31. Remembering Ralph Eggleston - Oscar winner & Pixar Production Designer

Welcome to the Creative Society Animation Podcast. I'm Michael Wakelam. This week we were saddened to receive the news that longtime Pixar production designer Ralph Egleson passed away after a long battle with cancer. I spoke with Ralph for one of our very first episodes, so my instinct was to remember him by re-running that episode this week instead of what we had planned. I went to briefly chat about Ralph before we got into that episode and I'm joined today by a longtime Pixar animator Sean Kraus. He's Sean. Hello. So sad and tragic to lose Ralph at such a young age. It really is. I loved him dearly and I've known him since Toy Story, obviously, and what's really nice is you're seeing a lot of these great tributes and people sharing their memories with them. It was really nice to see how many people felt as close to him as I did. You know, that there's so many people in his life that he touched amid a difference for. Yeah, and you know, I was just saying before recording that, you know, I've spoken to more than 30 people on the podcast now and I do learn something new from everyone. Some people I continue chatting with after the episode ends and then some I continue to chat with Avery Mal and Ralph was one of those. And, you know, he'd shared with me that he was on well back then. But he also was hopeful and upbeat, but I was saying, you know, he really wanted to share as much of that wisdom that he'd acquired over the years with others as he could. And I know apart from the podcast, he was doing lectures and he'd even bought a new microphone so that he could do all of these over Zoom. And he was super generous with his time. You know, it was the longest episode that we've ever done and one of our most popular. And we talked about doing, you know, a follow-up to delve deeper into some projects, but never managed to do that. Well, I think you're saying the key word there. He was very generous. So many people I know say that Ricky Nair was telling me the other day how when he was coming up to Pixar in the beginning, I believe Ralph offered his couch, we can crash on it until he found a place to settle. And, you know, anytime, you know, like you said, you know, the podcast that was like one of the longest because yeah, you can talk to Ralph about anything. And he was an expert on it, you know, architecture film, obviously, you know, music, you know, he would send me some obscure piece of classical music and say, this is why this is the best version of this symphony and send it over in highest res possible. And he'd buy two copies of everything, everything he had media-wise, one to watch and one to keep. And I remember when I first met him and went over to his apartment, he had a two bedroom apartment, almost his bedroom. The other was filled with at that time, VHS, tapes, you know, CDs, cassettes, books on art, you know, old obscure hard to find books. So he just was a wealth of knowledge and he was so willing to share that. And if you had a book, he'd send it to you or give you a link to find it or an audio clip. And so every conversation I learned something new and it was just, you know, I'm going to miss that. Yeah, I mean, he gave us a whole reading list to share with viewers that we put in the show notes, which was great. Yeah, and he, you know, he did various things, the art director and production design, everybody was an animator, I believe he told me that he animated the dog trainer and that great family dog. Yeah, yeah, he talks about that in the podcast, working on family dog and, you know, my favorite because you've worked on a lot of the same films that Pixar didn't you? Oh, yeah. And my favorite story he shares in the podcast, maybe because I'm Australian, it was, but also because it was a great story was that when he was, he was sent on his own to Sydney to do research for Finding Nemo. And he said he got into trouble when he got back because he'd spent too much money by in a digital camera and spending a whole day in a water taxi seeing Sydney from the harbor. But he said it's it helps save a lot of money in the third act because his suggestion that they move the climax from the downtown area to the harbor was, you know, how we ended up with that whole thing with the pelicans in the harbor. Yeah, that that those things you don't expect to find solutions, you know, these little experiences lead to these great solutions. Yeah, what's interesting too is like he would, you know, he was a ball of nervous energy in the sweetest way and he would come in and just kind of come here and say, hey, how you doing? If you're busy, yeah, don't worry, I believe. And I'm like, no, sit down and you'd sit down and have his great conversations and then just as fast as it started, he'd be like, I gotta go. I can see you later. And I'll talk, you know, always kind of a polygenic and a weird way. But just, you know, I'll send you those things I talked about, you know, we, you know, go out of your room and, you know, we'd have a long lunches together and he knew about food too. He would have great opinions on food and so that's my big thing. I remember a lot of times having lunch with him in the in the atrium for our breakfast. He'd always be there. He would get there really early in the morning. And then luckily, you know, because, you know, he fought it for so long, which was, you know, amazing that he, he had that. We had a lot of time to, you know, tell each other how we felt about each other. I'm grateful for that. And, and spend, you know, spend the spend a good amount of time together. So, you know, yeah. As I was mentioning before that, you know, even when I was visiting the Bay Area, when you and I met earlier this year, he had invited me to come visit him if it fell between treatments. And, you know, that is just so generous to, I'm like, the last thing you need is me coming to visit you between treatments. But he was generous. Yeah. Yeah. He really was. He had great, you know, he had such a legacy in history, in animation. You know, I wanted to, I tried to get him to just have conversational stories and record it. But he was a little hesitant about doing that, I think, for a couple of reasons. But I'm really, you know, Bumbley didn't get this down. And like his, all of his great, um, recollections and stories and knowledge, you know, just to have it. Yeah, I'm Bumbley didn't get to do a sequel. I follow up. Yeah. But, you know, I appreciate you, you jump in on with me today, Sean. It is a great loss. And let's listen back at that episode and, and remember Ralph. Hello, Ralph. Thanks for joining me. Hi. How are you? Yeah, really good. I really want to start out by rewinding all the way back to the start of your career and find out how you got started on, on this path. Were you one of those kids that was always drawing? No, I hate drawing. Yeah, I'm not really trained as a, as a painter or artist. I mean, when I got into animation, which is where I started as an animator, it was about things moving and stories and temperatures. And then I realized I had to learn to draw to be able to do that. So kind of was secondary. And I was always a better animator than I was a draftsman. And, uh, and what I learned right as I made the transition into doing art direction and production design was, oh, I actually can do this, you know, and then I made the switch and I stopped the anime. You know, people bet far better at it than I am. But I do miss it. And I love animating. But yeah, it wasn't the idea of it at the time. It wasn't about drawing. And it still isn't. I have a quote that I use in a lot of lectures that I give. Pretty pictures are nice. Hang it on a wall. You know, we're telling a story, making a movie. So that's what I, I still kind of believe that. So was that in in high school, were you started to think about animation on the later? I was 10 years old. And when my sister took me to see a double feature from my birthday of a one really bad Disney movie, a live action film called one of our dinosaurs is missing, not exactly the highlight of Helen Hayes and David Niven's careers. Peter used to know if I think he was in that. But the, the, the, the double feature was Cinderella. So yeah, that, that I believe in the second grade, I believe I saw Alison Wonderland that there's the animated film. And although I appreciate it even now, it didn't make the same kind of impact on me, obviously, I mean, for me, it's obvious. That's Cinderella, because Cinderella has it all. It's a spenceful. It's character driven. It's, you know, it's, it's just terrific. It's loaded with characters dramatic. It's, it's terrifying in some ways. You know, it's beautiful and funny. Yeah. I gave a talk on Cinderella not long ago at the Walt Disney Family Museum. Well, not long ago, it was a long time ago now. And I went and dug into the history of it and put together a really great talk in and even now, you know, on a, that film was done on a shoestring budget had it not been successful. I know now that the studio probably would have shut down entirely. But Walt used the success of that film to broaden his base in terms of business and getting the parks going and getting other films going and getting into live action and more of that kind of stuff. He wanted to do it, but he didn't have the money. And now with the success of Cinderella, he did. So, Cinderella was the film that really got me and I went home and wanted to figure out how do you do that? I went to the library and I read every book they had on the subject, which really wasn't very much and I grew up in a really small town. But I learned how to, for my sisters, worked at the library and she helped me figure out how to get books