Grasshopper as part of it, and a very healthy
Speaker 1: dose of the Seven Samurai uh As as the various
Speaker 1: core story elements, and the Pixar team said that A
Speaker 1: Bug's Life was particularly challenging and rewarding. The movie called
Speaker 1: for a lot of characters on screen at once, I
Speaker 1: mean hundreds and hundreds of insects all on screen at
Speaker 1: the same time, which requires a lot of processing power.
Speaker 1: You're talking about a ton of animation. You don't want
Speaker 1: your characters all just standing still, and that requires a
Speaker 1: lot of computer power. Also, on top of that, the
Speaker 1: characters had lots of limbs. I mean, insects have lots
Speaker 1: of legs, so most of these creatures had six legs.
Speaker 1: Some of them also had wings or also antenna. On
Speaker 1: top of that, these settings were on uneven surfaces, and
Speaker 1: those surfaces had to have an organic look to them.
Speaker 1: There was also fire and smoke in the movie, which
Speaker 1: is notoriously difficult to get just right with computer animation
Speaker 1: or at least it was at that time, and so
Speaker 1: it was very resource heavy. It was a very ambitious
Speaker 1: project to take on after toy story. Now, one of
Speaker 1: the defining looks of the film is the translucent nature
Speaker 1: of the various leaves and flowers. So John Laster said
Speaker 1: it was like characters were living in a world of
Speaker 1: stained glass, and that the animators had to create ways
Speaker 1: for light to behave properly to shine through these surfaces.
Speaker 1: And again it meant creating new rules, making up new
Speaker 1: rules so that things looked right, didn't just look pretty,
Speaker 1: but they looked natural. And the story of Bug's life
Speaker 1: changed a lot too over the course of its production. Originally,
Speaker 1: the main character was the head of the circus bugs,
Speaker 1: and that was an ant named Red. But the film
Speaker 1: didn't find a voice with that main character in place.
Speaker 1: They couldn't They couldn't figure out, well, what's the story here?
Speaker 1: Where where's the character arc? Why would this character stick
Speaker 1: with this plan of pretending to be a group of
Speaker 1: warriors to fight off grasshoppers. He has no steak, he
Speaker 1: could just leave. And that's when they realized that perhaps
Speaker 1: a couple of the ants that would be asking the
Speaker 1: circus performers for help are the real main characters, and
Speaker 1: eventually those ants were reduced to a single ant flick uh,
Speaker 1: and that became the main character. So it's interesting to
Speaker 1: see that that story remained the chief concern these other
Speaker 1: technical issues while while really fascinating, uh, they were secondary.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't matter how pretty the screen was. Again, if
Speaker 1: you went and saw it, you didn't care about the characters. Now,
Speaker 1: while A Bug's Life was in production, a team led
Speaker 1: by David Di Francesco created a new way to transfer
Speaker 1: computer animation onto film stock. Now, remember this is before
Speaker 1: most theaters were able to have digital projectors. There are
Speaker 1: only a few digital projectors in place in a couple
Speaker 1: of theaters around North America. So we're still talking about
Speaker 1: an era in which physical reels of film are produced
Speaker 1: and projected onto screens. So De Francesco's method was using
Speaker 1: a laser recording system that became known as Pixar Vision,
Speaker 1: and it used solid state lasers to record images onto film.
Speaker 1: So film is photoreactive, meaning that when light hits it,
Speaker 1: there's a chemical change, and that's where we're able to
Speaker 1: capture images on film. Lasers are really really precise way
Speaker 1: more precise than cathode ray tubes, which was the typical
Speaker 1: way to transfer a computer animation over to film. So
Speaker 1: using lasers allowed for a much higher quality color reproduction
Speaker 1: and sharper images on film than the earlier versions did. Plus,
Speaker 1: De Francesco's invention was faster than the catholic ray tube method.
Speaker 1: If you wanted to use a CRT method, it would
Speaker 1: take thirty five seconds to record a single frame of
Speaker 1: computer animation onto film. With the laser method it took
Speaker 1: eight seconds, so much much faster, four times faster than
Speaker 1: the traditional method. So De Francisco would receive a Technical
Speaker 1: Academy Award for this invention he started he was starting
Speaker 1: to rack up those those Academy awards for his tech
Speaker 1: technological contributions to the film industry. Now, the big advantage
Speaker 1: of using that laser recording system is that allowed for
Speaker 1: that much higher quality transfer of an image onto film,
Speaker 1: and the first time it was used was on a
Speaker 1: Bug's Life, So the transfers that were made for a
Speaker 1: Bug's Life relied upon this system and it would be
Speaker 1: used on lots of future films. Though by the time
Speaker 1: we get around two Monsters Incorporated, Pixar was really starting
Speaker 1: to push for digital projectors in more movie theaters, saying
Speaker 1: that the digital projection is just superior. You get more
Speaker 1: vibrant colors and sharper images than you ever will with film.
