(zipper zipping) (buckle clicks)
- [Angus] From when I first saw Buzz Lightyear
I was always drawn to Buzz as a character,
as an amalgam of the sci-fi characters of my youth,
and of the youth of the filmmakers.
And I always felt like I wanted to know more
about that character and where that character came from.
- [Child] This is where the spaceship lands.
- To infinity and beyond!
- [Angus] Buzz indicates like a larger universe
of sci-fi adventures that were never really explored
in the feature space.
So that was just something that I was excited about.
Both having worked on that Buzz character
in Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3, pretty closely
and then also wanting to make a movie that was evocative
of those sci-fi movies of my youth.
- [Buzz Lightyear] Buzz Lightyear mission log.
After a full year of being marooned on this planet,
(electricity shocking)
our first test flight is a go.
Let's get everyone home.
- Good luck, captain.
We're all counting on you.
- Roger, that.
- [Galyn] There is a certain full circle feeling about it.
This is sci-fi, though.
Like, we're really doing sci-fi, and I love sci-fi.
And this opportunity to make something that feels
so fundamentally different from the first film,
yet has this link is really very, very exciting.
I mean, we were trying to make something
of a particular aesthetic
and it's definitely not one that we've done before.
I do feel like, in general as an industry, we are
at a point where people can stop talking about animation
as a genre and start talking about it as a medium.
It's just a medium for telling
whatever story you want to tell.
And we need to really help move that conversation forward
so that animated films are taken with the same kind of,
you know, not seriousness because they're fun,
they're, you know, they're films.
But with the same authenticity of filmmaking
as any other medium
as any other medium.
- I feel like the narrative possibilities for
animation have always been huge,
but the saleability or the commercial viability
of some sub genres of animation or the stories
that can be told or are supported in animation
are actually quite limited.
So what I'd hope to do with this film
was find something that had a little bit more breadth
narratively, that would be where the media
would be a barrier to entry for some,
and would also be a little bit more reserved
in the animation so that it didn't feel,
the animation style didn't--
it wasn't constantly asking you to be impressed.
I think so much of animation
desperately wants you to like it.
And so I wanted to have a film
where the animation was confident enough
so that it wasn't asking for your affections.
- Lightyear!
- I can provide sleep sounds if you like.
- [Greg] This is the first time where we have had this very
vehicle heavy kind of vast world of manmade objects, right?
So vehicles are, you know, difficult to make,
you know 'cause there's just a lot of moving parts
and things, like there's interiors, there's exteriors,
they, you know, have a certain level of detail.
And then of course in our movie,
the level of detail is even way off the charts
to kind of achieve that cinematic kind of aspect
that Angus was really keen on getting in this movie.
We found that you just, you need to have
a lot of high quality detail in a lot of our models, right?
Especially that meant spaceships, that meant,
you know, the bases, all the armor,
the weapons, the robots, right?
It all needs to have this tactile reality to it.
That means seams and grills and knobs and stuff.
And you can't just slather that stuff on, you know?
It's like, it takes a lot of design time
to kind of find a balance of those aesthetic elements.
Right? And so that was something that, you know,
on the design side, like it was a whole,
a lot of work to kind of figure out
what that looked like. And then on the modeling side,
all the people that had to build that stuff.
It was an immense challenge.
- [Buzz Lightyear] Buzz Lightyear to star command,
come in, star command.
Why don't they answer?
(Buzz grunts)
Hey, Hey.
- [Alisha] Shhh. The robots. - [Buzz Lightyear] The what?
(Robot buzzing)
- [Buzz] What is happening right now?
Alisha?
- Oh no, that's my grandmother.
- But, Sox, how long were we gone?
- Meow, meow, meow, meow, meow.
- [AI] 62 years, seven months and five days.
- What?
- [Fran] This project was really exciting because of how
important the costumes are to the story.
So a space suit is designed to be like
a tiny mini spaceship if something goes wrong in space.
And so the suit has a lot of responsibility,
which puts a lot of emphasis on the costumes.
Which was really, really exciting.