from other libraries and also figured out the periodical. So I knew everything about how to operate the library system when I was 11. By the time I was 11, because I wanted to know everything I could about animation, I didn't have much money. And so buying any kind of book was not really the thing, you know, something I could do. I would get a few here and there. But then I, my parents got me a super eight camera, which had a single frame capability. It was a really, well for them, it was a lot of money, but it was an inexpensive camera at the time. But it was great. And so I started doing a personal clay because it was fast. And then I got in the Preston Blair books on animation. And basically my dad was an accountant and he would borrow paper from his work from the Xerox machine. And I would use that to figure out in between. How do you in between these? And I didn't know much about peg holes or timing charge, but I was trying to figure it out. So I came in between a lot of the stuff in that book. Again, it wasn't for me at the time as much about drawing as it was just kind of figuring out the mechanics of it. And then when I was 14 or so, I animated from scratch a little short film, which I actually just had transferred high definition on super from super great. Yeah. And you know, it's a 14 year old film. And I was going to ink and paint it. And I had gotten the cells for it. And I was using Sharpie markers for the ink ink because it was permanent. And I was going to use acrylic house paint because it was the closest thing I could get to sell paint. And unfortunately, I had it all at school ready to ink and paint in the next semester as an art project. And my high school burned to the ground over Christmas break. And I lost everything except for the pencil test. So yeah, you know, all the drawings were gone. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So so I at least had the pencil test. And that's probably where I needed to stop. I mean, it would have been fun to do as color. I was able to use that to the I there was a magazine called Comics scene magazine. And there was an article about comic artist Bill Keane who did a strip called Family Circus. And and that in there was a sidebar article about his son, Glenn Keane, who had just started at Disney. And so I said, well, I'll write him a letter. And I so I wrote him a letter. And he wrote me back. I still have that letter. And he told me about Cal Arts, which is where I went to school. And I immediately applied. And because I at least made a short film, which a lot of students didn't have the opportunity maybe to do or the the resources to do, I think that's what pushed me over the edge because my portfolio was nothing. It was the drawing the drawing part of it was something I had to learn as a matter of fact, one of my teachers Ray Erigan, a life drawing teacher and he did lay out on sleeping beauty and a bunch of 101 down the Asians. But he was our life drawing teacher. And he came to me one day early as we were doing life drawing. And he told me he had a kind of a thick accent. But he said, you know, Ralph, you're drawings suck. I love them. And I'm like, what? And he said, well, a lot of these folks have gone to junior college and have had life drawing. And they're good to a certain degree. But I'm finding I'm having to spend more time getting them to unlearn bad habits. And you don't have any. So in a way, I guess, you know, so you know, that was actually very encouraging. And he made he made me laugh at it. And so I really doubled down. And I'm like, okay, I've got to draw better. And so life drawing became a thing for for a while. I still is, but not really as much as it was then. So yeah, you know, I made that little film and I was able to get into Cal Arts. And we were required to make a film every year. So yeah, I mean, Cal Arts take a kind of a different approach to a lot of other colleges that need a lot of other schools that do the team approach for short films, whereas Cal Arts get you to make your own. Yeah, well, they had a program there at the time it was called. Well, it was it was the program that Glenn was in was not the character animation program. It did that started the year after he was there or maybe the year he left. I don't know. And that first class included Brad bird and John Musker. Yeah, you know, yeah, my gay, just a insane talented group of people. And same Lee talented group of people. So yeah, we were required to do that. And I was so I had never traveled that much. And so moving from where I grew up in Louisiana to the West Coast to a place where it was my dream come true. Yeah, it was crazy. And so I was animating like a man being I made like two or three short little films. But they were more like tests than films to be really on. There was one that was a little short film. I wish I still had it. I don't unfortunately. And then I made a film from my freshman year and sophomore year and junior year. And after my junior year, I was able to leave. And it was it's a very expensive school at the time in all four classes from freshman to senior year. There was maybe 75 students total. Now there's probably a hundred in each class. Oh, well, yeah. So it was a lot smaller program than that. And we had focuses on life drawing, which was twice a week for 10 to nine hours a day. No headphones. And I still believe that if I were teaching life drawing and I saw someone wearing headphones on the music, their ears would be streaming blood from me ripping the headphones up. Mainly because that it's not about it's it is about learning how to grow up. But it's more about learning how to see. Yeah. And concentration. And really kind of look and we were not allowed to use shading in our life drawings. It was all a line line. You could describe the form with line, which is a very austere way of doing it and learning about it. But it was something that's what we did. And we had design classes. We had a wonderful teacher, Bob, Wayne Quest, who was a really great designer. And you know, basic drawing classes. And animation classes. And we get little tests to do. You know, so yeah, it was fun. And then we had to learn how to use the mechanics of 16 millimeter film and editing and all of that. A lot of that I would have to say we learned from each other. We really didn't have there weren't that many formal classes on how to use the equipment. They just wasn't. It was kind of an odd thing, but we all learned it. It was pretty easy. Yeah. And did you meet people at Cal Arts that you continued to work with over the years? This day, yeah. Tony Fichilli, who I think is one of the greatest animators ever. And I are still very good friends. We're not working together now, but we did on Incredibles too. Quite a few. You know, Andrew Stanton and Pete Doctor and Jeff Pigeon and those folks are still around Pixar and quite a few more here and there. So yeah, but Tony and I and oh, Doug Frankl. We were Doug Frankl, great animator. And Tony and I were in the same class at Cal Arts together. So yeah, you know, it was great. And did you jump straight from there into a job offer? I had gotten the opportunity to do a movie credit, some movie credits, but a filmmaker who was an actor, more known as an actor, he sadly passed away, Robert Forster, the actor Robert Forster. And it was his writing directing debut. And no disrespect to him, it was not a very good movie. And of course, he only had a little bit of money. And he wanted something really big and dancing. I tried to get him to kind of whittle it down and think more of a simple graphic approach to it. It was very cool, you know, really nice through the whole process. I had to kind of meet in the middle. And it sadly, the credits themselves ended up being not what I thought like they could have been, even with my skill level at the time. If we had simplified it a bit more, I thought I could have been more dynamic. But there you go, you know, you learn, but it bought me a car. And from there, that was the summer where, and I worked at Hannah Barbera for a summer as well, doing, I don't even know what shows they were, but it was, it was a paycheck, you know. The next summer, I worked at American Film Institute on a live action film for the, he's a well known person. photographer, David Hume-Kinnerley. And I was designing sets for a project that eventually became a television movie. But I left that. They weren't paying me. So I was an intern. And suddenly this guy, mainly, I think, believe-- I believe, mainly because of Tony Piccilli. I got the job as an animator on a project for Brad Bird, called Family Dog, which was a half-hour episode of the Steven Spielberg and Dolly G. Series Family Dog. Amazing stories, sorry. Yeah, I remember. And it was basically three short films that made up the half-hour. And we were in downtown LA in just a terrible neighborhood, really terrible neighborhood, between a porn studio and Skid Row. But literally. But it was one of these things. Everyone who worked on that was great. They were so talented and so giving. And I learned so much. And I was originally supposed to be freelance. But I was really hungry. I needed the money. I was not eating and well. And I had asked my parents who really didn't have the money or the money to pay rent just one month. And I was able to pay him back. But I didn't like having to do that. So I was so grateful to have the job. And I was just like animating like a fiend and Brad. But just tear me apart. tear the scenes apart and sit down and go through them and work with me. And we had a wonderful director of animation, Chris Buck, who directed Frozen and Tarzan, and a lot of other films, who was also very-- we had more time than Brad did. Because Brad was doing a little