Speaker 1: You don't have the jitter that you would have with film,
Speaker 1: you don't have other other physical limitations of film. There
Speaker 1: you would have pure digital experience, which for computer animated
Speaker 1: film makes perfect sense. If you're talking about other types
Speaker 1: of movies, you can have a legitimate argument that film
Speaker 1: creates a certain sensibility that you cannot easily replicate using
Speaker 1: digital projection. Quentin Tarantino would would go bonkers if you
Speaker 1: told him from now on you can only do movies
Speaker 1: and digital, you cannot do them in film, And uh,
Speaker 1: it does have a a different effect. But in computer
Speaker 1: animated movies that's less of a problem because the whole
Speaker 1: the whole film is digital. It's only when you put
Speaker 1: it onto film that it becomes analog. There was never
Speaker 1: a physical object for you to shoot on film in
Speaker 1: the first place. Now, in n Toy Story two comes out,
Speaker 1: that would end up being a bit of a point
Speaker 1: of contention A little bit later between Disney and Pixar
Speaker 1: and this development process was uneasy from the beginning, actually
Speaker 1: because Disney. Disney originally wanted this to be a direct
Speaker 1: to video sequel. If you remember the nineties. In the
Speaker 1: early two thousand's, Disney was really into creating direct to
Speaker 1: video sequels of a lot of its very popular feature
Speaker 1: length films, so much so that it became a bit
Speaker 1: of a joke in the industry. But John Laster and
Speaker 1: his team fought for a cinematic release, and eventually Disney agree.
Speaker 1: They said, all right, fine, we will make this a
Speaker 1: theatrical release film, not a directive video sequel. Now, during
Speaker 1: the making of the movie, there were some really huge setbacks.
Speaker 1: A terrible sequence of events happened. So first, the files
Speaker 1: for the film We're all saved on a Linux system,
Speaker 1: and someone ran the function r M star on the
Speaker 1: hard drive holding all the Toy Story two files. R
Speaker 1: M stands for remove essentially, it's it's to delete stuff
Speaker 1: and start pretty much means everything you find. So someone
Speaker 1: was essentially deleting all the material off of a hard drive,
Speaker 1: and that hard drive happened to have all of Toy
Speaker 1: Story two's assets on it, including reference files, animation, you know,
Speaker 1: the completed movie. Up to that point, all of it
Speaker 1: was on this hard drive. So when this was detected,
Speaker 1: people saw that various assets we're starting to disappear, including
Speaker 1: entire sequences and even characters. They began to get deleted.
Speaker 1: And to make matters worse, the official backup for the film.
Speaker 1: They found out it hadn't been backing up for a
Speaker 1: couple of months. There had been a failure that had
Speaker 1: not been corrected or addressed. Instead, the team, which was
Speaker 1: working furiously to try and get this movie done on time,
Speaker 1: was relying on the primary copy of the movie, and
Speaker 1: the backup was outdated. Now, if this is where that
Speaker 1: story ended, things would have turned out very differently. The
Speaker 1: whole film would have been set back a huge amount.
Speaker 1: But the technical director for the movie happened to have
Speaker 1: a copy of all the files on her work computer,
Speaker 1: her computer that she used to work from home. She
Speaker 1: had requested that computer so that she could occasionally spend
Speaker 1: time at home with her family and not just live
Speaker 1: at the office, and so the team actually sent people
Speaker 1: to her house to physically take her computer, secure it
Speaker 1: in the backseat of her car, and then very gently
Speaker 1: transported back to Pixar so that they could recapture all
Speaker 1: the assets that had been lost in the Great file deletion,
Speaker 1: and they were able to do it and the movie
Speaker 1: was able to continue in development and not suffer this
Speaker 1: terrible setback. But then they had another major challenge when
Speaker 1: Disney executive, seeing an early cut, said they didn't like
Speaker 1: where it was headed, so the team had to rework
Speaker 1: the film, but Disney said, we are not going to
Speaker 1: change the release date. You still have the same deadline
Speaker 1: to get the movie finished, even though you have to
Speaker 1: go back and rework a lot of the stuff. So
Speaker 1: teams would start putting in as many as thirty six
Speaker 1: to forty eight hours in a row of work, so
Speaker 1: just working for two days non stop, like not even
Speaker 1: to take a real night's sleep, just working on sequences
Speaker 1: to get this movie finished in time for the deadline.
