Let's take a look at the fascinating process that created "Toy Story 4," from start to finish. For "Toy Story 4," as for all Pixar films, story comes first. While the writers draft the script, story artists work alongside them, making preliminary sketches for each scene in the film.
These sketches, called storyboards, give the Pixar team an idea of how each scene will go down. Editors then cut the storyboards together into an animatic, or story reel, basically a long, detailed flipbook that reflects the pace of each sequence. The story reel is edited with rudimentary sound effects, a scratch soundtrack, and temporary dialogue that's been prerecorded by Pixar employees. It serves as a rough draft for the movie, allowing the filmmakers to get an idea of how the story will unfold and hone the sequences before having them animated.
Once the storyline is set, the art department and production designers get together to create concept art for the characters and their environments. Meanwhile, character artists lay out how each toy will look in the film. For "Toy Story 4," character design involved a lot of research into the toys themselves: how they're made, how they age, and everything in between. The character team found their perfect villain on field trips to antique shops, where they'd often spot vintage dolls lurking in corners.
There, the idea for Gabby Gabby was born. This newcomer is a talking doll from the s, and she's designed to come off as very toylike in a way that might even give you the creeps at first. On the other hand, it's all warm fuzzies when we meet Ducky and Bunny, a pair of carnival-prize toys voiced by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele. Their loud, bright colors, cheap-looking plush, and sheen finish were designed to look authentic for the kind of toy you'd win at a carnival game: not the highest in quality, but lovable nonetheless.
The character artists also decide on wardrobe. They steered clear from any major changes to most of the toys' signature costumes. But they wanted to update Bo Peep's look to reflect her resourcefulness and sense of adventure, aspects of her character that weren't fully explored in the earlier "Toy Story"s.
So they came up with a convertible costume that allowed Bo to repurpose elements of her outfit on the fly, even turning her dress into a bag or a cape when it suits her.
Another key step in the visual development of the film is the creation of color scripts, these digital illustrations that kind of look like impressionist paintings from the 19th century. Each picture depicts a single frame in the movie, helping filmmakers start to define the style, lighting scheme, and general mood of each shot and figure out how the colors in each scene will relate to the overall storyline.
All of these illustrations provide reference material for the next stage of computer modeling. This is when the toys and their environments begin to take form in three-dimensional space. Modeling artists take the basic shapes of the characters, sets, and props and mold them into a 3D mesh, then sculpt and refine these builds until they're satisfied.
In constructing the sets, scale was a chief concern, as the artists wanted to accurately represent the diminutive size of the toys relative to their surroundings. To nail down that contrast, they photographed models of the toys interacting with objects out in the real world, then used those photos for reference. Filmmakers reference previous films to ensure visual consistency and check that characters animate the same way they always have.
Toy Story 4, which lands in US theaters June 21, opens with a flashback scene from nine years ago showing pouring rain outside Andy's house. The incredibly realistic storm scene wouldn't have been possible in earlier films, Pauley says.
In fact, in the first Toy Story movie, filmmakers wanted to create a rainstorm in the scene where Woody and Buzz are trapped in Sid's room. But they were limited by both the technology and experience on the team. So they came up with a compromise. Instead of showing pouring rain outside, they created shots showing rain dripping on the window from inside the bedroom. That way, they could more vaguely illustrate that it was raining outside without having to create the droplets. More advanced effects tools available today allowed Pixar to create realistic rain droplets in Toy Story 4's opening sequence.
Dust can also be added for atmosphere on floors, cabinets and rafters, and cobwebs add an ominous touch to darkened nooks and crannies. For instance, they made the water in Sydney Harbour look fairly green to fit the mood of the scene. In reality, it would not be that color.
Once the environment was created, they had to populate the world. Perhaps the most challenging sea creature they had to create was Hank the octopus from the sequel, "Finding Dory. Creating just one scene with him supposedly took about two years. Character supervisor Jeremy Talbot explained that they had to break down an octopus and piece it back together again, which sounds a lot like how Pixar mastered fur and water.
One thing they discovered was that octopus tentacles don't bend but almost unfurl. An engineer spent six months just getting the curve of one of his tentacles right, and this was even before they mastered his camouflage. And as Pixar got better at developing the natural world, it also improved on the man-made world. By the time 's "Cars" came around, Pixar had about 1, times the computing power it did on "Toy Story.
As they did with the water in "Finding Nemo," they took time to make the light reflect off Lightning McQueen. Those metal surfaces would then be rusted up and seen in 's "Wall-E," often considered one of Pixar's most visually stunning works.
