Making the Cut at Pixar

The Art of Editing Animation

Bill Kinder, Bobbie O'Steen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367766580
• eBook ISBN: 9781000575170
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Making the Cut at Pixar is an interactive book written by industry insiders Bill Kinder and Bobbie O'Steen about the central role the Pixar editor plays in some of the most critically acclaimed and successful movies of all time. The 90 minutes of Video Material in the companion website show every stage of production on Pixar's animated films, from storyboards to virtual cameras and final animation, accompanied by exclusive interviews with Pixar editors.

In addition to exploring method and craft, this book provides important context for the editor in film history, the evolution of technology, and Pixar's uniquely collaborative studio culture. A must-read for students of digital filmmaking methods, filmmakers in all aspects of production, and fans of Pixar movies, this uniquely educational, historical, and entertaining book sheds light on how beloved stories are crafted from the perspective of crucial members of the filmmaking team.

1The Hub of the WheelThe Setup

DOI: 10.4324/9781003167945-2

Toy Story came out and it just blew the world wide open. It’s very, very exciting because after seventy or eighty years of making films in largely the same way, suddenly there’s technology existing and people making films that are raising the bar, pushing the boundaries. You feel like you’re living in a pioneering filmmaking time again.¹

—Peter Jackson, Director (The Lord of the Rings, King Kong)

Photo 1.1 “Tin Toy” (1988).

© Pixar.

Wild, Wild West

After driving through an industrial landscape pocked with oil refining tanks, a fresh-faced Lee Unkrich arrived at a nondescript office park in the so-called “Hidden City” of Point Richmond, in the Northern California Bay Area. It was the spring of 1994. The recent graduate of the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts was at the beginning of a career track aimed toward directing live-action films—perhaps in the manner of his hero, Stanley Kubrick. But this day’s visit to the outskirts of the San Francisco Bay was a novel detour from that path—a job interview for the position of film editor, with a small production company doing business as “Hi Tech Toons.”

Soon to be known around the world as Pixar, the enterprise was then comprised of about 150 engineers, artists, and production staff packed into the leased building. Unkrich toured the long hallways, which commonly hosted scooter races, and saw the employees—for many of whom it was a first job—working in a warren of cubicles or playing arcade video games in the animators’ “Bullpen.” “Nobody talked about it. It was literally out of nowhere, and nobody really knew what they were doing. They were all making it up as they went. It was the Wild, Wild West,” remembers Torbin Bullock, an early, local hire in the editorial department.

These recruits had been brought together by the man many consider “the godfather of 3D animation,”² Edwin Catmull, who had a hand in creating one of the earliest filmed examples of computer-generated imagery (CGI), back in 1972. (Literally, he scanned a mold of his own hand and animated it.) He then spent the better part of two decades steering toward his vision for a film rendered entirely with computers.

GALLERY: A Start-Up Studio in “Hidden City”

Photo 1.2 Home of Toy Story: an unassuming industrial park on Cutting Boulevard, of all places.

Photo by Bill Kinder.

Photo 1.3 Low-cost industrial park real estate.

Photo by Bill Kinder.

Photo 1.4 Other tenants of the complex included a bank, which was prone to being held up.

Photo by Bill Kinder.

Photo 1.5 Point Richmond also had its share of toxic spills from the nearby oil refinery. Evacuations were not uncommon.

Photo by Bill Kinder.

Photo 1.6 Point Richmond had its early-20th-century charms. The quaint town was known as “Hidden City.”

Photo by Bill Kinder.

Photo 1.7 But to get there, one had to wait for the train to cross.

Photo by Bill Kinder.

Photo 1.8 The view from Point Richmond to Marin County, home to Lucasfilm in the 1990s.

Photo by Bill Kinder.

Photo 1.9 Editorial crew T-shirt.

Courtesy Torbin Bullock.

Like almost everyone else in April 1994, Unkrich knew very little about this animation studio by the bay. But as a self-avowed film nerd, he had seen all of its short films—and found them “intoxicating.” He pulled into the unmarked industrial development as a fan, “just hoping to get a little glimpse of what they did because it was so magical to me.” This chance meeting would arguably alter the course of numerous, notable films—and influence the way movies are made.

It may have appeared inauspicious, but Unkrich was merging with an effort founded on the wish to make not only a movie animated with computers, but also to make a movie with a global, cultural impact. Catmull had convinced Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to purchase the computer division from filmmaker George Lucas’s company. Jobs bankrolled seven years of quiet trials to build the tools and confidence of a team of animators and computer scientists. They found customers for medical imaging and other industries before cutting their filmmaking teeth on television commercials and short films. But they had set their sights on making a bigger impression.

Photo 1.10 Meet your shiny new “Random-Access, Non-Linear” digital editing system.

Courtesy Tom Ohanian.

Photo 1.11 “Disk 2 of 13” (18.2 megabytes total).

Courtesy authors.

