in conversation with paul topolos
Presented as part of Pixar: 20 Years of Animation
30 June 2007
80 mins
|
Requires Flash Player to view
|
| |
Artist and matte painter Paul Topolos talks about his role at Pixar and the art of creating worlds onscreen.
Paul Topolos: Thank you. Can everybody hear me? I've got a very strong, commanding voice. Thank you for coming. You didn't have to, but you did. I appreciate it. I thought I'd wear a suit today to try and give me a sense of creditability and intimidation. Is it working at all?
Audience Member: [indecipherable] so intimidate.
Paul: Thanks, sis.
All right. I know what you are thinking. You are saying to yourself, yes, matte painting is an important process of the production pipeline for special effects film, but who is this guy? Who does he think he is and why couldn't they have brought somebody more famous here? [laughter]
I've got one of my notices that I thought I'd read just to prepare you. Paul Topolos is the most famous, talented and dangerous matte painter in the world. He is so famous, powerful and talented he could actually come to Melbourne in the heat of summer, blah, blah, blah. He is the brightest star in the matte painting firmament. He is a good son. He calls me every week. Now, my mom wrote this for me, and I just want to say that film is all about illusion because I call her twice a week.
Matte painting, or as the French say, matte painting. Matte painting has been around ever since pretty much the dawn of film actually. This is actually from 'King Kong,' which is like sort of the 1930s, but actually goes way back into the silent era. It's always been a way to create beautiful images that would be far too expensive or time consuming to build.
As a kid I loved watching any movie that had stuff like this, and I was too dumb to really know how they did it. But, then, you buy all these books, and you sort of begin to see that sometimes there are little side extensions. Sometimes, they're whole vistas. (Come on in. The room's fine.) I was just amazed.
This is actually one of the earliest matte painters from early ancient Egypt. This is one of the early crowd simulations, too, right below it. This is a painting I really like, and when I worked for George Lucas this was actually in one of the hallways on my way to go to drawing sessions. This is 'Die Hard 2.' Many people actually don't know that Margaret Thatcher was actually a matte painting.
When I went to work at Pixar I knew that I'd be doing stuff, like this was clouds from 'Finding Nemo.' This is kind of funny. It's grass instead of water. Do you say grass or grass? [different pronunciations] I knew, I would be doing stuff like this where you would be painting skies or there would be something about Paris that you do a painting, and then it becomes a bigger painting, and becomes this. Wow. It's beautiful. The most beautiful. What I wasn't expecting was I had to do stuff like this.
[laughter]
Paul: But, what I thought I'd do is make this a little bit about a journey, an artistic journey because I find everybody's... All of us at Pixar have had all sorts of different kinds of backgrounds. There are people from Harvard, and there are people like me that had a sort of very checkered past. So, I thought I'd just sort of show a little bit about what it takes to become so strange.
This is me, painting on the right, and I probably would have had a normal artistic career except my older brother. That's my older brother on the left. He got me addicted to science fiction as a child. He made me try an episode of 'Star Trek' one day and my grandmother hooked me up with some merchandise. And pretty soon I'm dressing up as a Vulcan.
[laughter]
Paul: And this is a picture day...
[laughter]
Paul: Thanks, but what you're not seeing is that look; that's actually blueprints of the Starship Enterprise. And then, actually 'Star Wars' happened that year and that just about did it for me.
But, the funny thing was that by the time I reached high school and collage I dropped the habit cold turkey. And I studied fine art, I loved drawing people and I was working on sort of children's books, making coffee for people, and getting lots of very polite rejection letters.
And I was pretty arty farty and if somebody has asked me what squeal to a movie would you want to work on, easy easy easy, another 'Room With A View.' 'My Life As A Dog' again. The 'Seventh Seal' two resurrection, this time it's personal.
But, the World works in mysterious ways, and not without a sense of humor or irony because my first job was 'Star Wars.' And boom, I'm back to being 12 years old again.
This is me at Skywalker Ranch, one of the few times they let us out in the sun. You can sort of see how pasty most of us look.
[laughter]
Paul: And I took my drawing skills and I was a storyboard artist, so I did lots and lots of storyboards. And I got tired of getting laid off at the end when they say: 'Oh great job we'll call you soon,' so I started to learn to do paintings for video games. And I really got into it because you look at some reference and you get these pieces of geometry and you start painting, and then you overlay stuff, create history, steel buttons, make a jigsaw, and then boom.
And I really kind of got into it in a big kind of way. And you start looking about what makes something something. This is an 'X-Wing Fighter.' But, what kind of visual language does this tell you, I mean all this beat up paint and earth tones verses the bad guys that were sort of clean and blue. And you start seeing how visual things are telling narratives. And I really got into it.
The only thing was that I wasn't entirely happy. I did try and do conceptual design within my little paintings, so all these would be little designs that I come up with. But, what I really wanted to do was stuff like this, and really neat concept designs, but ever since I was a kid I had this little fear of permanent ink. It may sound strange, but pencil I was kind of fine, but the ink it's just my confidence level.
And my friends would say, 'no look, all you've got to do, just do a page of different designs, its easy. You treat it like watercolors, its fine, just work from light to dark and then at the very end put that ink line in that will stay there for ever, and boom you get it.'
That's easy enough for some artists, not me. I look at the blank page, I stare at it, I stress out and then, 'OK put something on there all right,' and then boom and I hated that line. And that line seemed to kind of represent me in a way. Just like not really defined, sort of a little bit, you know, bad. And I would sort of finish it you know...
