Ronnie del Carman on his Favourite Up Sequence
Pete Docter, Bob Peterson Direct Disney/Pixar Animated Film
Oct 27, 2009
In Part #4 of this exclusive interview, Disney/Pixar animators Ronnie del Carmen and Peter Sohn talk about working on storyboards for the hit film Up, coming to DVD on November 2nd (Blu-Ray review upcoming).
In this installment, Ronnie reveals his favourite sequence from the film, and how it came together.
S101: Was the opening montage one of your big sequences, Ronnie?
Ronnie del Carmen: “I did it with Bob Peterson and Pete (Docter) and all the story artists. We’re all going in there, trying to find the truth about the story of an old man’s life. I mean, we went other places, too (laughs), but that’s not in the movie.
“We tend to ask those questions: ‘What is the truth about an old man’s life? And how do we represent that without putting any dialogue in there?' And then there’s the point where Carl finishes his journey in the prologue and finds it kind of hollow. That was where we were going to prove whether or not we had an emotional story.
“We couldn’t have him say stuff, we needed to observe it. It’s like seeing a family member who’s going through a hard time: he doesn’t want to talk about it, he doesn’t want to confront the pain. So you observe his pain from a distance.
“That’s what we wanted to do with Carl: we wanted the audience to feel for him at the beginning. That’s much better, to our mind, than having him talk to the audience.”
S101: What sequence in the movie do you feel proud of?
RdC: “Where Carl sits down and opens Ellie’s adventure book.”
S101: And finds it all completed.
RdC: “Yeah, we had to tell the completion of his story arc without dialogue. We had to set up all the components of this epiphany from the very beginning. So, if we did our job right, everything we had set up in the prologue would come together here. And I wanted to do it with no dialogue.
“But how do you dramatize this, and make it compelling, to see someone sitting there and just turning pages? Because we had this emotional story to tell, it felt important for me to look at Carl’s face, and all these little emotions that have to cross it. And I wanted to show that finding that Ellie had put in pictures beyond the page of ‘Stuff I’m Going to Do’ was going to be a surprise to him.
“(voice drops to a whisper) He closes the book, the finger is on the page, the page slips, and reveals something behind it that Carl had never seen before. So when he pulls away that page, he’s going to be surprised.
“In the hospital bed, Ellie had been pasting together the greatest adventure she had ever had, which was her life with Carl. And you have to watch his face change: from surprise, wistful, to happy. He’s absolved. So you have to be careful about what you choose his face to show: his arms can’t flail, he can’t stand up, it’s a subtle thing.
“From the time I was storyboarding it, Pete Docter had been looking for a temporary musical cue. He hadn’t seen anything I had done, and I didn’t know he had been looking for that. He calls me: ‘Ronnie, I got a piece of music for you.’ He didn’t know I had been storyboarding this far.
“So I put the music right on top of the storyboard sequence – I forget what piece of music it was – and I didn’t time the sequence. Then I pushed ‘Play.’ And it worked.
“So I brought Pete over, and showed it to him and he said, “There he is.’ And it was so amazing that I didn’t want to touch the sequence after that! (laughs) I don’t know what we just did, but I don’t want to ruin it.”
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