bit of everything writing and directing and editing. And Chris was focused purely on the animation. So he had more time to be more patient in a lot of ways that were very helpful. Plus I got to meet so many. I mean, I knew a few of the folks from school. But a lot of folks I'm still very good friends with. Like Chris Buck, I didn't know him. Darryl Rooney, who was doing layout on the film, I think he did some animation too. Yeah, it was an amazing small group of people. It was probably about 20 of us. And again, I wasn't supposed to be there full time. I was actually using a desk that was meant for assistant and cleanup animation, which was being done freelance. But if there were corrections to make, they could use this desk in the corner to make the corrections when they dropped their scenes off. And so I said, well, I'll just go and walk around the block or take a break or whatever while they're fixing their stuff. And I'll come back and I'll use a desk. And I kind of basically hijacked the desk. And that was a terrific time. And I met Sue Kroyer. I met. She was an animated one of the best animated I've ever met as well. Was there and where were lifelong friends. And I worked for her and her husband. But yeah, that was something else. It was only three months of work. But it was a highlight. It still is a highlight of my career. Was that experience? The last thing impact and group of group of characters. Tell us a group of characters. It was amazing. That's awesome. So you went on to do another title sequence I know for a film. Was that-- That was a little bit later. Yeah. I started to say earlier when I did the movie titles and then went on to Family. There was no work in LA. There was nothing. I went over to a project right after Family Dog called the Chipmunk adventure, which was being directed by-- really being directed by Glenn Kean. And that was-- I believe the second time he had left the studio. And again, a lot of the folks from Family Dog were there. People that had left Disney were there. So it was a great crew, again, at a really wonderful opportunity to learn from these folks. And although the project was really pretty awful, the job was great. We had a lot of fun. And I met so many people. But it was-- I think Gene Cisco gave it a review saying that he liked it to someone scratching their fingernails on a chalkboard for 90 minutes. And I thought it would be nice. So from there, I kind of had gone go rant, who-- I knew a little. I didn't know that well. But he had been working on-- along with a few other folks had been working on a project called the Brave Little Toaster. And he was over in Taipei, Taiwan, finishing that film up, which is where most of that film was made there. And he said that Disney was looking for some supervisors for a television show there. And again, there was no work in LA. And Glenn had left the studio. We were making the Chipmunk adventure at to go back to Disney to work on some dopey little movie called Little Mermaid, I think. And I'm joking. And a lot of the Disney folks were kind of moving back over to that. Now the Disney was kind of starting up again. I wasn't that good of an animator. So I ended up going over to Taipei to supervise a TV show called Duck Tales for a few episodes. And it was a great experience. What was really great is I used that to-- I kind of lifted the needle on my career for six months to the day, because after six months, tax situation changes. And so I went there for six months and paid off my student loans. Well, yeah. I got some scholarship money and other things, but I still owed money. So I kind of-- in six months, I was able to save up enough money because I went there and I worked. And I slept and I ate and I worked. And I slept and I ate. There's not a lot for me to do there. And oh, it was a great experience. But I just saved my money and paid off all my student loans and came back to America and kind of started all over again. And so yeah. Did you work with Joe over there? No, no. I didn't. I didn't work with Joe until later. But we knew-- I mean, we were in the same circle of friends, but we didn't really know each other. I mean, we'd met, but we didn't really know each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I missed it terribly. Yeah. Larger than life character from what I hear. I don't-- I never met Joe, but I was on a flight to LA last year and I was sitting next to this lady in Chit Chatt and she was asking me what I do for a living. And so, as I mentioned, animation. She said, I only ever knew one person who was in animation. And she said-- she told me it was Joe Ramp. And she said, he was always drawing in high school. She went to high school with him. Oh, that's great. And she said so much so that when they were in the school play, the school production, they were both in it on stage in front of an audience. And he was still drawing at the back of the stage. I believe it. I believe it. I'm very good friends with his brother, Jerome, who's a sculptor at Pixar. I mean, he's an amazing artist himself. So if he weren't so mean-- no, I'm joking. He's a really great guy. You came back and-- We came back. And then I actually ended up moving to Muncie, Indiana for 10 months to work on a project with Doug Franco and Bob Scott and Wendell Looby. And it was a 15-minute, an hour-long television special, put together by the guy who created Garfield, Jim Davis. We never drew Garfield the cat, but it was a 15-minute, 15-minute, three shorts that took up 15 minutes that were cats. And they were only related to Garfield in so much as they were cats. But they were all different styles. So we got to do three different little short films. The only thing we didn't have control over was the writing in the soundtrack. And they were-- But we got to design, animate, lay out, do the background paintings, ink and paint, and shoot the work-- or supervise the shooting of the work ourselves. So as a small-type group of people, and we were in a house-- Yeah, take a look. --just so right. Yeah, we learned a lot. And again, we had a blast. Once that was done, all they really had to do was Garfield stuff. And it wasn't enough to make all of us happy, I think. So I ended up moving back to LA where I was doing a lot of commercials. And then I was animating-- and commercials are just not for me. I respect people who can do commercials. I'm not one of those people. The weekly deadline grind is too much. On a feature film or a longer term project, there is a deadline. But it creeps in slowly. So you have time to get used to it. With commercials, there's no time. You just got to get it out. And it's really, really hard. And I respect people who are-- It's great texting. Oh my god. Yeah. So I ended up getting picked up by Bill and Sue Kroyer, who, I-- again, I met them-- I met Sue on Family Dog. And they had a commercial house. And they had been doing some movie titles. And we continued doing that. And special projects for Disney World. And mostly I was animating and doing some design work. And then this project kind of fell apart. in their lap called Fergoli, the last rainforest. And again, I just started as a designer and an animator on the project. And I was working with Tony Fichilli in Sue and a few other folks, Dory Latel Herrick. And designing, and we had a lot of producers on that film. There were, I think, 14. - Oh my gosh. - Yeah, and they all wanted to, yeah, it was very odd. It was a, they were all nice folks, but it was hard to get anything going because they wanted to discuss stuff to death. To a point where it was kind of, nothing was, I personally thought, then really that not a whole lot was going, was getting done. You know, the only person who was driving that forward was Bill Croyer, you know, and he had to deal with it a lot more than I did because he was the owner of the company too. So, you know, it was really interesting having a front row seat at Bill and Sue's company to see that and know for myself, like I learned on commercials, which was, I will gladly help anyone if they want to have their own studio. I never want to have my own studio. I will gladly do whatever they want me to do to help them. So they can do what they need to do to make their studio successful. And I'll get behind them a thousand percent, but I don't want to do that. That's too hard, you know. And I saw what they had to deal with. And I totally respect people who can have their own businesses. I don't think I could deal with it. But we had a lot of fun. We learned a lot. And again, because we had so many producers and they wanted to talk about stuff a whole lot. And again, Bill just started making the film on, you know. And one of the ways to get things through to them was to start doing little drawings, little pastel drawings. And that's what they would look at the picturing. Yeah, kind of like that, kind of like that, they would say. Yeah, kind of like that. And so suddenly I was our director, you know, of the film. And I did a lot of little chalk pastels for that film. A lot, hundreds and hundreds of them. And they kind of guided a lot of what was being done in terms of layout and the background paintings and worked with Wendell Luby. He was doing our character color models and wonderful head of income, Kittie Shontag, who I learned a lot about film making from. And you know, we just had a ton. We had a, it was everyone on that project. So things that, that job of the two years we were on that show as one of the best jobs they ever had. And it really had more to do with Bill and Sue and the way they ran their company. But it was, it was a great experience. And again, I didn't expect, and I animated on the film too. And I designed characters and I did color work. And I, we had a