The Incredibles Animators

The Incredibles animators.

Transcript

 * (music playing)
 * TONY FUCILE: I'm Tony Fucile.
 * STEVEN HUNTER: I'm Steven Hunter.
 * ALAN BARILLARO: I'm Alan Barillaro. We're supervising animators...
 * FUCILE: Of The Incredibles.
 * HUNTER: Known as the Three Caballeros.
 * GINI: Hi, I'm Gini. I'm an animator.
 * DAVE: And I'm Dave. I'm also an animator.
 * KUREHA: I'm Kureha, I'm an animator.
 * DAVE MULLINS: I'm Dave Mullins, animator.
 * JOHN KAHRS: I'm John Kahrs, animator.
 * ROBERT RUSS: Robert Russ, animator.
 * ANGUS MACLANE: Angus MacLane, animator.
 * TRAVIS HATHAWAY: I'm Travis Hathaway. I worked on a few sequences here in The Incredibles.
 * DOUG FRANKEL: I'm Doug Frankel, I worked on a few sequences on The Incredibles.
 * PETER SOHN: And I'm Peter Sohn. I'm proud to say I've worked on this film as an animator.
 * FUCILE: This is the best film we'll ever work on. (LAUGHS) There is some amazing animation here by Mike Stocker.
 * MULLINS: This was tough for your second shot.
 * FUCILE: "Here you go. First shot of the film. Have fun." (LAUGHS)
 * ADAM BURKE: I'm Adam Burke, his first shot too. And CG.
 * HUNTER: An interesting thing that every hand-drawn animator, including myself... We're used to timing our drawings differently than you would on the computer, where hand-drawn, you time it every other frame, you do a drawing. On the computer it's on what we call "ones." In every single frame there's a different pose, or move. So, if you're thinking in twos, which is every other frame, and you translate to ones, it looks a little watery. Things get a little swishy and slow. That happened to me and every 2D guy. Their first scene got a little bit sloshy and slow. When you're going a 2D, your brain fills in the gap. Your brain fills in the gap, yeah.
 * FUCILE: That's what Brad would always say, "Put it in the fridge." We had to eventually take... There's a certain point where you get to put away your shot for a while and go on to other stuff, and get your chips and reps in.
 * HUNTER: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: Then go back to the shot, and it would be a lot easier to finish in between.
 * HUNTER: There are a couple of shots that are long enough that animators spent the majority of the production working on them. They came back many times for little dialogue tweaks anything... during production. Brad's whole idea about having the interviews at the beginning was a calm beginning to what would be an action opening. He wanted people to go, "What movie did I say I was gonna see?"
 * FUCILE: The first scene I did was Mrs. Hogenson. What does she say?
 * HUNTER: (IMITATING JEAN SINCERE) "Denied? Denying my claim?"
 * FUCILE: Two things I learned, for one thing, timing on twos, then going to ones doesn't work. You need to re-space everything. But also, in hand-drawn stuff, you're always looking for ways to make things feel pliable. So, you squash and stretch everything, everything is changing shape. With a 3D puppet, you do that and you feel like you're gonna hear the skull bones crack. (IMITATING BITE) It doesn't look right. You've got to be subtle with it. I remember I overdid that head squash and stretch.
 * HUNTER: Oh, yeah.
 * FUCILE: I had to keep pulling it back. Pretty soon I got rid of it and just used the facial stuff.
 * HUNTER: It's like you have the control that you have when you're doing hand drawing. You can redo things until you get it the way you like it.
 * FUCILE: They're stop-motion puppets, and you don't have the control. You're pretty much pushing the puppet one frame at a time, and you're stuck with what you have. That's an interesting combination. Just finding the right balance where you don't...
 * HUNTER: Doug Sweetland will hate me for saying this, but to feel it rather than see it. What's going on, just feel it a little bit in the head.
 * FUCILE: Right. There was a thing that John Kahrs, you know, told Peter Sohn. Pete did a scene that was looking a little animation-y, flourish-y, which you sometimes do when you're bored with a scene.
 * HUNTER: Too many gestures?
 * FUCILE: Yeah, you give him, you know... The head does a little too much stuff, and you wag the hands around. You're trying to come up with something. John said, "No fluff." He wrote it down on a piece of paper and stuck it on his monitor. No monitor, no fluff.
