I always wanted to do animation. This is awesome and we're making movies.
It was just pure joy for me it was what I loved so much.
We are in Emeryville, California, outside San Francisco
and we're about to go into Pixar.
I'm a director of photography for lighting which what that really means is
in live-action films they have a director of photography that's also known
as the cinematographer and they're doing camera and lighting and it's happening
all at once. In our computer world, we split that job
into two, so we have a director of photography for camera and
director of photography for lighting. And so all it really means is I direct
the lighting for the films. It's this perfect combination for me of
of art and technology, where there's, um, some coding, a lot of
like, problem solving and getting the computer
to do what you want it to do, but the end result is the visuals which to me is
so magical where you are doing this very left and right brain things and that's
kind of my happy place. I ended up getting a camera and making a
lot of animation when I was a kid. About sixth or seventh grade I heard
about a school, Cal Arts. Basically that was it, you know, I got
accepted and I was able to go. And, uh, John Lasseter hired me in
the very end of 92 so i've been here pretty much ever since.
So you're there for Toy Story...
I was there, that's what i was hired to do, is
Toy Story. Art direct Toy Story. You mentioned that you started working
for Pixar, uh, straight out of undergraduate, right?
Yeah this is a huge name, so coming into this environment and working here... was
that scary?
Well the funny thing is back then it wasn't a huge name because
Pixar made Toy Story but it... no one... everybody seemed to think Disney made
Toy Story back then. Like, they didn't know what Pixar was, and it had Disney's
name on it. Everybody knew what Disney was, and so,
for me I knew what Pixar was and it was my dream job
already then because it was to me the pinnacle of computer graphics and what
you could do with a computer to make art and tell
stories. We were just making stuff up as we went and trying to just
improve film to film on how we made the films and how great the story was and
how great the visuals were. And so you could watch these giant
technological leaps happening where it's like,
on Monsters Incorporated they want Sully to have hair and nobody had done hair.
How do you do hair? I don't know. Like, over the course of a
whole movie, and so figuring that stuff out.
And so, it's things like that that have actually been the biggest challenge I
think to overcome. When you're in a new thing and you don't know what you're
doing and finding the way, the strength to kind of
tromp through that even though you're having doubts
until you get to the place where you actually have enough experience that
that you don't have to deal with that anymore.
Fun part is doing all the research and really getting into it and getting to
its bare essence visually, and then how you present it, and
all of that. But the one kind of golden rule for me
is start from character and everything else will follow.
Design for design's sake just doesn't interest me in the least.
People always will say something... some things to me like,
'That wasn't a very good film but it sure looked great,' and I'm like, 'I don't care
about that.' You know? I said, 'Yeah it look great. I
don't care.' You know, it's like I'm more interested in the film making me care
and if the visuals are great and, and really are working to kind of advance
that, um, the better.
My favorite thing that I
ever got to work on was I got to light the jellyfish
sequence in Finding Nemo and it was kind of one of those things. I
had gotten promoted to a job where I wasn't supposed to
do lighting anymore because I needed to be hands-on managing people, but I really
really wanted to light the jellyfish. And so I
said okay, this is so ridiculous looking back on it now, but
I'm like, 'Okay i'll take the promotion if you'll still let me light the jellyfish.'
Right? And so, at you know, like, seven o'clock at
night when I finished managing people I'd go off and light the jellyfish until
late at night. But it was just pure joy for me. It was what I love so much.
I was working on it and I got all the pieces balanced just so. The kind of
murkiness of the water, and the caustics on the bells of the jellyfish.
All the fog beans and stuff. And I-- we send it off to render overnight.
You come in in the morning and it's sort of
like this moment where you're either going to get something that's garbage
because something went wrong, or you get to see your work from the
previous day. And I pulled it up and I was like [gasp]!
Like, everything kind of came together. It was just the most distinct moment I'd
had where you go, this is working. And when I showed it to the director,
you know, you're in a room full of people in a screening room and there's maybe 50
people in there. Normally what happens is the director says
'oh this is great, okay, well, let's change this and that,' and they give you a few
notes that you're gonna work off of. And um, I showed it
and the director was silent. And you never know what that means, right? And
then he just started clapping. And then the production designer starts clapping.
The whole room starts clapping. And so it was this moment of like, you
know, you put in this hard work late at night,
and, and it all kind of came together to make you feel like
all right I do know what I'm doing and this is awesome, and we're making movies!
And it was-- that was like my favorite moment.
Here I think with Wall-E we, we went to cruise ships and got very
thorough tours of the interior bowels of a cruise ship
and also trash dumps. Yeah a lot of them. But the reward is, of course, when you get
to see it go out in the world, and, you know, see what people think, you
know? It's terrifying and, and thrilling at the
same time. The only advice I would give anybody
would really be to
have fun with some research .Once you get interested in something go and find out
as much as you can about it. I mean it's not that hard to do
especially with the internet, you know? You can always get a dozen books on a
subject and just read through them, and uh, just keep doing that, you know?
That's that's really it. But a lot of people get stuck in their
little world of what they do, and so, to take yourself out of that, and
go experience the rest of the world, go to different places, try different
foods, go see a rock concert, and go see a ballet, and then go see an opera, and then
go see a movie, and just see everything.