Speaker 1: Leon Rich, who oversaw cinematography for the film, said that
Speaker 1: while they were technically capable of putting a camera anywhere
Speaker 1: within a scene and have it do anything that could
Speaker 1: disobey the laws of physics, because it's a virtual camera,
Speaker 1: you can place the virtual camera anywhere you want. It
Speaker 1: doesn't have to follow the rules of a real world camera.
Speaker 1: He said that if you did that, they found that
Speaker 1: audiences responded as if things weren't right, if it didn't
Speaker 1: behave the way an actual camera did, you lost the audience.
Speaker 1: So you actually had to restrict the virtual camera, give
Speaker 1: it the same limitations of physical camera would have, which
Speaker 1: is pretty interesting that despite the fact you have the
Speaker 1: technical capability, you couldn't really take advantage of it in
Speaker 1: that way and still managed to keep your audience. Now,
Speaker 1: Toy Story two was the first sequel to earn more
Speaker 1: money than the original film. It broke opening weekend records
Speaker 1: in the UK and the US and in Japan, and
Speaker 1: it was the first film to be created, mastered, and
Speaker 1: exhibited digitally. Now not exclusively digitally, because again at this time,
Speaker 1: not that many theaters had digital protectors, but the ones
Speaker 1: that did showed Toy Story two in digital format. In
Speaker 1: two thousand, Pixar would premier the short for The Birds,
Speaker 1: which would of course go on to win an Oscar
Speaker 1: for Best Short Animated Film UH and Pixar would relocate
Speaker 1: to a new headquarters in Emeryville, California. In two thousand one,
Speaker 1: they debuted Monsters Inc. Now, this was the first Pixar
Speaker 1: film not directed by John Lasseter. He had worked on
Speaker 1: Toy Story, A Bug's Life and to Story Too, but
Speaker 1: Pete Doctor came in as the main director and David
Speaker 1: Silverman and Lee Unkrich co directed it. Billy Crystal, who
Speaker 1: voiced the part of Mike Wazowski, was originally offered the
Speaker 1: role of Buzz Lightyear for Toy Story, but he turned
Speaker 1: it down, and he said that this was such a
Speaker 1: huge mistake that he leapt at the opportunity to voice
Speaker 1: a character in a new Pixar movie. One of the
Speaker 1: big advancements they made in computer animation for Monsters Inc.
Speaker 1: Was building realistic looking for and when you think about it,
Speaker 1: you realize how important it was for them to develop this,
Speaker 1: considering the types of furry creatures they had in Monsters, Inc.
Speaker 1: If you don't create a system to animate the fur automatically,
Speaker 1: it means that you would have to animate every strand
Speaker 1: of for by hand. And if you didn't even allow it,
Speaker 1: like maybe maybe you say, all right, let's not let's
Speaker 1: not animate every individual hair. That's ridiculous. Sully has more
Speaker 1: than a million hairs over his entire body, and animating
Speaker 1: every single one of those individually by hand is not possible.
Speaker 1: Let's group them together. Well, if you did that, then
Speaker 1: you would end up with this weird, matted look where
Speaker 1: hair still wouldn't seem to move naturally. So they had
Speaker 1: to find a way to solve that, and they did
Speaker 1: that by building a simulator so each hair behaves according
Speaker 1: to the rules set in this simulator. It took him
Speaker 1: a long time to get the simulator just right so
Speaker 1: that hairs would behave properly, so the team had to
Speaker 1: test the program to make sure that the fur and
Speaker 1: hair is moving in the right way. They had to
Speaker 1: make tweaks whenever it didn't look right, and they had
Speaker 1: to work very hard to solve collision problems with the
Speaker 1: fur and uh. Some of the other issues were that
Speaker 1: if a character moved too quickly, the fur would sometimes
Speaker 1: go crazy and stretch too far, like it suddenly would
Speaker 1: It would act like a rubber band and stretch across
Speaker 1: the screen, and it wasn't until later that they figured
Speaker 1: out where that problem was coming from. Also, they went
Speaker 1: ahead and made a decision that certain fur, like the
Speaker 1: fur around Sully's face, wouldn't be animated by this dynamic
Speaker 1: computer simulation because they wanted to have really tight control
Speaker 1: for the purposes of performance and expression. They didn't want
Speaker 1: the fur to be distracting, so for those cases the
Speaker 1: fur was not dynamic. It was actually static and and
Speaker 1: and could be animated by hand if necessary. But the
Speaker 1: rest of the fur, the stuff that was over Sully's
Speaker 1: body in general, that followed the rules of the simulation.
Speaker 1: They also went ahead and created a program to simulate
Speaker 1: the natural movements of clothing and toy Story two, they
Speaker 1: had to animate all of owl of Al's toy barn.
