In the room, at Pixar Animation Studios, where The Good Dinosaur was pitched and perfected, I sat, the end of September. At a long executive, wood table, in a room where one wall was floor-to-ceiling windows, over-looking the Atrium, Screenwriter Meg LaFauve, sat near the doorway, on a cabinet. You may know her name from this year’s amazing INSIDE OUT. Here, she is talking about writing an entirely new script for The Good Dinosaur. Between LaFauve and the table, sitting the intimate group of maybe eight bloggers is Story Supervisor Kelsey Mann.
There is energy in the air. This room has history. It’s where the writing process begins. The Good Dinosaur Director, Peter Sohn, sat in one of these chairs. LaFauve, Mann and John Lasseter gathered around this table. Today, it is simplified. When it was the room for creating, it looked like this:
A The Good Dinosaur story review, including Kelsey Mann, Meg LeFauve, Erik Benson, Edgar Karapetyan and Director Peter Sohn, as seen on August 1, 2014 at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, Calif. (Photo by Deborah Coleman / Pixar)
It was a room where the movie’s “charting” took place. A progressive time-keeping of the movie’s characters, their relationships and storytelling. It involved a lot of post-it notes all color coded for scenes: Red for the intense, Blue for the emotional. LaFauve’s role was to listen and tell the storytellers and animators how that scene would alter the story line (for better or worse). This meant sometimes the post-it notes had to be rearranged.
There is a sense of family here at Pixar. One filled with the world’s most talented animators and storytelling and yet, with such grandeur, I’m in awe at how much they share and recognize one another. Perhaps, being a Screenwriter, LaFauve shared this concept best, talking about her role in The Good Dinosaur, “It’s Pete’s movie, really. I have to own it just enough. I have to feel it so I can express it on the page, to find the characters, find the scene, find the behavior, find the point of view–but ultimately, I have to let it go back to Pete because it is his vision and phonetic.”
THE GOOD DINOSAUR – Screenwriter Meg LaFauve and Story Supervisor Kelsey Mann present at the Long Lead Press Days at Pixar Studios. Photo by: Marc Flores. ©2015 Disney•Pixar. All Rights Reserved.
Kelsey Mann is at the end of the table, facing the wall of windows. He’s sharing with us a gadget Pixar uses he calls “Pitch Doctor”. It makes the storyboard come to life. Pixar artists draw directly on the computer’s screen, replacing paper as their canvas, and they can scale, flip and erase their drawing as needed. The old method, using paper, had a lot of obstacles, too small and the artist was starting over or running down the hall to the copy machine to enlarge.
Mann also explains that paper made people retreat. The artists would get the script and head off to their office or the Atrium. When computers entered the scene, there became more possibilities, but the socialization and gathering of ideas was even more limited as everyone was in their office behind the computer. “Pitch Doctor” allows the artists and storytellers to gather together, bounce ideas off each other, and keep the energy and excitement of a movie moving.
The compromise was a combination of the old method and the new method. Line up computers, push tables together, gather the artists and story tellers in the same room.
In this room, Kelsey Mann shared that the storyboarding team’s “primary job is to take Meg’s beautifully written words and translate them into the visual medium which is film.”
One of the highlights was when Mann stepped up to the computer and shared how a scene would be pitched. His voice animated, booming and whispering, adding sound affects and using a squeaker toy. It all made the rough black and white photos of Arlo and Spot in a field of groundhogs come to life. Take a look at the film clip below, the chirps of those little prehistoric prairie dogs take me right back to the Pixar story room with Mann and his squeaker toy.
Walt Disney Studios during the early 1930s. ©2015 Disney•Pixar. All Rights Reserved.” width=”550″ height=”400″/> This storyboard was drawn by story artists Rosana Sullivan and Gleb Sanchez-Lobashov, both members of the Story team for “The Good Dinosaur.” Storyboards are drawn by story artists for the purpose of pre-visualizing the film and to convey a rough sense of how the story unfolds. This storyboard, from a sequence called “Above the Clouds,” is one of approximately 154,061 boards drawn for the film, of which 87,748 were delivered to the Editorial team. The storyboarding process, in the form it is known today, was developed at Walt Disney Studios during the early 1930s. ©2015 Disney•Pixar. All Rights Reserved.
That scene, Mann pitched, in its raw, abstract drawings, became this scene in the final production of The Good Dinosaurs, arriving in theaters everywhere on November 25th.
On November 25, The Good Dinosaur will be in theaters everywhere. It’s a magical film I know your family will enjoy.