 * HUNTER: Nice.
 * FUCILE: And stuck to it.
 * RUSS: How do you think Brad fared changing from the medium 2D to 3D? A learning process for him, too?
 * HUNTER: Yeah, for a long time he kept referring to them as drawings.
 * FUCILE: Yeah, he would call them drawings, and he started using some technical terms by the end.
 * HUNTER: By the end. T-Z.
 * FUCILE: It was difficult, too, that...
 * RUSS: That was one of the 50 million controls.
 * FUCILE: It was difficult, too, that... In 2D, you'd rough out the person you animate. The key poses would then be handed off to cleanup. And that's the same person in computers. You're gonna finish off the scene, and in-between it...
 * HUNTER: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: ...and get everything in there. That was another thing. Yeah, because in 2D you approve the rough scene.
 * HUNTER: Right.
 * FUCILE: Sometimes, maybe some of the in-betweens aren't in there. And then, if you have a good assistant, if it's off-model, I let him... It's done. It's done in rough animation. But that was an adjustment for him. He finales a scene before it was...
 * MACLANE: "That's good to go." But it wasn't finished.
 * HUNTER: He's thinking some guy down the road will take care of it.
 * FUCILE: Yeah.
 * HUNTER: Put it on a modeler who will do the in-between...
 * FUCILE: Right.
 * HUNTER: ...properly. No, that's me. Same person.
 * FUCILE: Yeah, yeah.
 * MULLINS: I do them both.
 * FUCILE: I remember the first time we looked at a scene, a test scene of Bob that Angus had done. Angus animates where you see all the in-betweens on ones.
 * HUNTER: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: He blocks it out, but you're seeing it move. Brad and I were like, "Huh?" We're used to seeing post-tests with single drawings in each pose, and that's all you're seeing. If it's a four-phase scene, or four ideas, you see four drawings. But we're seeing things kind of moving in and out, and it was a little... It was hard to make the call on that.
 * HUNTER: What about the character floating around in space with just the legs not even animated?
 * MULLINS: Yeah, yeah.
 * KAHRS: It was in the test, walking...
 * HUNTER: It's bouncing up and down.
 * FUCILE: That was nervous for us, too, I think. Having Brad and everybody come here, and you wanted to prove to them that humans are the most difficult to animate in 2D and 3D. We did prove we could do it.
 * HUNTER: It really was a different language. He was bringing something new, making us pay attention to our poses so much more than we ever did, you know, as a group.
 * FUCILE: That was interesting too, because we got the characters done fairly quickly, their geometry however. I didn't realize how intense the articulation phase was gonna be.
 * HUNTER: Oh, yeah.
 * FUCILE: Getting all those controls was gonna take long. It was so complex and so involving. And that was Steve, who did that. That was...
 * HUNTER: (WHISPERS) Me and... who else? (NORMAL VOICE) Angus, John Kahrs, Dave Mullins.
 * FUCILE: Rob, Rob Russ. How do we make them as loose as possible and make sense, so it's not like you're overbuilding, putting too many controls in the car? Pretty soon you can't drive it, there's so much stuff. You're finding a balance between keeping it visual and simple, but getting everything we wanted.
 * BARILLARO: We have something we've never done. We haven't done muscles before. We have a ton of cloth. Everybody is in clothes. Hair. It's not only like, Bob's got his tuxedo outfit that he wears the entire film, he's got about eight or nine different...
 * FUCILE: Yeah.
 * HUNTER: Comparing it to Monsters, Incorporated where Sulley was Sulley for the whole film. They had to cover him in show, but Mike didn't have anything. Boo just had a shirt, you know. It was something like 40 or 50 costume changes throughout the whole film. Maybe more than that. You know, but different hairstyles. Helen has two hairstyles. Then they'd have to tweak the hair parameters per shot, depending on what's going on in the shot. It's an immense amount of work to get that to look right. From our standpoint, the environment the animator would work in, Tom Hahn and the animation tools group did a lot of work to give us a whole new set of tools to work with. In-camera controls to pose the character. We had this new timing tool we called x-sheet, inspired by the old, traditional animator's x-sheet where we could time out shots with just images. So we'd say, "Pose out five different poses." You'd time those images, saving time in figuring out the acting in a shot. In every character, we had a full set of constraints where you could constrain a body part to another body part, which sounds like, of course, you'd want to be able to constrain the hand to the head, but we couldn't do that previously.
