Ronnie del Carmen, Peter Sohn on Up Sequences
Pete Docter, Bob Peterson Direct Disney/Pixar Animated Film
Oct 27, 2009
In Part #3 of this interview, Pixar animators Ronnie del Carmen and Peter Sohn revealed the inspiration for the character of Russell in Up, coming to DVD November 2nd.
In this installment, they discuss developing specific sequences for the Pete Docter/Bob Peterson film.
S101: Peter, I heard you also worked on a few sequences for Up. Which were those?
Peter Sohn: “I worked on several sequences: hen the house lifts off the ground, the first meeting with Dug. There were some other sequences that are no longer in the movie.”
Ronnie del Carmen: “You did the first version of meeting Kevin the bird as well.”
Sohn: “Yeah.”
RdC: “The core of those sequences that Peter boarded essentially stayed the same. We kept all the good parts that he put in. You would think that – because we didn’t have Pete in our story crew for the longest time while he was working on ‘Partly Cloudy’ – we would replace those sequences with more updated versions. But no, most of those core things that Pete did stayed in the sequences.”
S101: What were you trying to convey with those sequences?
Sohn: “Carl going up was a real breaking-away thing. I remember thinking at the time, ‘What would be fun about this?’ That’s how I begin everything I’m working on. How could a house fly? Just the practical terms, but then we’re seeing that he’s really breaking out of his life here. At first it’s just, how do we lift a house with balloons? After a while, it was: what does this say about Carl.
"This city is his cage, and how does he break away from that. There’s a scene where his house takes out an antenna; I was working with Ronnie, Bob and Pete about that. It wasn’t in the script at the time, we needed a scene where this was going to happen.
“With ‘Meet Dug,’ there were some lines that were coming up: ‘I can smell you’: there were some ideas, but mostly it was playing with the characters to see what would happen. Ronnie and the directors had what they wanted, but they said, ‘Go for it, and we’ll sculpt it with you’ before we put it into the reels, knowing that it’s gonna change later.”
RdC: “Pete’s one of those few story artists that you can safely say, ‘Go for it.’ He’s not only great at structuring a sequence in a way that’s very entertaining, but he’ll also find stuff along the way that you’d be so happy that he got to.
"There were scenes in ‘Carl Goes Up’ that most people would not pay attention to. For instance, when Carl’s house knocks over the antenna, there were all these pigeons on the high-tension wire that flew along with the house. It’s a celebration; Nature is applauding Carl for going on this adventure. It also wiped the screen in such a way that you’d think this was an almost cosmic event. And the next thing you’d see would be Carl’s face going, ‘Yeah.’ (Everyone laughs)
“You don’t write that. That’s the sort of thing that only comes out in storyboarding; you can’t write that in a script. Because Carl’s not going to do a happy dance (Peter laughs), that would be awful! That’s where a great story artist comes in; you let them find it. I don’t want to write it, it's better if you let someone like Pete find it.
S101: You let the artist come up with something that’s better than you originally envisioned. Is that one of Pixar’s big secrets?
RdC: “Yeah, yeah, that’s the whole spirit of collaborating. Any one of us has a different point of view how to tackle a problem but, all together, we could funnel our solutions, distill it, and come up with the best way to solve these problems. Lone-wolfing it, as romantic as that is, is very lonely. Not only that, you don’t know if you’re doing anything good! (laughs) So this is the only way I know how to make these things.”
Sohn: “But it’s not like Ronnie is passing this stuff off. Ronnie is boarding away like nobody’s business and, through his work, it’s inspiring the rest of the crew to do their best.
“All the beginning montage, all the drawings, that was Ronnie, and we were taking that back to our desks, looking at it and going, ‘This makes me want to do my best, too.’"
(In Part #5, Ronnie discusses storyboarding his favourite sequence in Up.)
 |