lot of funny things happen on that film, including a lot of artwork that had been inked and painted and been stolen minutes of film that were finished. And stolen before they could be shot. And including the opening. And so the, so I kind of came up with this idea, the idea was already there for the opening and the dialogue. But I redesigned it, I animated it, I inked and painted it, I painted the background, I wrote the ex sheets for the opening of the film, which is an Aboriginal kind of opening idea. - Yeah, I remember the film because it's the name of the town where I grew up in Australia is called Fen Tree Gully. - Oh, where is that? - In Melbourne. - Oh, okay, yeah, we got to go out there. - How really? - Well, I love Australia. Before I got into animation, I wanted to be a vet and they had the coolest animals. So I wanted to-- - And the deadliest. - The deadliest. - Oh, that's true. But we got to go out there and I've been out there a few times and it's a wonderful place. The only place I haven't, not only part of the country, I really haven't been, aside from the center, would be Perth. And I know Sean Tan, that's one person I know that's from Perth, but that's about it. But yeah, Melbourne's great and Sydney's wonderful. And but we got to go up to, not to entry, we went to O'Reilly's, which is in between Byron Bay and Dane Tree, National Rainforest. So yeah, it was really amazing. We were there for I think a week, 10 days. - You're doing research. - Great trip, great research. - Yeah, it was really great. So I got to do that opening. But what I started to say is I had no time. I was awake for a few days and I, from start to finish that opening was done in about a week and a half total. So that was a lot to do. And I was exhausted. I didn't know what a breakdown was, but I learned what it was at the end of that. When I stopped working all together, your body just, it takes a while to kind of acclimate to not doing a lot. Because everyone in that film did multiple jobs. We had to and that was the fun part of it too. - And so let's fast forward to Pixar. I mean, you probably had a couple of stops between there, but how did you get into Toy Story with any of that? - Well, we had another project. We were trying to get going at Coro your studio that didn't quite fly. And we were doing other odd jobs here and there. And one day I got a call from the end of 1992. I got a call from Andrew Stanton. Someone I had known. And he asked if I was busy. And I said, not really, why? And he said, well, we're coming down. Would you mind showing your portfolio to Joe Ramp and John Lasseter? So I gathered up a bunch of my pastels and I met him and I showed him and they hired me on the spot to do this film called Toy Story. And I told him, I said, I know nothing about computer. So he said, don't worry about it. Don't worry about it. And so I did. I, that was the end of 1992 between Christmas, New Year's, between Thanksgiving and Christmas. So beginning of December probably. And the second week of January, I was in the Bay Area. They'd moved me, you know? And was there and kind of stunned, you know? And yeah, we had a wonderful meeting with these brilliant people, Bill Reeves and Tom Porter. And I know I'm forgetting someone. But they sat down with us to explain to us how computer animation is done. And the Tia Cratter and Bob Polly and I were the art department on that film initially. We added a few other folks, Bill Cohn and Robin Cooper. But initially it was me and Bob and Tia. And we sat there furiously taking notes. And our eyes were spinning because we, we draw cartoons for a living. And these guys are brilliant theoretical physicists to computer scientists. And when we left that room later that afternoon, John saw a sensei that our eyes were spinning and just started laughing. And he put his arms around us and said, you know what, they can do things that you can't do. But you can do things they can't do. And what we need to do is visualize this film. So that's what your job is. And I'm like, all right. So I never worried about it after that. I mean, I learned a lot about what the computer can and can't do. But I didn't worry about how it was going to get done anymore. I feel that I was open to hearing. Like if I'd done a design, I was open to hearing from one of these scientists, hey, did you know, to not take the drawings so literally, there's a dozen ways of maybe doing that idea. But let's talk about it some more, you know? So yeah, it was a learning experience. Coming from hand-drawn animation and even live action films, you're working with a group of people that really understand your job and can take a rough drawing, especially an animation, can take a rough drawing and make it better and really plus it. And they said, "And we're able to do that now," at Pixar. But for a while there, it was quite literal. And you know, we would have to do a blueprint level drawings for everything that you see on the screen. And there was good to that. I learned how to do it. And that was bad to it. It was just very slow and cumbersome and time-consuming. And I especially now more than ever have come to respect what those folks were doing. They, you've seen Wallace and Grommet, I suppose. What they were doing was laying the train track right out in front of us as we were making the film. - That's a good analogy. - A lot of what you see on the screen was coded. There was no software for most of that. That we didn't even have hardware to shoot the film out. They built it there, you know? - It was crazy. It was crazy. I mean, a lot of that, I didn't know, even at the time. I didn't, I swear, I didn't know at the time. I knew that we were doing something cool and different new. But I genuinely had no clue then the amount of effort and thinking and science that had to go into getting those images on the screen and then making an entertaining story. You know, it wasn't just a computer animated film. That was a great story with great characters. It was. It's the only film I think ever that I've come out of the theater and bought a ticket and gone straight back in again. Oh, that's nice. I did that for a little mermaid. I saw four times opening weekend at the San Aranamadom where I lived in Hollywood and I went with Sue and Bill and a few other friends to see it the first time and we would just bold over. Like, wow, Disney did something good again. Yeah. I don't. You know. So, I guess it's almost 20 years since you won an Oscar for The Birds, which is one of my favourite short films of all time. Thank you. And what I like about it, and I guess about a lot of Pixar shorts like Luxo and lifted even presto, is the ability to tell a great story within a really confined space or, you know, very efficiently. It's a less than I use when I made a short, a few years back. But, you know, for me, it was for budget. I'm sure it was partially budget at Pixar for shorts as well. But for The Birds, you can find just to a single telephone wire, which is incredibly efficient both budgetary and storytelling-wise. So, tell us about that short. How did that happen? Well, I had finished Toy Story and we weren't sure what was going to happen next. I actually had a project that I developed when I was still at Croier. They got picked up. I would have loved to have done it at Pixar, but I had it because it was developed at another company. They had a prior commitment both professionally and personally to kind of see if we could get it going again. And I would really love to- I still would love to make that film someday, but it didn't work out. And so, I came back and worked on Monsters Incorporated for a year. And then I wrote- they opened up an idea to anyone in the studio because it's a minute idea for a short film. So, you know, initially it was just one drawing with a little paragraph once, two sentences to saying what it was. And they whittled it down pretty good. So, I think 80-something people submitted an idea. And they whittled it down to, I don't know how many, 10, 15. So, I went in and pitched it and they picked it. So, that was it, but you know, really kind of it. It was an idea I had had when I was a student at Cal Arts. And I saw the drawings for that. At the time, it was going to be hand drawn and I really, you know, didn't have the patience, I think, to draw those birds, you know. And so, yeah, it was terrific. It kind of would sometimes frustrate me when the film was done, when people would say, "Oh, you had all these resources and all this." Many said, "We didn't." You know, we did have resources and there were lots of them, but that film is just over two minutes long and it took two years to do and it was because we were doing it here and there throughout the production of several films. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, begging, borrowing and stealing, people's time and grace, you know. There are 50 shots in the film. There were 49 animators, you know, over time. So anyway, we had a wonderful supervising technical director, Bill Wies. Bill Wies, I'm so sorry, Bill Wies and he was still very good friends with and worked with Unincredibles too again, you know. And a wonderful crew of folks, you know, great editor Tom Freeman and great producer. And it was a wonderful experience. I am a big believer that a short film should be short. I see a lot of student films and short films and some of them are very, very good, but some are great. But when they hinge on 40 minutes for a short film, when that maybe story, that story could have been told in Lesser Tond. You know, I was like to tell students to that they always say, well, what do I put at my portfolio and I'm like, make a short film? Well, no, I want to go in the art department. I want to go in and make a short film. You got to learn what it means for screen time. What it means to screen time for your image to read. If you've only got four frames or 30 frames for your image to read, you've got to figure that out. And it's also a lesson in patience, isn't it? Oh, yes, yes, yeah, it really is. And also, I said, frankly, when we get together to look at portfolios and films, if the film hasn't caught our attention in the first few seconds, 10 seconds, it's off to the next one. And so there's a great short film made by the studio Bert Box called Will the Beast. You can look it up on YouTube. It's exactly one minute long. And I use that as an example often, among a few other films, but I use that as an example of a perfect short film. It's one minute long, handful of characters, and really, really, really clever and funny and simple. Yeah. And, you know, but I really like the word short when it comes to short films. Did you, did you want to direct after doing that? I was developing projects. And again, I tried to get this other project off the ground outside of Pixar. Again, it's something I would still love to do someday. It was a, well, I mean, you know, when I, when I talk to students to kind of shake up their mind a little bit and put them in a time and a space when I talk about Snow White, to kind of remind them why it was important. I say it was about a woman so jealous, jealous of her stepdaughter she wanted to kill her and eat her heart. And they're like, what film was that? And it's Snow White. So I took to pitching this ideas and animated musical comedy about a serial killer, which it kind of was. It was a, it was a film called Bluebeard. We developed it for 10 months and they, and it was actually, chances are it was going to get made before I and giant got made. And it was at Warner Brothers. And they suddenly realized that it was a comedy about serial killer. You know, it was, it was kind of inspired a little by a, a, a play like Swini Todd. But it was, I wanted to use the art, and it was hand drawn animation. I wanted to use the artifice of hand drawn animation of a film like Cinderella, the tell a story that was considerably darker. And there was no blood and guts or any, it wasn't like that. It was much more like a suspense thriller than anything. And you know, it didn't, it didn't get to go, but that, that was a project that I really wanted to make. And I felt that with Dorri LaTel Herrick and Stan Shervin, our writer, who wrote Moneyball. And, and it's a film I, I still would love to make. We had a, a terrific art director, Dave Cutler, who's brilliant animator as well. We did posters, all the characters were designed. We were doing test animation. We had a number of sequences boarded. And, and it, it showed a lot of promise. It wasn't ready for a feature, but it was, it was showing a lot of promise, you know. So, so I don't think I would want to direct unless I felt as passionate about a project is something like that. Is that? Yeah. Yeah. And like I said earlier, with a business, and having worked with some terrific directors, Pixar and other places, that's a really hard job. And I, I'd rather help them succeed than be on that hot seat all the time, you know? Yeah. Definitely. Let's talk about Incredibles because both, both of those films were masterful in their design. And so can you talk to how you approached the aesthetic in creating that world? The original Incredibles, I was, I was on Finding Nemo for a good part of that production. And only came in towards the second half. And but, but, you know, I know Brad and I know, you know, and he was coming from hand-run animation and trying to understand the computer world and the process of how you need to do things, which are much better now than they were then, you know? But we couldn't do dailies where you see everything together. We were still having, it was, it was, we were trying to get there. We knew we wanted to get there, but it was still very difficult to do there. We had done it on Finding Nemo and then Incredibles too picked up on that and they were trying to do it more. But still, it was rendered images with no shadows or textures, you know? So, so, and in traditional animation, it's a much more linear process and you can see the process happening before you, in computer animation, you design and then you dump it in this black hole and you wait to hear it hit the bottom and it never do. Until suddenly you wake up one morning and it's there. And it can look really great if you plan right or it can be too late to change it if it looks bad, you know? So, so Brad getting used to that, I think was one of the things I helped facilitate. I had a personal relationship with him and I also have no shame. So, so, I would really, it was a joy to help figure out the second half of that film in terms of of how things got done. The production aspect of it. We had a terrific team with Rick Sayers, the supervising technical director. As far as the aesthetics of the film go, again, a lot, what and I didn't learn this again. I wasn't on the beginning of it. originally incredible. I was halfway through to the end. Well, what I learned looking back on it, as I began Incredibles 2, was that the design aesthetic of the Incredibles is about big and medium, not about small. The small details are the acting and the writing and the design aesthetic was the world had to be big. The ideas had to be big and medium. You know, because there's still some smaller sets on that. The small textural details are there, but they really received quite a lot into the form of the film. So that alternately made it, the challenge on that, even on the first film, was it's easy to make it look that way and make it look new. How do you make it look that way and give it a sense of history as well? When you don't want, you know, we would do think that there were early on in the Incredibles 2, they were doing things on the sofa's where they would sat. We go out of the sad past where everything had to make it a little bit more lived in. And I'm like, yeah, that's too far. We actually had to pull back on it. So they would kind of tighten things up a bit, but not too much so that it looked like it was done by the computer. So there was a lot of that. So some of that comes from, of course, the mid-century design aesthetic itself, which was clean line, you know, a follow through on Art Deco where you're just trying to clean things up a bit. Jet age and where's my jet pack? The title of a talk I give about the design of the house of the film of the Incredibles 2. It's actually harder in a lot of ways to do that to make it look that. It's hard to make it look believable and the world lived in and yet keep that clean aesthetic that it is to make, you know, if we were doing, you know, remake David Lien's great expectations where you could add cobwebs and texture everywhere, you know, in a lot of ways it was more difficult to kind of get that world up and running and believable for the audience, but that story to take place in. Yeah, I feel like some of that was achieved with the color palette as well. It was quite subdued in a lot of places. Very subdued, you know. On the sequel, we pushed it out of it. We, you know, the first film was again, it's set in a mythical 50s mid-century. But I wanted to expand it a bit, you know, and have a little bit more color. And I worked with the art director, Brandon McGurrey, and she kind of took that home, you know. So even when you go into their house, you see there's quite a bit more color than the original film. Yeah. But the idea wasn't to do that because we didn't love the first film. The idea was we wanted to give the families advancing the worlds and advancing. They're kind of stepping up in the world a bit, you know. So yeah, it was a lot of fun. And inside out, I guess there's another one I'd like to touch on just because you had the enormous challenge of various worlds in the one movie, not just, you know, like Monsters Inc. had an incredible world building, it was an incredible world building exercise, but it was just that world. Yeah, you know, the two shortest films I've ever worked on at Pixar were Toy Story and Incredibles 2, the Incredibles 2 was 2 and a half years. Toy Story was just under that, a 2 and a quarter year maybe. Inside out was 5 and a half years. And that was a long time and we worked really hard. I knew what to do. I knew that we needed to deal with the two worlds. I knew more importantly, I knew that the audience needed to know it. When we were cutting, even in the earliest stages of the story, they were cutting between the worlds, you know. And I knew that whatever we did, we had to make sure that the audience knew where we were without thinking. They had to get it right away. Otherwise, they were just going to be confused. And it's asking a lot of an audience to switch gears so often in a film that they are paying attention to that rather than the characters in the story. And so there was certainly no resistance to that idea. And dealing with the real world component of the film was a lot easier than the fantasy world, the mind world, I should say, it wasn't a fantasy, it was really happening, but in our mind. And not in a brain in our mind. So we did come up with some basic conceits in that the real world was harder surfaces, very textural, very limited palette, not a lot of translucency or transparency. Just hard surfaces more. And the mind world, everything was a little softer, translucent, and transformative surfaces. There was a lot of things that had lighter or were made of light. It was a really big challenge was how do you make something look interesting if all you've got to work with is ambient light, especially with the characters being made