Tour notes - Pixar part 8: Realistic movies

We then walked up the stairs, past the outdoor swimming pool and sand volleyball court, to an area with a bunch of sketches on the wall. You can tell that these were their storyboards for one of their movies (as I recall it was Wall-E). As it turns out, EVERY single scene is sketched and revised and redrawn before it ever gets to the computer. They really pour a lot of time and care into creating the story, rather than focusing on effects.

Randy said that their goal is not to create realistic movies, but rather believable ones. After all, what is realistic about a rat who can cook, or toys who can talk? They just create a world where you can believe that those things happen so that the story can be told. Randy said that anybody can make realistic movies, they are called home movies, and nobody wants to watch them. Because they are boring - there's no story.

They have found that a third of the creative process is concepting - developing characters, putting the story together. The other two-thirds is in the implementation. The back-and-forth between the directors and the implementors is where most of the creative process resides.

We got some time to walk around and check out a lot of the art and sketches and models they have upstairs. It is an amazing collection, and a very rich heritage created in a relatively short period of time.