“Who do you know that hasn’t seen Snow White [and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)]?,” Jobs asked once. “I don’t think I know one person who hasn’t seen Snow White. So, the ability for these things to live for sixty, or even a hundred years is amazing. And that’s very different than the technology world that I come from. We’re not competing against Microsoft or another company. We’re competing against, ‘can we make a great film that people love.’”³

By the time Unkrich was in his job interview, Pixar had built a relationship with The Walt Disney Studios, the birthplace of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. First it was to render the elder studio’s animation cels for the digital future (via the Computer Animation Production System [CAPS]). Soon after, it was to deliver the first computer-animated feature film: Toy Story.

Though long-held, that “first” was still an audacious vision, and any evidence that it could be realized was not obvious from the outside. Among Disney projects, Toy Story at that point was known as “the fringe of the fringe.”⁴ This also worked to its advantage—Pixar was neither bound by traditional divisions of labor nor deeply rooted Hollywood hierarchies. The privately held amoeba was largely formless, inventing itself in response to the new demands of a feature film. Unkrich was introduced to people with titles such as “Story Lead,” “Devil’s Advocate,” “Music Wrestler,” and “Art Czar.” In that fluid state, gathering the right collection of talent, experience, and energy for making “a great film that people love” was not automatic. “It wasn’t like live-action filmmaking in Hollywood, where you’re just going to hire twenty more people,” explained Toy Story producer Ralph Guggenheim. “You needed to find people who can use Pixar’s proprietary animation software that nobody else in the world uses.”⁵

Editorial faced the same challenge. The studio had committed to a new, digital editing system, Avid Media Composer, which had recently become common in commercial and short-form television work. When Pixar had initially hired editors to travel up from Hollywood, some of them had a hard time adjusting their craft from trim bins and splicers to a computer interface. “It was a heady time of the intersection between traditional editorial on mag [magnetic sound film stock] and film, and digital editorial tools,” recalls the editorial manager, Julie McDonald—whose own background as both choreographer and NASA scientist embodied the multi-modal mindset cultivated by that time and place.

“There just weren’t a lot of people who knew how to use them,” remembers McDonald. “It was hard to entice people up to Northern California…it was hard to find Avid editors. Very hard.” There were those who claimed to be proficient when they were not, as was the case of one editor who was discovered furtively studying the heavy, bound instruction manual behind closed doors (there was no online search or video tutorial to be found on the internet). “It was not uncommon that you would find people doing that sneaking,” recounts McDonald.

There was some turnover in the position before Unkrich arrived. Perhaps Pixar was not completely sure what it needed in an editor, but it was clear they needed someone who could command the machinery. What are the odds that Pixar’s Avid representative would choose to look at their “expert” list in reverse-alphabetical order—bringing “Unkrich” to the top for this referral? That is how he got the first call for this unpromising, remote assignment—to help out, temporarily. Unkrich fulfilled the requirement for technical expertise—and improbably he also offered a perspective the studio did not know it needed. “I loved filmmaking,” Unkrich says.

“But I also was a huge computer geek, so when the first Avid Media Composer showed up in a lab at USC, I did everything I could to spend every waking moment in that lab learning it. That ended up not only getting me my first few jobs when I left grad school, but it also put me on Avid’s radar.”

Unlike all of the previous editors Pixar had tried out, McDonald recalls that Unkrich was “what we call now digitally native:” he was fluent in digital processes at the start of his career. He was “very, very, very fast” on the system, and could quickly present multiple creative options. But he was more than a proficient operator. “He was up and coming,” reflects McDonald. “He was very, very excited, and he could work those incredibly long hours. He was really young. He was living for it. It was a great fit.” Also, “He was a film aficionado.”

The line of questioning in the interview indicated that, although his technical chops got Unkrich in the door, they were not the priority. “I stressed that I had a strong computer background, and while they were happy to know that I had those skills, they kept coming back to story and structure.” He got the job.

His new collaborators studied—and revered—The Walt Disney Studios’ animation legacy. Many of them also got their first experience and training under its banner. Director John Lasseter had shown early promise at Walt Disney Feature Animation in Burbank, as had lead story artist Joe Ranft. Still others in Pixar’s story and animation departments were graduates of The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), the university established with Walt Disney’s support to develop talent—envisioned by some as a “a feeder school for the industry.”⁶ (Decades later, Lasseter would resign from Pixar amid claims by former and current employees that Pixar’s working environment under his leadership had become toxic.)

Meanwhile, Unkrich had earned his advanced film school degree with an emphasis on editing, filling a gap—at CalArts, in line with standard industry practice of the time, editing was not featured in an animation curriculum. Luckily for him, Toy Story’s creative leadership welcomed collaboration with talent and skill sets different from its own. In this loose, collaborative environment, the editor’s job description was open to possibilities.

Unkrich felt “a rhythm and sense of collaboration that I had never experienced in either film school or professionally,” he remembers. “We would sit around a table and it was like a creative feeding frenzy. Because you’re involved at such an early stage, you help to shape not just the struct...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Endorsement Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on the Text
• Introduction: Reframing the Editor
• 1 The Hub of the Wheel: The Setup
• 2 “Story, Story, Story…”: Edi-storial
• 3 Conducting a Concerto: Sound
• 4 Edit First, Shoot Later: Layout
• 5 Cutting Jell-O: Workplace Challenges
• 6 Out of the Galápagos: Editors and Technology Adapt
• 7 Afterword: Why Does It Matter?
• Sources and Resources
• Index