Speaker 1: They had an animate all of his clothing by hand,
Speaker 1: and according to the animators, this was a real pain
Speaker 1: in the butt because not only did it take a
Speaker 1: lot of time to get closed to animating the way
Speaker 1: that they looked right and they behaved according to the
Speaker 1: contours of the person wearing the clothing. Is that the
Speaker 1: worst part is if you do your job right, no
Speaker 1: one notices. They only notice if you don't do your
Speaker 1: job right because it doesn't look right. So it's a
Speaker 1: frustrating thing to think you spend a lot of time
Speaker 1: to get something to work just right so that people
Speaker 1: do not notice it. And so as a result, they
Speaker 1: created this automated program that would save time and frustration
Speaker 1: and the animators could work on other stuff that was
Speaker 1: more important from a performance standpoint. Glenn McQueen, who was
Speaker 1: a supervising animator for Monsters, Inc. Spoken an interview about
Speaker 1: how the increase in computer power was both good and bad.
Speaker 1: It was good and that it gave animators more power
Speaker 1: to create visual complexity, but with that complexity comes the
Speaker 1: challenge of making sure all the details in the frame
Speaker 1: are working properly. And, as we've seen in all realms
Speaker 1: of computers, not just an animation, if you add more power,
Speaker 1: programmers or animators or directors will find ways to make
Speaker 1: use of that power, so you're never actually ahead of
Speaker 1: the game. You know. This is why when we get
Speaker 1: a new computer with an even more powerful processor, you
Speaker 1: start to think, well, this thing isn't isn't faster than
Speaker 1: what my old computer was Like, Well, that that's not
Speaker 1: because the processor isn't more powerful. It is the problem
Speaker 1: is that software developers are building software to take advantage
Speaker 1: of that power, and they may not be taking the
Speaker 1: most efficient path to doing that. So you have this
Speaker 1: constant issue with the fact that software is taking up
Speaker 1: all the power that the new shiny processors can generate,
Speaker 1: and it feels like we're kind of treading water. Same
Speaker 1: thing is true with animation. You can do more stuff,
Speaker 1: but once again you just start pushing up against the
Speaker 1: boundaries of what the technology is capable of doing. Now,
Speaker 1: the most difficult sequence for the team to nail down,
Speaker 1: both from a story perspective and technical challenges, was the
Speaker 1: sequence inside the Yeti's Cave, and it was so hard
Speaker 1: for them to get that scene right that they started
Speaker 1: using the phrase yet He's Cave as code for any
Speaker 1: scene in any Pixar film that is near impossible to
Speaker 1: get right. They would say, oh, this is turning into
Speaker 1: another Yetis Cave, just to explain, like we we know
Speaker 1: this isn't where it needs to be yet and we
Speaker 1: need to fix it. Monsters, Inc. Did really well. It
Speaker 1: hit a hundred million dollars in domestic box office in
Speaker 1: just nine days, which was faster than any other animated
Speaker 1: film in history up to that point. Edwin cat Bill
Speaker 1: officially became the president of Pixar again, and the company
Speaker 1: had six hundred employees at that point. Now two thousand
Speaker 1: one would see ed Edwin kettmil Lauren Carpenter, and Rob
Speaker 1: Cook receive an Academy Award of Merit for the pixar
Speaker 1: in house rendering software package known as Pixars RenderMan, which
Speaker 1: had been used in many other films to render c
Speaker 1: g I effects, not just Pixars movies. They had licensed
Speaker 1: it out to other production companies, and this would represent
Speaker 1: the first OSCAR ever awarded specifically for the development of software.
Speaker 1: In two thousand two, Pixar would debut a new short
Speaker 1: film called Mike's New Car, and this was the first
Speaker 1: time Pixar had ever released a short film starring characters
Speaker 1: from one of their feature length films. It was nominated
Speaker 1: for an Academy Award but did not win one. But
Speaker 1: that same year, the first Disney Park attraction based off
Speaker 1: a Pixar property opens. That would be a bugs Land
Speaker 1: at disney California Adventure Park. Of course, Disney's California Adventure
Speaker 1: would eventually become home for the Cars right, which if
Speaker 1: you've not had the chance to go on it, If
Speaker 1: you ever do go to Disneyland, I would say that
Speaker 1: a trip over to California Adventure is completely worth it
Speaker 1: just for the car's right. It is really really well done.