 * FUCILE: Yeah.
 * HUNTER: That was one thing we knew. This was such a physical film. We were gonna have to be able to do that stuff.
 * BARILLARO: Some of the stuff hasn't changed at all, though, like, some of the tools that we use...
 * HUNTER: Yeah.
 * BARILLARO: ...for about ten years. Even though it sounds boring, some of the input tools that we use to animate have hardly changed at all. It's a testament to how simple and effective they are.
 * KAHRS: Absolutely.
 * BARILLARO: NBT is like a pencil to me now.
 * FUCILE: Yes.
 * BARILLARO: It's always the same.
 * FUCILE: NBT is one of the tools that we use. For the uninitiated.
 * HUNTER: In Monsters, Incorporated, there wasn't really a rig. You'd set up the character from scratch. The things that let us get all these characters... Bomb Perignon is Frozone.
 * Bob: Don't worry. We'll get him! Eventually!
 * (boom car whirrs)
 * HUNTER: We were going, "We've got to build background." That included Bomb Voyage and everybody. And we were like, "Ohh, okay, how are we gonna do that because we need to built a universe of people?"
 * MACLANE: "Well, okay, I need six female models that I can pull around, and six male models I can pull around to get different shapes."
 * BARILLARO: "Can't afford that." Okay. John Walker says, "No, can't afford that."
 * MACLANE: "Well, I need three of each." "No, can't afford it." Then, finally, we got down to one model. We get one model, a quarter of the time that we did for most main characters, but we had to build the universe out of them.
 * FUCILE: This is John Walker's here, too.
 * MACLANE: John Walker...
 * FUCILE: For those who wanna know, the voice of the priest. He's not that old, but he probably aged his much, though, on this film.
 * (ALL TALK AT ONCE)
 * FUCILE: Did you wanna finish about the one guy...? Just that it's one model we had to get all our background characters out of. Bomb Voyage wasn't one of those because we didn't have that model yet. But he was Frozone and we pulled around to get that model. Then the rest are, like...
 * MACLANE: The cops, all these people in the news reel here, all these people here, they're the same model. We just put controls in to pull the noses around, and eyes, and ears and heard sizes. All kinds of weird stuff, like chins and cheeks. It was just going through, making sure they look different enough and not like the same model.
 * RUSS: Do you think it was successful? We learned a lot. (LAUGHS) I think... I don't know.
 * FUCILE: Never happy. All we're...
 * HUNTER: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: ...watching right now is a lot of mistakes and pain. Life is flashing by, watching this film, as we talk about it. It's like if someone put your life into an hour and a half. You just sit there going, "Pain." And fun stuff. It's funny, every animator says, after a picture, that you feel like you didn't do anything. Even though you worked your ass off and did a lot of footage, even the people that did a lot of footage, it goes by so fast, you're lucky to do a few seconds. That's a lot of output...
 * HUNTER: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: ...if you do a couple seconds worth. Like, a minute worth would be a lot.
 * RUSS: How many fixes were on this? 5,000 animation fixes?
 * MACLANE: The average show has 2 to 3,000. There's 5,000 animation fixes on this show alone.
 * RUSS: And there's 5,000. Brad just said, "Screw it."
 * KAHRS: "Can't get to them."
 * (ALL LAUGH)
 * HUNTER: What does the average animator do on a film, 200 feet? At Pixar? 100 feet?
 * RUSS: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: So you're lucky to get a minute in. Wow.
 * MULLINS: Yeah, they're working.
 * FUCILE: So if you get a minute done, that's pretty good.
 * RUSS: One minute in four years.
 * FUCILE: Wow.
 * HUNTER: Thanks, man. That's really depressing. Here's a scene, I remember, when you did the Hogenson scene. "Denied? You deny my claim?" You wanted too jiggle the earlobes.
 * FUCILE: Oh, yeah, yeah.
 * HUNTER: You were like, "Can't do it. There's no control to jiggle them."
 * BURKE: "I need them!"
 * MACLANE: Yeah, you had to bitch about her for a while. Well, it was such an extreme close-up. They didn't look right. They had to move. Just a simple little swing. That's all they needed. So we just did it under the table.
 * HUNTER: Who did you pay off?
 * FUCILE: I think Cameron did.