of light in a world that has transformative light. And then the memories were all a light source. We had just a terrific director of photography for lighting was Kim White. And I don't think we could have pulled that off without her really diving in and figuring out what we finally came to the conclusion that the headquarters, which is in the center of the mind, was itself a light source. And if we showed the audience, that's what it was. It was kind of the sun of the world, if you will. If we showed the audience that that's what it was, then we felt that we could kind of cheat a lot of things when we're on the edge of the mind. Not cheat, I don't like that word. But once you set something up in the audience gets it, like seeing that it glows, then you can kind of do a lot more elsewhere. But if we had just done that without showing that, I think that would have been questions. And again, I don't want the audience wondering about that. I want them to kind of follow the characters and be involved in that and just believe that the world exists. It got easier towards the end of the film when the entire mind started shutting down and things became darker and the light source became more obvious and brighter. We could do more dramatic lighting at that point. That was a big challenge. That was really a big challenge. But I will say that in terms of human mind map for that, I am there were probably about 35 to 40 versions of that as we were building the film and things were changing under our feet a lot. And even doing what I normally do with a color script in terms of just kind of establishing some moods and laying. I wasn't able to do on that film. I ended up having to do more what we call color keys, which are just individual paintings because if something and story changed in the real world, then it had to change in the mind world. And so I would remove those, redo them or touch them up or drag them in the computer and Photoshop something different. And that was constant. That was constant. It was it's a hard film for me to talk about in a lot of ways because it was so difficult. It was very taxing that film was very, very difficult to do for everybody for Pete Doctor, you know, but trying to get a grasp on the world. But more importantly, not just a grasp on the world, but a grasp on the world that wasn't going to be confusing to the audience. That was the main thing. That's another thing I talk a lot about when I give talks on film design is don't forget the audience. Yeah, I can hear that. But how you pulled it off. It was incredible. It's a hard film for me to talk about in talks that I give. I often say that I suppose the best thing that happened with that film is that it got up and walked away and became its own thing, which is what you really the best thing you could hope for. It's better than any individual plan or conceit or a contribution. It's kind of its own thing now, you know. Yeah, let's just I know we're kind of running low on time, but I just want to touch on on process a little if you've got time. Yeah, I've got a time as you want. Okay, great. You know, we're taught, right as a taught, I guess, to boil a story down to the simplest idea, you know, the heart of the story of the characters without reference to all the details and the world. Do you try to do that visually too? Do you come up with the simplest version of an idea? Or how do you start? I do. You know, well, you know, I want to understand the characters and you know, I the talk I gave in cheer in Italy at the view conference was a talk called I spent a year putting this talk together. So it's fresh in my mind still. I called character in world building and it's looking at the world of the film as a character, not just as a backdrop. It's not just an illustration to the story and I think a lot of films, especially animation, only do that. Yeah. And, and you know, I want to kind of dig a little deeper and I will often try. Well, you know, I start with words and I pin up words that describe each of these characters and the characters include sets or worlds, I should say. buy-in-large, plus we had the axiom, plus we had earth, those were the other characters. And for a long time, I kept trying to find, there's visual differences between Wally and Eve Square versus Circle and all that. But the contrast wasn't really Wally and Eve, it was Wally and Byon large, because both Wally and Eve were made by Byon large. Byon large is a company that's kind of turned, and is trying to do the right thing now, but it's a little too late. So I didn't realize that until well into the production, that is the contrast. I got it now, you know. But it led to the idea of Wally having become a romantic. And the loan is whole life, and he's built this whole fantasy world in his digital mind, I guess. And so it clued me into the world being somewhat monochrome and ugly, intentionally. I used the word romantic in the classical sense of the word that we would highlight his emotions through lighting. And again, another terrific lighting director of photography, Daniel Feinberg, who really picked up on, she's such a great photographer. Excuse me. Such a great photographer as well. So we would kind of let the lighting warm a scene or cool down a scene. When we got to the axiom and the Byon large world, I didn't know what to do. And it finally did come upon me that, well, Byon large wouldn't be romantic. It would be how they wanted you to feel if you were on that ship. So it was much more like Las Vegas or a place like that where, or like Disneyland, where they're kind of trying to entice you to go do something around the corner and to spend money. But it was more about, so Wally's world was really about how he felt. And Byon large was about how they want you to feel. So that became the contrast. And what I know in terms of design, when I think of films, is if you start with the character, it won't fail. If you just start designing stuff and stuff you like, which is fun and I've done that too, but you know, it usually fails me and I'll have to kind of start over. So I tend to start with a board and words for each of these and I'll get the saw us out and I'll start writing words down, no pictures, just words. And then eliminating words that don't provide enough contrast across that board for the key sets and characters. And then I will set with music, listen to music and books and research was what kind of research do I need to do and want to do and not just on the internet, you know. That was where we had a Zoom hiccup, but we jump right back in as Ralph continues talking about process. You know, in back on Monsters Inc. No, finding Nemo. We had a PA, a production assistant who was dating this woman. His father was the great film production designer Richard Silbert who did Chinatown and a big Tracy and a thousand other films. And his mentor was William Cameron Minzies who is the first person credited with production design on Gone with the Wind. And he came where I was able to get him to come to Pixar and give a talk and he talked about film design and he talked about Chinatown in particular. There's a great book by Sam Watson out now, highly recommend it. One of the, and it's exceptionally well written. It's called The Big Goodbye by Sam Watson. And it's a, you know, I read a lot of these kind of books and a lot of them have lots of great information but aren't so well written. But this one is exceptionally well written and has lots of great information. But it covers a lot of Richard Silbert's story on that film as designer. And you know, and he was such a, his thought process was something that we, that I was really interested in. And a lot of our production designers, you know, were really had picked up on. And we, you know, it was such a, that whole day where, you know, was such an inspiration. He gave his talk on Chinatown and, you know, and we took him out to lunch and then we gave him a tour, I gave him a tour of the studio. And he was just flabbergasted that we still draw everything, you know, and like, what he means, we have to, it doesn't exist. It's all in the computer. Yeah. You know, and so, but, but it is thought process on Chinatown. I don't know if you've ever read his thought process on that. I have. Just, have you seen Chinatown? Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Well, it's a film about not water. So there are no clouds in any shot in the film. Everywhere, Jay, get his walks is uphill. All the buildings are painted white. Everywhere he goes is behind a frosted door because it's like water, but it's dirty. Even the solid doors are painted glossy paint. Again, it's like water, but you can't see through it. The only people who have green in their lives are people who can afford it because they can afford water. Yeah. So, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he basically just laying out these design conceits that then the cinematographer and even in this case, the writer because he was on the film before the director was long before. And they were shaping the world as a character in the film again, as much as the characters in the written screenplay. And also knowing that, you know, there's been a quote that is often attributed to Pixar or maybe other places is that story is king. And I'm like, no, it's not. Storytelling is king. Telling the story well is the hard part, you know. And again, that's what someone like Polansky brought to that table was all these different elements and laying them out and withholding information as well. Of course, it's in the screenplay, but then somebody's got to get it on the screen and edit it and kind of tile with that together. That's why I really love the filmmaker William Wailer. I think he's in my opinion that