Speaker 1: In two thousand three, Finding Nemo premieres with a remastered
Speaker 1: version of the classic Pixar short Knickknack that was one
Speaker 1: of the ones that they had made back when they
Speaker 1: were trying to sell hardware. Knick Knack was kind of
Speaker 1: their demo for saying, hey, look at the kind of
Speaker 1: stuff we can do. So this time a remastered version
Speaker 1: comes out with Finding Nemo, and Finding Nemo would break
Speaker 1: more opening weekend box office records for an animated film
Speaker 1: and would win an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. And
Speaker 1: back in Monsters, Inc. Where the fur effects were the
Speaker 1: big challenge with Finding Nemo, obviously, the big challenge was
Speaker 1: getting those underwater effects just right. All sorts of stuff
Speaker 1: need to be right. The way that particulates floated in
Speaker 1: the water had to be modeled correctly. The light had
Speaker 1: to be just right for each of the different water
Speaker 1: environments they were in, the colors, how those colors in
Speaker 1: light would affect the way characters appear on screen. All
Speaker 1: of that had to be researched and developed, and it
Speaker 1: was pretty incredible. They were eventually able to create underwater
Speaker 1: scenes so convincingly. They would take some reference material, some
Speaker 1: actual film shot underwater an attempt to recreate that film
Speaker 1: using computer generated imagery. They got so good at it
Speaker 1: that you couldn't tell the difference between the two if
Speaker 1: you showed them side by side, it would be very
Speaker 1: difficult to say, this one's the real footage and this
Speaker 1: one's the computer animated footage. At that point, they then
Speaker 1: had to dial back the realism because in the world
Speaker 1: of Finding Nemo, they wanted it to be somewhat like
Speaker 1: a make believe world, but based in the underwater world
Speaker 1: we know off. So it had to be it couldn't
Speaker 1: be too realistic or it would lose the audience, and
Speaker 1: it couldn't be too cartoony or wouldn't be what they wanted.
Speaker 1: And they also had to study how fish move through
Speaker 1: water to make sure that the animation made sense. Uh,
Speaker 1: they had to research aquatic life to understand their anatomy,
Speaker 1: and every animator was required by John Lasseter to get
Speaker 1: certified in scuba and to take several dives to have
Speaker 1: firsthand experience underwater around these environments. They also had to
Speaker 1: develop the color palette that particulate movement all of that stuff,
Speaker 1: and this was a huge undertaking. Oh and they also
Speaker 1: had to figure out how can you make a compelling
Speaker 1: character out of a fish because traditionally fish have very
Speaker 1: limited abilities to emote. They don't do a lot of emoting,
Speaker 1: so they had to cheat a bit on that one.
Speaker 1: They had to give fish things like eyelids, which fish
Speaker 1: do not have, and to give them more preastive faces
Speaker 1: and be able to move their their brows and things
Speaker 1: like that so that they could have characters have expressions
Speaker 1: on screen. Uh, that was a bit of a challenge
Speaker 1: to to get that just right. And of course developing
Speaker 1: the story was a big tough thing to do. It's
Speaker 1: a story that begins with a character losing his wife
Speaker 1: and most of his children. Of course, that's not the
Speaker 1: only time that happens in picks Are, and it's not
Speaker 1: the only time you see it in Disney. But you
Speaker 1: have to be able to treat that just right so
Speaker 1: that it has an emotional impact but doesn't become so
Speaker 1: overpowering that people you lose everybody at the very opening
Speaker 1: of your movie. It's it's a it's a delicate thing. Also,
Speaker 1: in two thousand three, Pisar debut the short bound In
Speaker 1: and in two thousand four, Pixar would release The Incredibles,
Speaker 1: which I would say is arguably why the best superhero
Speaker 1: films ever made. I'm including all the live action films,
Speaker 1: and The Incredibles broke all of pick Stars box office
Speaker 1: records for opening weekend up to that point. It also
Speaker 1: would eventually win the Best Animated Film Oscar. Now, this
Speaker 1: movie was a little bit different from earlier ones Pixar
Speaker 1: brought on brad Bird. He actually ended up joining Bixar
Speaker 1: becoming part of the company, But when brad Bird came
Speaker 1: on board, he also brought some folks that he had
Speaker 1: been working with in previous UH productions, and so at
Speaker 1: first there was kind of a Pixar versus brad Bird
Speaker 1: and his guys sort of feeling. It took a while
Speaker 1: for the two groups to meld together and work together effectively,
Speaker 1: and brad Bird UH was apparently something of a UH
Speaker 1: and a brace. It is probably the wrong word, but
Speaker 1: he definitely seemed to come across as a bit aggressive
Speaker 1: because in various drawings of bread Bird that were made
Speaker 1: at around around the time, it always looks like he's
Speaker 1: screaming at everybody, which in the behind the scenes footage
Speaker 1: where the Incredibles, Bred Bird seems to take a little
Speaker 1: bit of an exception to He's mostly amused by it,
Speaker 1: but he's like, come on, guys. Uh. Eisner reportedly didn't
Speaker 1: like the pitch for The Incredibles at all and thought
Speaker 1: the film would have to be a live action picture.