 * MULLINS: You guys should talk about this, because this is the first sequence in the film that was in production. So this is the beginning of production for us.
 * FUCILE: Yeah, everyone was excited to start pushing stuff around.
 * HUNTER: Go nuts and extreme with it because owe put all these controls in. You could take it all over the place.
 * FRANKEL: But Brad actually has to apologize. He's telling everybody to calm down. "Hey, calm down. You'll get to do it again some other time."
 * FUCILE: If you freeze through some of those Angus scenes of Huph, the little guy, you could see some of those controls. You can see when the hands are scaled larger.
 * RUSS: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: For a frame or two my house. His head is scaled a couple times. There's lots of stretch and smash going on.
 * HUNTER: I gotta give Mark Walsh credit for that idea of doing Sally Sobstory as this "la-la" thing. Doug Dooley did a great animation of pencils here. Beautiful.
 * HATHAWAY: I couldn't do it.
 * HUNTER: I said, "Dooley, can you do it?" and he kicked it out of the park. It was great.
 * Helen: ...about?
 * KAHRS: A little looseness we got to put into Bernie. We got to do the pass on the bends on the arms.
 * MACLANE: Makes a huge difference.
 * KAHRS: An amazing difference.
 * MACLANE: It's a control that keeps them from looking too marionette-like.
 * KAHRS: Yeah. You put a rotate on an arm or something like that, it always keeps its shape no matter where you move it. But if you put a bend control in that bends it between the wrist and elbow, you can loosen it up by creating a nice arc between the elbow through the hand. And it really makes a difference, I think, though all this stuff. When you didn't have it in, it looked really stiff.
 * FUCILE: It's just trying to get to it all.
 * MACLANE: That's kind of a big head. Those two are the same character. That's right. That's Universal Man. That's the most dramatic example of different head shapes in the same character.
 * KAHRS: Until later in the movie. Frank and Ollie.
 * MACLANE: Oh, that's right.
 * KAHRS: That also brings up that myth that you can't go off-model in computers.
 * MACLANE: Yeah.
 * KAHRS: It's there for you, it's a puppet that you really can... If you can stretch Frozone into Bomb Voyage, you can really push the characters.
 * (door closing)
 * Bernie: Quality, do anything. No!
 * (car whirring)
 * KAHRS: I think on this film, more than any, we had a lot of fixes. We were really trying to keep it on-model and clean as possible. I forget what we ended up with, something like 3,000? 5,000.
 * FUCILE: 6,000. Six?
 * HUNTER: Jeez.
 * FUCILE: Six thousand.
 * MACLANE: That was just last week.
 * (ALL LAUGH)
 * FUCILE: Four fixers cranking at all times.
 * BARILLARO: You are cheating humans. We're are doing stuff here to cheat the daylights out of these things. But we're doing it based on stuff we've learned in hand-drawn animation. We're really trying to apply a lot of the same principles. The shaping of eyelids, the way you would see that in a drawing. We would look at old Pinocchio, or...
 * MACLANE: 101 Dalmatians was something.
 * BARILLARO: Yeah, we talked about that a lot. That scene with Roger.
 * FUCILE: We really didn't want to fall into the trap, which a lot of computer films do, where we could put pick mark on here and throw in all this detail on this flesh and get realistic. It was something we didn't want to do. We wanted to say caricatured and not shy away from the fact that this is a puppet film with 2D principles layered in. Caricature, sometimes, is more realistic. You get the sense of the person when you distill it down to something...
 * HUNTER: Exactly.
 * FUCILE: ...rather than the dead zombie corpses of the realistic.
 * MACLANE: It's like Al Hirschfeld, you look at a drawing of anybody. Carol Channing, if you take a photo of Carol Channing and trace it exact, you know right away your eye would go to the caricatures. It's more her. It captures the essence.
 * MULLINS: It's how your mind remembers it.
 * MACLANE: Yeah.
 * RUSS: You know.
 * FUCILE: Pick up all the little goodies and eliminate all the extra junk.
 * (KAHRS SIGHING)
 * FUCILE: So it was resisting that.
 * HATHAWAY: One of the things cool that was a great tool for us was the boards that Mark Andrews...
 * FUCILE: Yeah.
 * HATHAWAY: ...and his team did, Andy Jimenez, Ricardo Curtis and Ted Mathot, and a bunch of guys that I'm probably forgetting. Kevin O'Brien, Peter John.