They're also some of the hardest costumes
we've ever made at Pixar.
There's soft parts, there's hard parts,
there's all the structure underneath,
and all the life support underneath.
And all of those components have to work together
to bring you the performance of a space suit on screen.
And then once we figure that out,
we're going to give you 10 more.
So we get to advance the space suits over time
and then work our way finally to the space ranger costume
that we all know and love.
The first time we put all the modeling, all the shading,
all the graphics, all the cloth detail
on Buzz's first launch and anaray suit, the XL-01.
When we put all that together and we got to
see our first render, it was just like,
(Fran gasps)
it was just this really, really exciting moment
of like, oh my gosh,
I'm putting a space suit on Buzz Lightyear.
And so not only did I get to have that moment,
but my five year old sneaking downstairs from his nap
because he knows mommy's working on Buzz Lightyear,
got to come up behind me and share that moment with me.
So we got to have that moment together,
which was so, so exciting.
- I will tell you a secret.
I saw Toy Story when I was 19 or 20 in college.
I didn't think there was a DP on animated films either,
until I saw that movie.
And that was the one.
I was like, "oh."
I love all these live action films,
I love the idea that you can do anything in animation.
Look, here's this crazy company that did all of it.
Like, how do I get on that?
How do I do that?
So on a live action film and an animated film, the role
of the director of photography is how is the film shot?
How is the film lit?
Where are the characters in the frame?
Is the camera moving?
All those kinds of things.
On an animated film,
it's the same.
The methodology and the thinking is the same.
However, on almost all animated films
that role is split into two pieces.
There's the camera and staging DP, which is me,
and Ian McGibbon was our lighting DP on this film.
And the reason they're split is production order.
It is very expensive to light something and then shoot it.
So we often shoot something and then it gets lit later.
On Lightyear, we've been trying to push this for years
and some films have been more successful than others
of bringing this pipeline together.
On Lightyear, Ian and I were lockstep from the beginning
so that he was thinking of lighting and trying some things
as I was trying some things with the camera.
And we would go back and forth together, even though
you're sharing files and not sitting on a set, right?
To try to really figure out the look
for each sequence before we had to do it.
Kind of like what a director would do with the actors on set
but we are doing this first pass at it.
In CG you can do anything you want and you can do anything,
things that have never been done.
So everything should be intentional.
We really have this chance to think through
what we want it to look like.
And the great thing about Pixar is
all of our movies can look different.
And they can all have a look that fits their story.
And for Angus, for us, this look felt right for the story.
It felt like we had a little more gravitas
and more stakes for Buzz in this moment
than what we have on other films.
And it just, the world Angus was describing,
this felt like the way to achieve that look
without it feeling like a cartoon.
Animation is a medium, it's not a genre.
The genre is sci-fi adventure.
And how you tell that story, you could do whatever you want.
You know? You could make a great movie with sock puppets,
as long as it is true to the characters
and transports the audience someplace else.
- [Fran] Part of what made this movie
so exciting to work on is that, you know,
there's going to be complexity
and there's going to be detail everywhere.
It's a sci-fi action and adventure
rooted in the design of like seventies, eighties.
So we get marry these things together,
which is super, super exciting and kind of how that ends up,
like in our departments, is we want detail on everything.
Really emphasizing that we're in a world built
by humans for humans, like at a human scale.
And so the level of detail that we achieved
in hard surface modeling is a new height for us,
which is really exciting.
The level of detail that we achieved in Alisha's hair
is a new level of detail for us.
And we think it, we know it's going to be a game changer
for what we're able to offer at the studio regarding braids.
And regarding those beautiful curls that she has.
And like they're perfect, perfect shapes and how they move.
That's an exciting game changer for us
that we hope to be able to replicate again in future shows.
Now we have the technology, now we can do that.
- Part of people being engaged in film is
that they get to see themselves in film, right?
And so to authentically represent the communities around us
down to their braided hair is important
if you want somebody to engage, to say
"I see myself in that person," right?
And that's really so important,
it's important for everybody.