Speaker 1: He would just essentially dismiss the idea that this should
Speaker 1: be animated, but Lasted was able to change Eisner's mind
Speaker 1: and get the film greenlit. Now early ideas had a
Speaker 1: slightly different take on a story than what we saw
Speaker 1: in the finished film. For example, originally everyone in the
Speaker 1: family could fly except for the dad Bob, which meant
Speaker 1: that he would end up behind the wheel of the
Speaker 1: family station wagon trying to keep up with all the
Speaker 1: rest of his members who are flying away. Um Brad
Speaker 1: Bird decided that that didn't make a whole lot of sense,
Speaker 1: and he didn't want any of his characters to have
Speaker 1: unlimited superpowers. He didn't want any character to be like
Speaker 1: Superman because he wanted those characters to get into situations
Speaker 1: that were difficult to get out of. And if you
Speaker 1: make a character's too powerful, it's really really tricky to
Speaker 1: come up with complications that that character can't just immediately fix, right.
Speaker 1: I Mean, that's the problem with a lot of Superman
Speaker 1: stories is how do you create a situation for Superman
Speaker 1: that he can't just fix right away, and it tends
Speaker 1: to mean you have to escalate everything. So instead of
Speaker 1: escalating everything to a ridiculous level, Brad Bird said, let's
Speaker 1: make certain that the powers, while cool and and and
Speaker 1: beyond the capabilities of your typical human, don't get to
Speaker 1: the point where any one character is invincible. Now, the
Speaker 1: animators have the challenge of making unrealistically proportioned characters move
Speaker 1: in a believable way. If you've seen the Incredibles, you know,
Speaker 1: while they're unmistakably human, they don't have the proportions of humans. Bob,
Speaker 1: for example, has these tiny little feet and legs compared
Speaker 1: to a massive, massive tour So, uh, it's not realistic.
Speaker 1: It's it's a stylized version of a human being. So
Speaker 1: animating a character like that so that the character appears
Speaker 1: to move in a natural way when the character itself
Speaker 1: is an unnatural shape is a pretty tough problem. And
Speaker 1: also they had to create a look to the character
Speaker 1: so that they didn't look like toys. You know, that
Speaker 1: was that was the issue with Toy Story. In fact,
Speaker 1: some people pointed out that Andy in Toy Story and
Speaker 1: Toy Story to look kind of toy like himself. He
Speaker 1: didn't look very much like a human, So they had
Speaker 1: those challenges ahead of them. They needed to get that
Speaker 1: just right. But you could argue that maybe by going
Speaker 1: the stylized route they didn't really nail it. I think
Speaker 1: it's perfect for the way the movie is. Two thousand four,
Speaker 1: Finding Nemo would go on to become the best selling
Speaker 1: DVD of all time, with twenty four million copies in
Speaker 1: North America alone. Also in two thousand four, over it
Speaker 1: Epcot Walt disney World, there was a new attraction that
Speaker 1: opened called Turtle Talk with Crush, which was part of
Speaker 1: the Living Seas Pavilion. So Turtle Talk with Crush is
Speaker 1: really cool. The basic premise is you go into a
Speaker 1: little theater and Crush from Finding Nemo, that's the sea turtle,
Speaker 1: shows up and he has a conversation with the audience
Speaker 1: and actual conversation. He can talk to specific people in
Speaker 1: the audience, ask them questions and tell jokes and that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. So it's an incredible thing to see,
Speaker 1: and it's it can at least be It can be
Speaker 1: a little mind blowing at first because it looks like
Speaker 1: they're doing three D computer animation in real time that's
Speaker 1: not exactly what's happening. It's more like a video game.
Speaker 1: Like think of a video game where you're able to
Speaker 1: control the characters, make the move around, and it's similar
Speaker 1: to that. So there's a performer who's behind the scenes
Speaker 1: who can control Crush. They can make the turtle move around,
Speaker 1: do tricks and move his mouth, and then the performer
Speaker 1: actually provides the voice. So they always have to have
Speaker 1: someone on staff, usually a couple of people who could
Speaker 1: do the Crush voice really really well. Uh, you need
Speaker 1: to have a couple because sometimes the person's voice isn't
Speaker 1: up to snuff and you have to call in the backup.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of interesting that that's become an actual job.
Speaker 1: Like if you can do a good Crush voice and
Speaker 1: you can learn this system, you've got a good You've
Speaker 1: got some good job security there. So this is really
Speaker 1: kind of a type of machinima. That's machinima with a
Speaker 1: lower case M, and that's machine animation, the idea of
Speaker 1: using a pre existing three D virtual environment in order
Speaker 1: to render animation in real time. Uh. In this case,
Speaker 1: this was a custom built system meant just for this uh,
Speaker 1: this this attraction. It's not like they bought a video
Speaker 1: game off the shelf and they're using it for that purpose.