 * FUCILE: Peter Sohn.
 * HATHAWAY: I mean, we had amazing boards to work from, to the point where we were almost worried... Early on, I remember talking to you, Rob, going, "Man, I don't know. They already got all the ideas there. What's gonna be left?"
 * FUCILE: "We're just gonna in-between it."
 * HATHAWAY: And Brad's like, "No, man, trust me. There's gonna be plenty of work." He couldn't have been more right.
 * MACLANE: Yeah.
 * KAHRS: Well, the previous sequence, with Bob picking up the car, that's stealing directly from the boards.
 * HATHAWAY: Yeah.
 * KAHRS: It was Mark Andrews. I was trying to match them. And you know what? I think they work better in the boards. I don't think it ever got the starkness and hilarity that Andrews had.
 * HUNTER: Yeah.
 * MACLANE: You try to match the boards.
 * FUCILE: Early on, Lou and I were looking at Santa Claus is Coming to Town, which are really, unbelievably charming-looking things. They were done in Japan, this stop-motion studio in Japan. I don't think people know a lot about who sculpted these characters. But the ones that I was amazed with were the ones that were drawn by Paul Coker, who's a Mad Magazine artist. And they were able to take those drawings and turn them into these puppets that really look like his style. No matter which way you turn them. Same with Mad Monster Party, that was another one. Jack Davis designed those characters. So, whoever those are, I swear they're brilliant, and really able to capture the simple shapes. We knew we weren't gonna go that caricature because the tone of the story is not that broad. It's not really right. Hopefully we've caught that sweet spot between pushing it too far and too real.
 * KAHRS: The biggest thing that helped us when articulating these was, you had the sculpts done down at Disney be Kent Milton. Just having those on our desk when we were articulating was such a big help. It was like your drawings were right there in 3D. You could turn it around, look at it. It really would give you an idea of... As you built a control that moves Helen's mouth, you knew what it should look like from all angles. It was a big help.
 * MULLINS: Yeah, it's great.
 * FUCILE: That was fun because for most of his career in animation he was doing maquettes for 2D films for reference, for the animators to draw from, which was not as direct as this, where you pretty much did it. We got those first batch of sculpts and we were pretty clear, "This is what we want the film to look like." Hopefully... I'll have to ask him what he thinks when he sees it.
 * KAHRS: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: He hasn't seen it? He hasn't seen anything yet. I think he'll be happy.
 * HUNTER: This is one of those sequences that epitomizes the whole film, where it's the family doing family stuff.
 * FUCILE: With superpowers.
 * HUNTER: It's close-up acting, it's superpowers, and at the en it devolves into this big action sequences.
 * FUCILE: Yeah.
 * HUNTER: I remember thinking in preproduction, figuring out how to do the film. From here on it was, "Man, this is gonna be really difficult to do."
 * FRANKEL: Sean has the nicest arcs...
 * HUNTER: Awesome shot.
 * FRANKEL: ...I think, of any of us. When Bob is on the phone later on, he's arcing and it's a pleasing, satisfying motion.
 * MACLANE: That short was Frozone saying, "Good night, Helen."
 * FUCILE: Oh, that's a good story.
 * MACLANE: Oh, jeez.
 * FUCILE: Brad was on vacation.
 * BARILLARO: He left the bozos, the inmates in charge of the asylum. Right?
 * KAHRS: Shawn Krause animated Bob saying, "Good night, Helen." We all thought it was awesome. And it really worked. It was pretty funny.
 * BARILLARO: Brad gave us a look like we were crazy.
 * FUCILE: It was really Frozone who was talking. Samuel L. Jackson. You had to re-animate it? It happens when you go out of town.
 * MACLANE: He was nailing me for that. I was gone too. I'm like, "What are you about?" "Come on, man."
 * FUCILE: "Listen to that." "Listen, does that sound like Greg to you?" I'm like, "Don't hurt me." (LAUGHS) "Please don't hurt me."
 * (ALL LAUGH)
 * FUCILE: "You're scaring me."
 * BURKE: This is two guys sitting in a car. We realized we should cast this out. You try to cast animators. They'll get a group of shots with a bunch of characters or we'll separate by character. We wanted to because it's so distinctive. There's great lines of dialogue there.
