Between this film and last year's Wall•E, Pixar's mastery of wordless montage has become peerless. I'm not one to become outwardly emotional while watching a film, but less than 10 minutes into your movie I began to tear up while watching this mini-masterpiece that encompasses Carl's entire life until this point.
Good, I’m glad it worked. We knew we had a lot of funny, goofy stuff to get you through the second act. A lot of humor, a lot of action-adventure stuff, and for me, it was important to base that on some sort of foundation of emotion, so that you care about this guy. You understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. Otherwise, it would be funny and entertaining — hopefully — but it would kind of just be vaporous, unless you have that emotional connection with the main character, so we worked hard on that. One of my favorite parts of the film is that montage.
I’d imagine it must take a long time to create such a montage. There must be a tremendous amount of paring down to achieve just the right length, just the right amount of information. . . .
Yeah, yeah. That’s it, exactly. You start with the big, huge . . . there’s probably about 15 to 20 minutes worth of material, and we wrote out scenes with little snippets of dialogue, and it was kind of just quick cuts of: here they are, setting up this room, or fixing up the house and having little gags and things, and then we paired it down, paired it down, got rid of dialogue, got rid of sound effects. Ronnie del Carmen, who’s the head of story, just this amazing artist — he’s the closest person I know to being a superhero, and his power is drawing. Like, you can name anything, and he just does it. “Now, can you draw that a little more three-quarter?” And he’s like, it’s almost like he can see it, and project it with lasers out of his eyes, and he just kind of traces it. It’s really incredible. So anyway, his staging and composition is beautiful, and he really contributed heavily to that sequence.
While I'm sure it's much faster than back in the Toy Story days, the film must still take an awful long time to render. . . .
Yeah, depending on the shots, some of them are four hours, while some of them are . . . longer. You know, the weird thing is — going back to Toy Story — the computers were like a 64th of the speed, and yet the frames went faster. [Laughs]
Really?
Yeah, ’cause we keep asking more and more from . . . there’s like a subtle. . . we call it “sub-surface scattering,” where the light comes in and bounces around under the skin, and all that takes time. And now we have occlusion shading, where the character . . . you know, not only do you get the shadow on the surface, but as it gets close to something, it just darkens in at the base, and all that stuff just takes more computational time. And every time they increase rendering speed, we say: “Good! Now we can add ‘fill in the blank.’ ”