Speaker 1: Us they developed it from the ground up. But it's
Speaker 1: the same basic principle, and the performer can hear audio
Speaker 1: thanks to a handheld mic uh and possibly some other
Speaker 1: mics that might be positioned around the room, and also
Speaker 1: can see through people through a camera system, so that's
Speaker 1: where that interactivity can come in. In two thousand five,
Speaker 1: another Pixar short film debuts. This one is called One
Speaker 1: Man Band, and the New York Museum of Modern Art
Speaker 1: would host an exhibition called Pixar Twenty Years of Animation
Speaker 1: in December of two thousand five, though to be fair,
Speaker 1: the actual twentieth anniversary happens in two thousand six, so
Speaker 1: the exhibition opened a little early. But yeah, Pixar was
Speaker 1: coming up on twenty years as an entity, although it
Speaker 1: only have been making feature link films for about ten years.
Speaker 1: In a sad piece of news from two thousand five,
Speaker 1: Joe Rant, who had worked both with Disney Animation and
Speaker 1: with Pixar, died in a car accident. Raft had worked
Speaker 1: on dis Any films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The
Speaker 1: Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast, Aladdin, The Nightmare Before Christmas,
Speaker 1: and The Lion King as a story artist, storyboard supervisor,
Speaker 1: and occasionally as a voice actor, his specialty being cartoons screams.
Speaker 1: He would go on to work on Toy Story as
Speaker 1: a story supervisor. He provided the voice of Heimlich in
Speaker 1: A Bug's Life and he also served as story supervisor
Speaker 1: for that movie. He voiced Wheezy the Penguin. And Toy
Speaker 1: Story two. He worked on Monsters, Inc. And he voiced
Speaker 1: Jacques the Shrimp in Finding Nemo. Andy co directed Cars.
Speaker 1: So it's very tragic Pixar was lost a a real
Speaker 1: superstar in Joe Raft when he passed away. Now, that
Speaker 1: same year, Disney did something pretty controversial, at least in
Speaker 1: the eyes of some Pixar employees. So in two thousand five,
Speaker 1: Disney created a new division of Walt Disney Animation called
Speaker 1: Circle seven Animation. The entire purpose for Circle seven Animation
Speaker 1: was to focus exclusively on developing computer animation for Disney,
Speaker 1: with a primary goal of creating sequels to Disney owned
Speaker 1: Pixar films. Now, that led some folks to dismiss Circle seven,
Speaker 1: calling it picks aren't instead of Pixar it's Picks aren't.
Speaker 1: But the studio never actually produced a single film, nor
Speaker 1: were any of the scripts that they wrote at while
Speaker 1: they were still a thing, ever used by Pixar in
Speaker 1: any of their movies. This was really Disney's move to
Speaker 1: try and leverage the intellectual property that Pixar had created
Speaker 1: under that agreement for those five films, and specifically they
Speaker 1: wanted it so that if Picks are left Disney, Disney
Speaker 1: could continue to make money off of those properties by
Speaker 1: creating sequels, even though those sequels would be made by
Speaker 1: people not connected to the original film. Now, there wasn't
Speaker 1: really any hard feelings between or there weren't I guess
Speaker 1: any hard feelings between Pixar executives and the folks who
Speaker 1: were working for Circles seven Animation. Uh they I'm guessing
Speaker 1: that John Lasseter wasn't thrilled that Circle seven Animation became
Speaker 1: a thing. He was probably very torn up about it,
Speaker 1: but he didn't hold it against the people who had
Speaker 1: been hired by Disney. It was more of a problem
Speaker 1: with Disney's move in the first place, and in fact,
Speaker 1: when Circle seven ended up dissolving later on, Lasseter would
Speaker 1: actually bring on a lot of that staff and bring
Speaker 1: them into Walt Disney Animation Studios. In fact, Andrew Millstein,
Speaker 1: who had been the head of Circle seven, became the
Speaker 1: general manager of Walt Disney Animation Studios. So there weren't
Speaker 1: any hard feelings, but it definitely was a tense move,
Speaker 1: and there were some battles going on at the top
Speaker 1: levels of Disney and Pixar. At this time. Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: and Michael Eisner were having some pretty nasty fights over
Speaker 1: which movies were counting towards the deal that they had made.
Speaker 1: Eisner was arguing that Toy Story Too should not count.
Speaker 1: That is not one of those five movies that we
Speaker 1: agreed on because it's a sequel and sequels don't count.
Speaker 1: Jobs said, what are you talking about. Of course it counts.
Speaker 1: It's a full length feature film, and I are saying, well,
Speaker 1: it was meant to be a direct to video sequel,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't count. And there was this back and
Speaker 1: forth arguing, and Jobs was very visibly looking at other
Speaker 1: potential partners for Pixar once the Disney deal was done.