 * FUCILE: We ended up casting out to Mike Venturini.
 * HUNTER: And Mike Wu.
 * FUCILE: My two friends.
 * HUNTER: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: Who sat in the car. I remember Mike saying that as soon as he was cast, he was like, "Man, this is awesome. In what film am I gonna be able to animate two guys just sitting in a car having a conversation?"
 * HUNTER: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: It's just one of those things. As an animator, you never... To be given a chance to act out that kind of scene.
 * MACLANE: Venturini did Frozone. And Mike Wu was Bob.
 * KAHRS: That goes to what I heard Brad saying. He'd write scenes, because he as an animator wanted to animate that. "I wanna animate two guys in a car talking."
 * FUCILE: And that he.
 * KAHRS: "I wanna animate a husband an wife yelling at each other."
 * FUCILE: There was a first times where... I remember being in dailies, that's where we get together and look at our shots on a big screen, and there would be a great shot. Brad would still say, "Well, it's good but it's something I've seem before. I've seen that gesture. I've written something that... I'm trying to make scenes for you guys that are new and bring something to the table that's new and fresh. Let's push the acting."
 * HUNTER: That's another thing they tried to do, hand out as much of the movie as they could to each animator, so that you can work within the continuity of the scene. You don't have to do one big scene here and worry about hooking it up to the scene before and after, that you didn't touch at all. And so, if you can get, like, 10 scenes in a row, like my Frozone stuff in the fire, it's a lot easier to hook that stuff up and really simulate a real performance in there.
 * Bob: This is gonna get hot! (screams)
 * MULLINS: This Frozone stuff was my favorite stuff that I did in the film. Pushing hand poses and...
 * FRANKEL: I remember how excited you were to see the ice flying out of his fingers. You had to imagine that when you were animating.
 * BURKE: Yeah, yeah.
 * HATHAWAY: It's difficult. There's so much stuff, the fire and haze, that it's difficult to imagine all that. There's stuff I spent a lot of time on that you can't even see at all.
 * FRANKEL: Yeah, isn't that the way it always goes?
 * FUCILE: Even the masks are cool. The design is a nod to... Later on in the film when he...
 * KAHRS: When they're wearing their superhero masks.
 * FUCILE: Yeah, yeah.
 * KAHRS: Animation by Alan Barillaro, I love his hands. I love Frozone's hands.
 * FUCILE: That scene of him in the fire throwing the stuff, that Travis did, there are amazing hand poses there.
 * HUNTER: Yeah. A little flick.
 * FUCILE: Yeah, he just flicks it. It's very comic book. Jack Kirby.
 * MACLANE: There definitely was a lot of attention to facial detail. That comes from Brad and Tony more than anything.
 * MULLINS: Hunter.
 * MACLANE: Hunter too. He pays attention to the facial stuff a lot.
 * KAHRS: I love this little Shatner move he does before he gets in the car. He does this pull-up, trying to stop his weight. Total Shatner. Thank God. A little Shatner in this movie.
 * FUCILE: You always try to get a little Shatner in. You gotta have a little Shatner. This is one of Ron Zorman's first scenes. This one here, the cake-eating stuff.
 * FRANKEL: The actual cake eating disturbs me to watch, because I saw that footage... Dave Mullins did the animation. He actually sat down with aa giant piece of cake. Actually, he bought a whole cake.
 * KAHRS: His wife made the cake.
 * MULLINS: Is that what happened?
 * KAHRS: His wife made it.
 * MULLINS: He just showed me all this footage of him scarfing back a giant piece of cake and delivering a line. I mean, he ate the whole cake in about 20 minutes. It was just disgusting.
 * KAHRS: You should put that footage on the DVD.
 * FUCILE: This is interesting. This section is animated by four different people, this argument. But it really feels unified.
 * KAHRS: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: Brad was really on top of this one.
 * KAHRS: It really does flow from one animator to the other nice.
 * FUCILE: Yeah.
 * KAHRS: Because this a case where we casted it in chunks of five or six shots in a row to four different people. And each of them worked on Bob and Helen. As it flowed through the sequence, it had this build to it. I think it was just how we cast it, that it actually... It just flowed nicely from one to the other.
 * MACLANE: Yeah.
 * KAHRS: And having Brad stay on top of it.