Then when "Ratatouille" rolled around in , Pixar combined its ability to work with fur from "Monsters, Inc. Lighting is one of the most important factors in making CG animation look real. It takes a lot of rendering time to get it right. And it's not just one or two lights we're talking about. This one shot alone in "Ratatouille" contained lights.
But that's nothing. Jump ahead to 's "Coco. And even with a movie as visually ambitious as this one, something as simple as clothes can be the biggest challenge. A lot of the characters that wore clothes in "Coco" were actually skeletons. The animators found that while simulating clothing, the cloth would often get caught between individual bones, creating a wedgie of sorts. For this, it implemented a technique called continuous collision detection, which allowed the animators to spot the clothes getting caught, even at moments where it was difficult to notice.
A year later, when the long-awaited "Incredibles 2" came out they were back to working with humans: skin, bones, and all. There was a year gap between the two "Incredibles" movies and the benefits of improved technology actually allowed them to make Jack-Jack look even cuter than he did in the first movie.
Meanwhile, more than people have been pouring heart and soul into the project for more than four years, and now, as they enter the final stages of production, it's nonstop crunch. Given this, you'd imagine the pressure level to be just a little tense around the Pixar studios.
Forget it. If things were any looser, everybody's pants would fall off. As Lasseter puts it, animators are kids who never grew up, and Pixar is the kind of place where people navigate the mazelike hallways on kiddie push scooters, where rainbow displays of penny-candy jars are to be found at every corridor intersection, and where successful shot completions are rewarded with trips to the in-house freebie toy box.
A few weeks hence, when a particularly difficult phase of making the film is accomplished, a calypso band will appear unannounced in the Pixar hallways, and a spontaneous conga line will go dancing deliriously through the offices. Here in the screening room, the ambience is so raucously sub-teenoid, you'd think you were sitting around in some kid's bedroom watching a bunch of precocious 9-year-olds try to crack each other up with gross body-part jokes and armpit farts.
Then we could call it Peanut Trouble. In fact, in the hothouse world of computer animation, Lasseter is not in any trouble at all. On the contrary, it seems, he can do no wrong. Lasseter is already regarded as one of the authentic, trailblazing stars; his short films have consistently turned into landmark events in the evolution of this young craft.
But it was the sensational Luxo Jr. A simple story involving cunningly animated desk lamps, the film was the sensation of that year's Siggraph conference and went on to win some 30 filmmaking awards, including a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, and an Academy Award nomination - the first 3-D computer-animated movie to have been officially lined up for an Oscar.
Only you'd probably end up down on the floor crayoning the wall along with him and never make it out of the house. If, as they say, whimsy is coded into the genes of animators, Lasseter was definitely born with it. One look at him sitting in the director's chair his production team fashioned for him - a wheelchair with drink holder, ooga-ooga horn, and gaudy bike streamers coming from the armrests - and you know the man was destined to make cartoons.
In fact, says Lasseter, the lead character of Toy Story has its origins in his own childhood. Woody is based on his favorite toy, a pullstring Casper the Ghost talking doll, which the director still keeps in his office. He loves to demonstrate it for visitors.
Growing up in Whittier, California, Lasseter, now 38, was a precocious artist blessed to have a family that recognized his talents.
His mother, a high school art teacher, actually encouraged him, he says, to get up early on Saturdays to watch the cartoons. My folks thought doing animation was a noble profession, a wonderful thing to shoot for, and that's pretty rare.
In high school, the budding artist wrote to the Disney studios of his ambitions and was invited to take a tour of the fabled animation department. In , he attended the California Institute of the Arts in Santa Clarita, just in time to be a part of the school's new character-animation program.
There he won the Student Academy Award two years running, and after graduating in , he went straight to work in the Magic Kingdom. People like me and Tim Burton were looked at as rabble-rousers - you know, young upstarts.
Then, in , Lasseter came upon one of the first crude demonstrations of computer animation and something clicked. He saw his future, and it was definitely digital. He convinced the studio to let him make a second test film using hand-drawn character animation within a computer-animated environment; the result, he says, blew him away.
It was just another world! Still, his bosses didn't get it, and Lasseter was told to go back to his pencils and be a good boy. Then, in , a job offer came from Lucasfilm in San Rafael, California, where some brilliant research was going on under Ed Catmull, one of the first-wave innovators of high-tech computer graphics. Lasseter joined the Lucasfilm computer group and quickly found himself immersed in just the kind of intense collaborative ferment he'd longed for at Disney.
I'd be inspired to create a character, to use the new stuff all these brilliant PhDs were creating, then they'd get inspired by my character and develop something that would make it even better. Lasseter had been working at Lucasfilm for three years, when company owner George Lucas decided to divest the computer division and concentrate solely on filmmaking.
It was then that Jobs stepped in and bought the division to form Pixar.
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