Tin Toy Commentary

Tin Toy commentary with Director John Lasseter, Modeler Eben Ostby and Producer/Modeler Bill Reeves.

Transcript

 * (music playing)
 * LASSETER: Tin Toy was created in 1988 for SIGGRAPH again. Um, the origins of Tin Toy was from... I was watching home video that my sister, Joanna, had taken of my nephew, Timmy. And he was an incredibly cute little baby and she sat him on a blanket and surrounded him by his favorite toys and just shot like a half an hour of, of him playing with his toys. And he would take toys and then drool on them and smash them on the ground and drool on them and throw it and, and I thought, "Oh, he's so cute." But imagine being a toy, this cute baby would actually be like a monster. (GASPS) And I just thought, "Oh, there's a story idea." And so I went into Bill's office and Bill, you had just had your, your daughter...
 * REEVES: Yeah.
 * LASSETER: ...Julia.
 * REEVES: Julia was born in '86, but she had just gotten to about this age. You know, was starting to crawl or having crawled a little bit. Yeah, I mean, but it was the right time for...
 * LASSETER: And so he was completely into babies, so um, so I pitched this idea to him and he got all excited and it was really quite a technical effort to try to, to do, uh, to do a human character. It's something we had never done before and hadn't been done too much in computer animation before. And so we took a lot of um... You know, Julia came in an awful lot and we were studying her toes and her fingers. And, and all like that. And so we, we started building the, the model and it was the first, the first time we had really... Bendable...
 * REEVES: Tried to do bendable arms and knees and...
 * LASSETER: Surfaces.
 * REEVES: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and then the whole facial stuff we tried to do. Maybe a lot...
 * OSTBY: You built... You built a whole bunch of new programs just to be able to do this...
 * REEVES: Yeah.
 * OSTBY: ...this baby.
 * REEVES: Yeah. It was the whole...
 * LASSETER: Little facial animation. It's our first real face, facial animation that had, had been done. Um, and... So out of this also came the first, first time we had ever done toys being alive, um, which has since, was really the origins of Toy Story. Um...