the greatest director that ever lived in that he knew how to manipulate the elements to tell a story exceptionally well. Yeah. So, yeah. Well, it's a really interesting point of view that. Yeah. Yeah, we picked up on that idea and even on Wally, for me on Nemo, thinking about the design was like, it was about a father whose son who had physical disability was taken from him. And he asked to traverse the ocean to find him. But he's so neurotic that he can't see two inches in front of his face. And so how do you represent that visually? So the further he got from the reef, the less he could see. So the murky or the water became and the water color changed. And the only thing he had to hang on to was Dory, who literally couldn't remember the two seconds before or after. So he had to trust someone. And that's not in his nature. So again, trying to find a visual way of putting that across with the murkiness of the water, the closer they got to Sydney, Australia. I was really worried at the dawn of giving the impression that Sydney Harbor was a dirty water because it was so murky and kind of a greenish color. But that wasn't it. It was really about the tide coming in and going out. That's the truth. I swear. Because I was the only one who went to Sydney to do research on the film for finding Nemo. And it's a longer story. But I got there and the whole thing fell apart what I was supposed to be doing. So I didn't know what to do. And I was sitting in a restaurant in Woolamulu and having just some food. And I looked up and literally there was one of the producers from Furngully. It was like out of the blue. You know? I was going to say you seem to wrangle these research trips to Australia. Well, if I can. Well, with Wally, we got to go to the trash dump. So yeah. Well, the folks from Ratatouille were going to Paris, you know. So I asked him, well, what do you-- what would I do? Because the plans that we had made kind of fell apart are reasons I don't really understand. He goes, well, why don't you rent a water taxi? I'm like, I didn't grow up around water taxi. So I said, OK, I'll do that. So I rented a water taxi all day. And you know, here's my credit card. I had to buy a digital camera because the one they given me was not working. They gave me the wrong battery and the wrong card for it. And the digital photography was just starting out. Yeah. So but I ended up going around the bay, getting off wherever I wanted to take photos and came back to San Francisco. And there was just a lot of concern at the money I had spent, you know? Having to buy a new camera and a boat all day. What do you mean? And not a week later, the scene in the movie, in the final movie where the Seagulls are chasing the pelican with the father and daughter in their mouth, was not set where it was. It was set in downtown Sydney, which means having to build the buildings and the cars and the people and blah, blah, blah, blah. And the produce we were having, I think, meeting with our producers and they were really concerned about how we can do this and I can't afford it. I said, "Well, why don't we set it in and I know I'm going to get this wrong. My brain is not, I don't know, I think I can remember it, but let's set it in Barmo." Hey, where? And I said, "It's across the Bay, a little point of land." And I said, "Look, I love Sydney, Australia, I love Australia, but most of the world like with the reef. They don't know of coral reef from scuba diving. They know it from documentaries. And Sydney, they know from the bridge, the tower, and the opera house. If we were to plunk a camera in downtown Sydney, probably the only people who would know it was Sydney, Australia, people from Sydney, Australia, it could have been San Francisco or, you know, but if we set it on the other side of the Bay, every time we go to the dentist office, we have that postcard view of Sydney and the audience knows where we are and we don't have to think about it anymore. And we can then set the chase scene with the seagulls in a little harbor, which we can replicate the boats, change them a little, change the color, and then we've got five, 50 boats. And blah, blah, blah, and all this other, and there's a, you know, yes, yes. So, so that money I spent on that, you know, water tax, he all day, suddenly became worth it. And a lot cheaper than having to build downtown and render downtown Sydney, Australia. But that's what we do, you know, and it also just kind of gave us a, you know, and one of the things that I heard from from Andrew Stanton, when the film was done and he was doing the press tour, he went premiered it in Sydney, Australia, was he said that there were so many people that would tell him, we were so glad you got Sydney right. And I'm like, oh, good. I mean, they makes me happy. They know where the sewer treatment plant is that we knew where it was and how it connected to this and that and the other and the, you know, but mostly it was, they got that picture postcard view too. They under, they, you know, it was great. It was really great. That was a lot of fun. That film was a lot of work and really hard, but it was fun. Yeah, I was such a great film. Did you work on the sequel? I contributed a little bit, but that was done by a wonderful guy named Steve Kultur. You know, it's, it's funny. We talked about this a lot, Steve and I and Bob Polly and I and others, Harley and I, it's like, you know, I did Incredibles too, but there's only one reuse set, and we plused it out and, and we did the whole set. As a matter of fact, E's house in the sequel, originally, it was a, had a much bigger part in the movie. And we went through the entire home from basement all the way to the rooftop at the, in that, in that, so we figured it out. We actually, the first film was only built, they only built what they needed. And we actually had to work back, which have a wonderful previous guy, an artist named Phil Metchin, and he worked really hard with us to figure out how to make it really work. And we got it all figured out and then it was all cut. Except for what's in the film. It's just fine. We only pre-visit. We didn't spend that much time. Really, on it, considering. Many people think, oh, it's a sequel. It must be easier. And like, never, you know, we had one set. The big relief is the main characters are kind of thought through. In terms of design. And Tony Fichilli back helping us out with that. And Matt Nolte, our character, our director, and Teddy Newton, you know, the gang was kind of back together on that one. Enough to make that work. But 99% of the movie were new sets. And it was it was bigger, it was biggest, much bigger scope. Much bigger scope. One of the talks I give, I call it, where's my jet pack? And we gave it a distinct called modernism week in Palm Springs. And Palm Springs is loaded with mid-century architecture. But this this kind of is designer, car designers, fabric designers, closed designers, film designers, landscape designers, architects, and everything's about mid-century. So we've gone there to do a lot of research. And when the film was coming out, the April before it came out, brand-immigary, one of our directors, and I went and gave a talk. But one of the things we talked about was originally the par family, the in the Incredibles, lived in a much smaller house, and it was finished. It was built ready for the movie. They were in their animating and lighting. And Brad had to the director Brad Bird had to write or director Brad Bird had to consolidate several sequences. And I had this idea before and Brad had nixed it and he thought, "No, they should live in a nicer house than they lived in before, but a little bit bigger, but not much bigger." So that's what we built and designed and built. And then suddenly he needed to consolidate several sequences. And I said to the head of story Ted Matha, "Oh, it's a shame he didn't go with this idea that I had." And he goes, "What idea was that?" And I told him the idea, which was, I think the Incredibles world is bigger than a small house. And I understand what Brad meant. And we built it. It's finished. We can focus on other things. But I always felt like they should be too small for the house, for even the family. I thought it would be a go-the-opicic way. And he grabbed my arm and said, "You have to tell that to Brad right now because Ted's in a lot more meetings with Brad about story than I am. I go to all the story meetings I can, but he's much more intently involved." And he said, "Now tell that to Brad." And I told Brad, he goes, "We're going to do it." And I said, "Wait a second. We just finished building the entire home. It's all, I mean, everything is done." And then John Lasseter walked in. And this was on a Friday, no joke. And he said the same thing. So we have to do that. And I said, "Wait a second. I will not change that unless you guys think about it over the weekend." We are literally in lighting an animation in some of those sets. I'm not saying we won't do it. I'm just saying, "Please think about it." And I went home and wrote a single-space letter saying, "Here are the things that work about the house we have now. And here's the things that don't work." And then if we were to do a new house, here's how I would do it. And here's how I would plan it. And here's who I would get to do it. And I came in on Monday, and I applied that off to Brad and John and the producers. And I came in on Monday and said, "We want to do it." And I'm like, "Okay." And I called the whole art department together. And I said, "We have, we had six months to design and build the house that we just finished. We have two weeks to do it again." So we did. We, you know, everybody, as I said, the first step is, let's go do some research. And then