 * MACLANE: It's interesting, too, as we were going along, if there wasn't what we call a "polish pass," where you guys put in subtle squishes, and a little squash and stretch in the eyes, little tiny things in the kids, when we saw it in digital dailies, suddenly Mom, for example, would turn into porcelain. She looked fine on our computer screens, but if that little pass wasn't done...
 * KAHRS: With all the lighting.
 * MACLANE: ...it really stiffened things up. It's amazing how you had to do it. There were no shortcuts with this stuff.
 * KAHRS: Right. Mom was one that was really easy to take off-model quickly.
 * MACLANE: Hmm...
 * KAHRS: And then out. She was the most difficult, making sure people were on-model.
 * FUCILE: The bigger the head and the thinner the neck, like Mom and Vi. It was difficult to make that shoulder and neck relationship feel real and not too puppet-y.
 * KAHRS: Right. Even if you move your head, it has to be reflected on the body.
 * FUCILE: Somehow ties into the chest.
 * KAHRS: Yeah.
 * FRANKEL: We really wanted to see a movie like this get made. Brad drops down from the sky, and we're like, "Oh!"
 * FUCILE: Yeah. Early on, before he even came on the picture, we were just talking about what we wanted to see, and that we hadn't seen. We knew it wouldn't be easy.
 * KAHRS: He wanted to prove something too, as a department. Brad definitely instills that...
 * RUSS: Yeah.
 * KAHRS: ...that feeling in you that you're the underdog in the situation.
 * FUCILE: You really want to prove that we can do the best balance between 2D and 3D. There is no difference. Good animation is good animation, and this is the most difficult task, doing good caricatured human animation. It was something we hadn't nailed, so we're out to prove something. This was a perfect film to do it.
 * KAHRS: Hallelujah.
 * MACLANE: It was just a lot. A big bite.
 * KAHRS: Yeah.
 * MACLANE: It was just a lot to do. The amount of stuff, in terms of this type of acting, the number of characters and there was lots of action.
 * FUCILE: Even locations.
 * MACLANE: Locations. If it was a regular, live-action film, instead of being shot on three locations it's shot on about 80 locations.
 * FUCILE: So, it was a lot.
 * MACLANE: And it was long. It was ten minutes longer than a typical film? That's a lot of extra work.
 * KAHRS: You know, the thing that's cool about this film in general is we got chunks of shots. Usually, you get two or three shots at a time. On this film, we got 10 shots at a time, 15 shots. I think Angus got, like, 200, shots at a time. He animated a minute and a half straight in the Bob vs. Omnidroid part.
 * MULLINS: Yeah, it's a minute and a half.
 * KAHRS: It's really cool, because we had five guys do the scene, and we all just hooked up with one another. It made it so easy. It could've been 20 animators...
 * RUSS: Yeah.
 * KAHRS: ...animating the scene.
 * RUSS: Yeah.
 * KAHRS: In the past, it would've been. We'd usually get one or two shots.
 * MULLINS: And it just wouldn't feel as continuous as a single idea.
 * KAHRS: From an artistic standpoint, too, you can say, "I animated this piece." A sort of ownership of that.
 * HUNTER: There was a big shift early on, so that we could do all the stuff he wanted. To get the looseness in there we had to first build it. That was with a small group.
 * KAHRS: Arguing over and over again, then getting that group to re-learn how we do things. Then we had to take on a group of 50 people, and teach them again how to re-learn their stuff. It was quite a learning curve at the beginning. We taught them all the controls, and all the new tools, and then let them go. A lot of people did an admirable job. It was just a lot to take in early on. And that was when they got tired. There was a point early on where people were like, "Oh, my God. This is huge."
 * FUCILE: But the most rewarding. This is why you're here. Brad always reminded you why you wanted to be an animator to begin with. It takes you right back to when you were a kid, seeing an old Disney movie, you know, The Jungle Book or something like that. There was a lot of work that was put into that to get it to that level. You eventually find out for yourself that it's a tremendous amount of work. So you really have to... Everybody dug their feels in and helped each other. He really bred that, "Go talk to that person, that you animator. That young animator should talk to that senior..." That we're all in this together and that we can only do it as one big group.
 * MACLANE: Yeah. His story at the beginning was like, "None of us is the best animator in this room, but together we could be. We can build that bird!" It's was like Braveheart. Yeah.
 * FUCILE: It was such a great talk.
