Jun 4, 2010 12:42 PM

1,084 days: How Toy Story 3 was made

This article was taken from the July issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by

subscribing online</a>

Screenwriter William Goldman once famously declared that the most important fact of life in Hollywood is that "nobody knows anything". It was his way of describing a reality that continues to haunt the movie business: studio executives have no idea which pictures will make money. Unless, of course, those pictures are made by Pixar Animation Studios.

Since 1995, when the first <em style="text-shadow: none;">Toy Story[/i] was released, Pixar has made nine films, and every one has been a runaway hit. Pixar's secret? Its unusual creative process.

Most of the time, a studio assembles a cast of freelance professionals to work on a single project and cuts them loose when the picture is done. At <a style="text-shadow: none;" href="https://www.wired.co.uk/wired-magazine/archive/2010/05/start/pixar-pioneered-3d-graphics-meet-radiology?page=all">

Pixar</a>, a staff of writers, directors, animators and technicians move from project to project. As a result, the studio has built a team of filmmakers who know and trust one another in ways unimaginable on most sets. Which explains how they can handle the constant critiques that are at the heart of Pixar's relentless process.

Animation days at the studio all begin the same way: the animators and director gather in a small screening room filled with comfy couches. They eat sugary cereals and drink coffee. Then the team begins analysing the few seconds of film animated the day before, as they ruthlessly "shred" each frame. Even the most junior staffers are encouraged to join in. The upper echelons also subject themselves to megadoses of healthy criticism.

Every few months, the director of each Pixar film meets with the brain trust, a group of senior creative staff. The purpose of the meeting is to offer comments on the work in progress -- and that can lead to some major revisions. "It's important that nobody gets mad at you for screwing up," says Lee Unkrich, director of <a style="text-shadow: none;" href="https://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-02/17/the-lost-toy-comes-home-lego-in-toy-story-3?page=all">

Toy Story 3</a>. "We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That's why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible."

The proof is in the product. The average international gross per Pixar film is more than $550 million (£370 million), and the cartoons are critical darlings -- the studio has collected 24 <a style="text-shadow: none;" href="https://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2009-01/22/oscars-snub-the-dark-knight?page=all">

Academy Awards</a>. Nobody in Hollywood knows anything. Pixar seems to know everything.

How they did it, step-by-step...

How they did it, step-by-step

Day 1

Coming up with the story. The creative team leaves the Pixar campus and heads to the Poet's Loft, a cabin 75km north of San Francisco. They thought they already had a plot for <em style="text-shadow: none;">Toy Story 3[/i], but after 20 minutes, the whole thing is scrapped. By day two, a new idea emerges -- how would the toys feel if Andy, their owner, left for college?

Day 3

Working from a series of plot points, screenwriter Michael Arndt begins drafting the script. At the same time, director Lee Unkrich and the story artists start sketching storyboards for each scene.

There is no animation yet, just drawn poses. But the storyboards allow the filmmakers to begin imagining the look and feel of each scene.

Day 36

So far, the characters exist only as digital illustrations though some are sculpted in clay and scanned. Others are drawn by hand.

Later, visual textures -- fur, fabric, hair -- will be added, a step known as simulation. "It's a constant negotiation with the technical side," says supervising animator Bobby Podesta. "Not everything we want is possible."

Day 123

The storyboards are turned into what's called a story reel -- a series of images that can be projected for an in-house audience like an elaborate flip book. The lines are prerecorded by Pixar employees. "This is a crucial moment for the film," says Pixar president and cofounder Ed Catmull. "Watching along with an audience allows us to see what works and what doesn't."

Day 380

Actors start coming in to voice the script. Tom Hanks takes his turn at the Pixar recording studio to lay down his vocal tracks.

Hanks reads every line dozens of times, varying his interpretations and emphasis. The sessions are also filmed, so animators can use the actor's expressions as reference when they start animating the characters' faces.

Day 400

The shaders add colour and texture to characters' bodies and other surfaces. One issue is the fact that Woody and Buzz are made of plastic: some plastics are slightly translucent, so they absorb light. The shaders use a subsurface scattering algorithm to simulate this effect, which makes the toys look more realistic.

Day 533

The pictures now move. Each character is defined by up to 1,000 avars -- points of possible movement -- that the animators can manipulate like strings on a puppet. Each morning, the team gathers to review the second or two of film from the day before. The frames are ripped apart as the team searches for ways to make the sequences more expressive.

DAY 806

The technical challenges start to pile up -- simulating a wet bear is especially complex. Fortunately, Pixar cofounder <a style="text-shadow: none;" href="https://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-04/29/steve-jobs-openly-tells-adobe-why-he-hates-flash?page=all">

Steve Jobs</a> insisted that the building's essential facilities be centrally located. "Walking to the bathroom is often the most productive part of my day," says producer Darla Anderson. "You bump into somebody and have a conversation that leads to a fix."

DAY 898

The animators work late into the night in their highly personalised offices. Each has been decorated in a variety of themes, from Polynesian tiki to 70s-era love lounge. ("We let them do whatever they want," Catmull says.) The animators even have their own working bars, complete with beer on tap and a collection of single malt whiskies.

Day 907

Rendering -- using computer algorithms to generate a final frame -- is under way. The average frame (a movie has 24 frames per second) takes about seven hours to render, although some can take nearly 39 hours of computing time. The Pixar building houses two massive render farms, each of which contains hundreds of servers running 24 hours a day.

Day 1,070

The film is mostly finished. The team has completed 25 of the film's sequences and is putting the finishing touches to an elaborate action scene that involves a runaway model train, smoke, dust clouds, force fields, lasers, mountainous terrain and a massive bridge explosion. It has taken 27 technical artists four months to perfect the scene.

Day 1,084

With only weeks to go before the film is released, the audio mixers at Skywalker Sound combine dialogue, music and sound effects. After a four-year production process, it can be hard to let go of Woody, Lotso, Buzz and the rest of the characters. "We don't ever finish a film," Unkrich says. "I could keep on making it better. We're just forced to release it."

Building a single frame

1. SKETCHES

There are 49,516 of these sketches in the movie's story reel, which is used as a sort of rough draft of the film. This frame captures the initial excitement of the toys as they arrive at Sunnyside Day care, their new home.

2. COLOUR SCRIPTS

It took art director Daisuke "Dice" Tsutsumi one week to create this impressionistic digital version of the scene. The goal is to begin to define the style and lighting scheme of the frame. Concept art from past movies is on display in the Pixar art gallery.

3. PROPS

Toys are positioned in the 3D "dressed set". The TS3 team wanted the nursery to be alive with movement, so hundreds of characters are placed on the shelves. Now the director can fine tune the camera's movement to best capture the action.

4. LAST DETAILS

The amount of labour spent on each character depends on its prominence in the final shot. Background toys are given simple textures and basic movements. Lotso and Woody -- the stars of the scene -- are lavished with attention and detail.

5. FINAL RENDER

Surfaces -- walls, clothing and faces -- are fed through rendering software that simulates light and shadow. It also adds texture to Lotso's fur, <a style="text-shadow: none;" href="https://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-02/15/meet-%27computer-engineer-barbie%27?page=all">

Barbie</a>'s leggings and the carpet. An average frame takes more than seven hours of computing time to render. A more complex frame such as this one required 11 hours.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK