[DRAMATIC MUSIC]
Only once is all we get, grant me this rebirth.
Till tomorrow's sun has set, one day to walk the earth.
I'm Catherine Apple.
I was lead editor on Disney's and Pixar's "Onward."
And this is Pixar's "Scenes Explained."
[UPBEAT MUSIC]
Yeah!
Editing an animation movie takes a long time.
I have been on "Onward" four years, I think.
We start off in the very beginning,
before even the actors have been chosen.
You have a script, and the story artists start drawing,
then we start cutting.
So we literally cut the first movie
together with just storyboards.
I think it's close to the end of the second year
when we start bringing in real actors.
And we get them in.
And then we do this thing called layout,
which is our camera work.
And we recut the movie again at that stage.
And then when they're through with layout,
they start moving on to animation.
And then towards the end, it's pretty much like live action,
where we have our sound designers,
we have our composer come in.
[ROAR]
Onward to the scene!
[CRASH]
[ROAR]
This scene uses every department.
We would all meet together as the animation was going forward
and we kind of had to decide, if you do this what happens
to the other departments?
And then I would be there to make sure
that we were still in the same time and the same emotion,
and not losing anything from the scene.
So many people had to be involved all the time
to make sure every department is working together.
One of the scenes that I like the best
is the building of the dragons.
We take things from the movie and we're putting them
in this, things that kind of bothered Ian,
like the car, from the driving test.
And then it's just really the small details of the walkers,
or the wings, and there's all this stuff
that's really building into it and it's really fun.
When the smoke was coming out, we first did it up above.
And so it kind of opened up and the smoke came up
and then it kind of built the monster.
Probably in layout, they decided to have the fog come
down, it was much creepier, and then
crawl into making the monster.
It kind of comes down and it rebuilt,
and it really became much scarier.
We wanted the face of the dragon to come on last.
You see earlier on that they're tearing
that part of the building out, but then we still
wanted to continue building the dragon
so many other ways, so the very last thing
was to put the face on it, it turns and looks at you.
[ROAR]
The Manticore!
The hardest section to get right
was when the mom and the Manticore came in.
We needed the Manticore to come in just right
and hit the monster just right, and then have the mom show up.
We really wanted the Manticore to be first
and then come to realize that Mom's with them later.
It's also the time in the movie where everybody comes together.
When the boys are running up the hill,
and Ian still wants to tell Barley, you know, I'm sorry,
but he's like--
There's no time.
You have all this emotion, but making Dad
is the most important thing.
I am a mighty warrior.
This is one of my favorite parts, when Mom grabs a sword
and runs up on the dragon.
When we first had Mom helping the boys out,
she didn't run up the dragon.
She pretty much just went up and, to their surprise,
she had stabbed the part that made--
the heart, I guess-- that makes the dragon stop.
But we really wanted it to be more heroic.
So we decided that she was going to grab the sword
and run up the dragon, which is really great.
The way she's using all of her aerobics
from an earlier scene when we first meet Mom in the movie,
and we even brought back the music a little bit.
So when she was running up there,
she was using all of the skills of her workout.
I am a mighty warrior!
[SIZZLING]
[GROANING]
"Onward" is now streaming on Disney+.
[UPBEAT MUSIC]