 * KAHRS: How many speeches? Dailies was always... It was either a speech or a rant.
 * FUCILE: A rant.
 * KAHRS: Usually, a lot of rants.
 * MACLANE: Which are like speeches. He would always polish off a rant with "Go team!"
 * KAHRS: He could've taken the road of telling us what he wanted, "Here it is. Just do this and you're fine." But instead, he wanted us to understand where he was coming from, where, at this moment this character was, why he wrote it. He made it so personal that you couldn't help but get emotionally involved when you're animating these shots. To the point where he'd be talking about the shot, and all of a sudden, "Look. All right, stop. Turn up the lights." He's run to the front and go on for 20 minutes. We never had those 20 minutes. He had to move on to another review. He'd go into this real big story about why it's important, why it's important that we see Bob get cut. That the audience believe that he can get hurt. This isn't a cartoon where he runs off a cliff and falls and turns into a pancake and walks off. For the story. This is a story point. It has to be believable. You have to worry about the characters. That's a difficult thing in animation. The level of skill that has to be put into the animation and the physics is really difficult.
 * FUCILE: It has to be... That balance, I guess, is really difficult for us.
 * MACLANE: I remember him talking about that years ago. He would bring up the word "peril". It requires some work to do that. In the first scene of the film, if you see your main character jumping off roofs and sliding down, I'm not gonna name a film, you see someone doing these superhuman things, dodging things, you're not gonna gonna be worried for him or her later when there's supposedly this danger.
 * KAHRS: You gotta feel like they can get hurt.
 * FUCILE: It opens up the door for telling real stories about all sorts of different topics.
 * MACLANE: It's tricky with a superhero movie. One of the problems with Superman is this guy's invincible, you know? What's there to worry about?
 * KAHRS: Yeah.
 * FUCILE: You gotta introduce Kryptonite.
 * MACLANE: You wanted these characters to... They could die. They're superhuman, but they can be killed.
 * FUCILE: The prologue, Brad said, "This is a sucker punch to the audience." They think this is gonna be a superhero movie. We can be hammy or more pose-y, anything to contrast the next sequence, which was Bob in the office 30 years later. Just to really drive that home.
 * FRANKEL: In 2D, you know what you're creating. It's in front of you as you create it. You know what it's gonna look like. And you can do cel setups where your drawing is done, and you know it's not gonna change much. You'll have a clean artist go over it, but it's supposed to stay the way you do it. In CG, there's this incredible growth and change from this crude blocking where the models were moving around and the characters we're primitive shapes of what they're going to be, with no color and shading. Sometimes it's almost unrecognizable when you finally see the shots. We're stunned at what we're seeing when we see it. And we animated it.
 * SOHN: The stuff that frustrated me the most was trying to take out what I had learned in 2D. You know, the bouncy-bouncy, fluffy kind of stuff. Like, swoopy cartoon-y arcs, and trying to take that out.
 * FRANKEL: Yeah.
 * SOHN: I'd get reprimanded a lot about putting stuff like that in there. They're just like, "No fluff! No fluff!" Brad's style also is more... Like, there's more of a live-action sensibility to it. Even in The Iron Giant, there's stuff you could get away with in 2D that in 3D, because of how real it looks, it'll look weird.
 * KAHRS: The animator would try to communicate to the audience different beats that the character is having. And if we can do that, then we've done our job, I guess.
 * SOHN: The quality of 2D animation that can be really bouncy and jumpy, well, this is totally on the other side of that spectrum. It's pretty serious acting. Brad is pushing for that subtlety, which with computers is so much easier to do than in my experience in 2D. I could never do the stuff that we could do on the computer.
 * MULLINS: Right.
 * SOHN: Supposedly, the Rankin/Bass thing was actually a little bit of a sell, because at first when Tony Fucile had mentioned we should capture the Rankin/Bass thing, Brad was skeptical. He said, "I don't want this to be clunky." And Tony said, "I don't mean clunky, I mean, grab the charm from Rankin/Bass and then put that into what's gonna be a lot more sophisticated." Then Brad was like, "Okay, you think you can do that? Let's see."
 * HATHAWAY: I think that's absolutely one of the reasons why this succeeds as one of Pixar's first films with humans is that charm. There are so many CG films that get caught up in the details of humans. We all know what we look like as humans. Everybody is like, "We need this detail and this detail."