Speaker 1: So tension was high at this point between Disney and Pixar.
Speaker 1: Now two thousand six rolls around and cars It's a
Speaker 1: film that a lot of kids love, but I think
Speaker 1: it's really just okay. It's not at the top of
Speaker 1: my list for my favorites among Pixar's films. It comes
Speaker 1: out in two thousands six it does really well. It
Speaker 1: actually does very well at the box office. But the
Speaker 1: reason that the movie exists in the first place is
Speaker 1: because John Lasseterer loves cars. And maybe I'm not into
Speaker 1: the movie so much because I don't like driving. So
Speaker 1: that's perhaps the problem. The whole romanticism of driving doesn't
Speaker 1: do anything for me, and that's on me. That's not
Speaker 1: the fall of the movie. So Bug's Life was a
Speaker 1: new take on Esop's Fables, and The Seven Samurai Cars
Speaker 1: is kind of a new take on Doc Hollywood. It's
Speaker 1: really very similar story. So while finding Nemo made it
Speaker 1: challenging to create characters from fish, Cars presented a new challenge.
Speaker 1: How do you create a character that's a believable entity
Speaker 1: and still recognizably a car like You can't change it
Speaker 1: so much that doesn't like a car anymore, but you
Speaker 1: have to change it enough so that you can have
Speaker 1: a character there whether can express him or herself, that
Speaker 1: can move around in his or her environment and manipulate it.
Speaker 1: How do they carry and hold things? This was actually
Speaker 1: a really big deal. The animators were saying, well, how
Speaker 1: does a car pick something up? Like? How do they
Speaker 1: how do they carry things around? Apart from Mater who
Speaker 1: could tew things by using his uh the hook on
Speaker 1: the end of his cable, how do you have these
Speaker 1: characters move things around? And they experimented with that a lot,
Speaker 1: with things like prehensile antenna or windshield wipers, or the
Speaker 1: ability to hold onto things with a card door, and
Speaker 1: eventually they just decided it wasn't important and they dropped
Speaker 1: all that. So, like finding Nemo, the acting had to
Speaker 1: be focused in the face, even more so since with
Speaker 1: a few exceptions, most of the characters didn't have a
Speaker 1: lot of ways to communicate. They couldn't do big gestures
Speaker 1: with their tires. They could do little ones, you know.
Speaker 1: They took a lot of liberties with the way stuff moves,
Speaker 1: but mostly it had to be the acting had to
Speaker 1: be uh concentrated in the face, and the team had
Speaker 1: to figure out how to make Chrome look realistic. It
Speaker 1: Chrome's very shiny, which means it's reflective, so that means
Speaker 1: you should be able to see reflections in the chrome,
Speaker 1: and that actually was a big technical challenge for the crew,
Speaker 1: but they were able to figure that all all of
Speaker 1: that out and they were able to get the movie
Speaker 1: together and release it. And two thousand six, when the
Speaker 1: movie came out, ended up being a huge year for
Speaker 1: a Pixar. It wasn't just when Cars debuted, it was
Speaker 1: also when Pixar and Disney were able to come to
Speaker 1: an agreement. Disney announced that it intended to purchase Pixar,
Speaker 1: and under this new arrangement, Edwin Katmol would become the
Speaker 1: president of Pixar and John Lasseter would become the chief
Speaker 1: creative officer of Disney and Pixar Animation Studios. So a
Speaker 1: huge change here where Lasseter, the man who had been
Speaker 1: fired from Disney because he had been too enthusiastic about
Speaker 1: computer animation, was going to become the chief creative officer
Speaker 1: of that animation department. A huge turnaround, crazy story. And
Speaker 1: in September of two thousand six, Pixar debuted the short
Speaker 1: film Lifted, just one of my favorite short films Pixar
Speaker 1: has ever done, and Pixar employee and story artist Joe
Speaker 1: Raft would be named a Disney legend, which is an
Speaker 1: actual designation within Disney. It's not just it's not just
Speaker 1: a term. It actually really means something. It's like a
Speaker 1: hall of Fame within Disney, and they induct only a
Speaker 1: few people every year, and uh, he joined that list
Speaker 1: that year. Well, guys have got a lot more to
Speaker 1: talk about with Pixar, but I fingured this is a
Speaker 1: good place to end in two thousand six. End of
Speaker 1: two thousand six, when Disney and Pixar joined Force Is
Speaker 1: and Pixar becomes an integrated part of Disney, still largely
Speaker 1: independent in the sense that it can develop its own
Speaker 1: movies internally, but now officially part of this company and
Speaker 1: no longer a separate thing. So we'll pick up in
Speaker 1: two thousand seven for our next episode. Guys, if you
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