we all got back together. And I said, "Anything goes, but it's got to be big." So everybody just went crazy. And we filled our art room with hundreds and hundreds of little scribbles and drawings and sketches and photos. So I mean, just stacked with boards with stuff. And then we showed Brad, like on a Thursday, four days later, we showed him, "What do you, what, my first question is that what do you like? It's what don't you like?" Let's get rid of that now. And then, like, what do you like? And he kind of pointed things that he did like, you know, and then I said, "Great. Let's meet again next week." And then we sat in and organized a lot of that and found similarities and got rid of duplicate ideas that we were finding and used the best image and got it down to just a room full of boards rather than stacked against the wall, 10 deep, you know. And everyone's drawings. And it really came together quite quickly. It was amazing. We had some wonderful people, Nelson Bull, two architects working on the film, Nelson Bull and Kyle McNaughton. And we had Philip Metchin taking all of that and going, "How do we?" And there were scenes that were animated in the original home and we couldn't change the animations. We had to lift the characters out of the set and design the set underneath them so that the animators would adjust a little bit. But, you know, and then Brad's concern with the bigger house was that everything would have to be played in a big room. And I said, "No, no, no, we went to Palm Springs and did research as a home called the Annenberg family home." That's known as something else, but it's the Annenberg family home. But they had big rooms. But they also had medium rooms and small rooms. And even the presidents' bedrooms were only maybe 15 foot square. Reagan stayed there. They only, they call it Camp David West, what it's known as. And I told Brad that we will design into this giant new home, smaller room so that you can have, you know, and you have your cake and eat it too. So that's what we did. You know, plus we had to reuse a lot of a lot of the elements we had designed for the first home. We were able to move into the new home and plus out and change, change a bit. But it was a huge challenge. You know, right when we were done with spending six months on that first house. But it's certainly it plus the film definitely. It definitely did, you know, it definitely did. And it's funny, you know. We even had for a while the entire home could move and change a much more. more than just the floor in the main room. And the idea was that the kids would know more about it than the parents would, and they would be able to use it at the end of the movie when the villains show up. You know, and we even had an idea where Frozone escaped with Bash and Violet in the Incredibile. But rather than backing out to the road, they flew off the front balcony down to the waterfall under the house. And Frozone was freezing, and they were swallowing down, and the house started collapsing and was literally the entire house was coming down the hill after them. You know? And you just see money flying out the windows. The poor producers are rubbing their temples, like, oh my God, oh. (laughing) But it was a great idea. - Yeah, fantastic. - It would have been fun. (laughing) - So I guess, you know, looking back on your career, there's so much you've obviously got to offer young artists and regards to advice. But are there any key things that you would, one thing I think about is education. There's so many education options nowadays. Obviously, you went to a great art school. A lot of colleges have good art programs. There's so much you can do online, even as, say, if you were 14 now, the amount that you could learn before you got to Cal Arts would multiply many times. So, what are your thoughts there? - You know, kind of in a way, the same thing I thought when I told the story about coming to Pixar and walking in the room with these brilliant scientists, and they told me about all these things that computer couldn't do. And it made my head spin. And when I came out and knowing John pulling us aside and saying, you know, you could do something they can't, which is imagine this world. - Yeah. - They could imagine it. That sounds terrible. But that was my job was to visualize this world so that they could build it. And I kind of made the switch right then and there that I wasn't gonna worry about. The second big switch I made on the Incredibles, too, believe it or not, was that I wasn't gonna worry anymore about how we were going to do anything. I really was gonna focus on character and story and design. And I think that that would be the biggest, it's great to know the tools. You know, and I struggle with my painting. I'm not really trained as a painter and they're with new channel that we have at Pixar and everywhere. It certainly paint circles around me. But again, what I really have been focusing on is digging a little deeper and really thinking about the character of the world that we are going to be building. And then how do we say more, how do we eliminate screenplay pages by showing rather than talking the world that these characters inhabit and what it means to them and how the world that as it exists informs the decisions or how the characters live. And really thinking about that. I like to try and attempt example. And there's a lot more. I use the King's speech. That's a wonderfully designed film about strict vocal constrictions. So the opening, third of the movie is all these tight spaces and walking through long corridors. Outside is always choked with fog and smog and the period, the suit and the air. And when you meet Jeffrey Rush, it goes perpendicular. And it's a giant room. And he's standing directly in front of a fireplace. It looks like a giant throat. And it's open. And it's just great. I love or film like Paper Moon, Peter Bergdanovich film. Have you seen Paper Moon? - No, I haven't. - You need to see Paper Moon. It's a great movie from '71, '72. But they track the character's progress through the succession of hotel rooms. The first hotel room, there's one bed and the guy sleeps on the floor. Then there's two beds. Then there's two bed and a sink. Then there's two beds and a bathroom. Then there's two bedrooms connected by a bathroom. And then they each have their own room. And then they suffer a major setback towards the end of the movie. And they're back in one room with two beds. And the entire scene is played in the reflection of the mirror in the room. You know, and just like, there's a terrific podcast. You must remember this, which covers the career of Polly Platt. It's about 10 hours long. And well, maybe six. But she designed that film. And the idea of it of hotel rooms was in the screenplay, but using it to track the characters success, that was not. And so, you know, it's just trying to find these things that the audience can understand simply and track with the characters so that they don't have to think about it. And they can really pay attention to the story and character. When you ask the audience to continually adjust to a new world or a new set or a new idea, visual idea, you better have a reason for it. I mean, then there are many good reasons for it. But 90% of a movie is making sure the audience is comfortable understanding the world enough. So that they can pay attention to the story. Because if you're asking them to switch gears all the time to kind of figure out this new environment, then they're not paying attention to the character in story. They're trying to figure out what am I looking at? You know, it's a big deal. I see a lot of that in current, well, recent movies in the last 20 years. And I just have a big issue with it. You know, I also love the idea of anticipation of withholding visual ideas. And Wally, for example, we were able to do, you don't see the color green in the film at all until you see the plant for the first time. - Yeah. - You know, little things like that can kind of add up. So yeah, you know, I would say for students to, of course, you know, hone your skills with the tools, drawing and painting and digital. But I would really encourage you. And I actually put together a list of books, which I'll gladly share with you. - Yeah, that'd be great. I'd love it. - I didn't put any of the crappy ones on here. I've read a lot. And these are like the best that you can get, in my opinion, on film and film design. I'll gladly mail it to you. And you can put it on your site as well. But it's really about character and understanding character and understanding story enough to be able to put that idea across. And also getting used to as much as they can, make a short film if you can. Learn what screen time means. If you have a beautifully designed and rendered painting that the audience can look at for 45 minutes, then that's great. But if you've only got four frames or 15 or 25 or 30 frames to sell that idea, you know, you're gonna have to rethink that design entirely. The audience needs to be able to get it right away and understand it. That doesn't mean you can't do something cool or have detail in it. It does mean that make sure that it's reading to the audience so that they can understand it. So I would say focus on character above all else. So. - Awesome. Ralph, it has been an absolute pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you so much. - Oh, well, thank you. Thanks for listening. As Sean said during the intro, it's been great scene online. How many people were touched by Ralph's work and his life? So take the time this week if you can to sit down and watch one of the fine films that Ralph contributed to. For me, I think it'll be fine in Nemo. We'll be back next week. See you then.