[laughter]
Paul: And it wasn't until I started working at LucasFilm, where guys like Ryan Church and Erik Tiemens, they were doing something that I had never seen before in the film industry. They were doing conceptual design on the computer using Photoshop or Painter, and their rough drawings... how are you going. And their beginning painting would become their end painting, all in one image.
And then, all of a sudden I realized that my confidence could come back, I could take my crappy pencil drawing, but then I put it in a computer, put it against backgrounds, steal bits, you know and just really get into it. And all of a sudden my confidence level rose and, boom, I made something that didn't quite suck.
Oh, you want a freighter? Sure, I'll do that that. You like this better? OK, boop, boop, boop. I realize that this malleability of working in the computer was something I was missing in my life. This led me to working as a matte painter for Star Wars.
This is stuff we get from Tunisia. These stuff I would do in the afternoon, like a really quick painting of a city. This would just be for George and Industrial Light and Magic to see what kind of movies they wanted to make. This bizarre thing was actually shot in Sydney. Then, I do set extension, adding in Sandcrawlers in bits, landscape guys.
That led me to do traditional full-on digital matte painting. Actually, you're a beautiful audience. Could we dim the house lights just a tiny bit, please? Get a bit of mood lighting in, yeah, yeah.
But, the only problem was, the arty-fartiness in me, I wasn't that crazy about the films I was working. The only people in the Bay Area that were making wonderful films were Pixar. And I knew that they would never hire me, because I thought that they built everything. I never thought that they would use matte paintings or a matte painter.
What I did know was that they had the best stories, and I had heard that it was this wonderful magical place to work at. Especially when Brad Bird was going to come on board, that's what clenched the whole deal. So, thank God, I got offered a job, a low patch.
I'm going to show you a scene, and I want you to think about how many matte paintings you can see in a scene. Then I'm going to show you.
[scene from film "The Incredibles"]
Paul: So, the preacher, that was John Walker, our producer, and the voice of the announcer is Teddy Newton. Teddy Newton - when you look downstairs at the show, he's got 5000 pieces, I think - is a talented guy, I hate him!
[laughter]
Paul: So, all these shots that I work on, usually there's a lot of a sort of background work before I get to it. So, this is a drawing by Scott Caple of the idea of the church. This is what's called a "color script." You can see a bunch of them from Bill Combe to Ralph Eggleston to Lou Romano. Lou Romano did this. Lou Romano is an amazing guy, production designer and he's also the voice of Linguini and he does an amazing job in "Ratatouille."
So, what I was given was what's called sort of like a layout. So, this was just very simple geometry showing me where the church is, where the street is, and from scratch I do a digital painting based off of that and we do little keep alive things. I don't know if you saw the little lights twinkling, you always see that in my paintings where I put flying birds and stuff just to try and remind you that it's not a dead painting.
The outside of the church was never built. So, I had to do like a little neighborhood outside. And actually, Helen's dress never got finished, so I actually had to do the dress bottom. All these photographs actually made this guy look like Robert McNamara who was the Defense Minister in the Johnson administration. I don't know why. That's kind of how it ended up getting used.
The Superior Court, matte painting, just a straight up painting, no geometry, no nothing, just a flat from scratch. All of those newspapers, it was really neat to sort of see all this stuff. So, we had Peeping Tom that was based off of Robert Mitchum getting caught for pot in the 50's. I get this bizarre, weird, naked render and then I begin to sort of painting the things, and then sort of give it like that newspaper print.
So, again, more naked people. This was the original idea, it was supposed to be this superhero accidentally knocking over a statue, but it never really quite work and I thought it would be better for him to like knock a hole out of the building. So, that's how it is.
[pause]
Paul: And it was fun. This is just a matte painting, just a flat, almost like a billboard. So, we would have these things that would just be stand-ins and then I'd be given these renders and come and do the paintings.
[pause]
Paul: This was a shot that we did, sort of like an old fashion 2D animation trick, where... This was the render that I got and then these are just old paintings with the clouds sort of sliding behind and these front two layers of buildings sort of separated out to give a little sense of parallax, all done on the computer. I just included it because it was cut from the movie and I spent time on it, and I figure if I give enough talks it might sort of see the light of day.
A lot of times I would be asked to do sort of set extensions. So, this is all that they would have, I would do a painting of the city and then that would get plugged in. But, I also had to do a bunch of these building paintings. Just to sort of get "geeky" so that you can actually say that you learned something. These would be all paintings that would then get projected onto simple boxes. It's almost like wallpaper, these things would repeat themselves vertically and they're separated out into different layers. So, we have something like this, which is called a displacement map or a bump map.
So, whatever I paint black recedes, it actually creates geometry or the illusion of it, and whatever's white pops forward so you've got a displacement. You've got another kind of displacement just for the bricks, you've got color and you've got windows. And then, I had varieties of windows and varieties of dirt. This is an early render, but you can see that the windows have got a little bit of shine induced to them and that they recede into the geometry.
And so, it's all fakery and trickery. So, I do painting like this, displacement, brick, and I did them for hundreds of buildings.
I want to talk briefly about Bob's office from "The Incredibles," which what I think, it needs is you sort of see in the whole design process, lot of time people would be looking at all movies. So, this is the apartment with Jack Lemon and Shirley MacLaine, which had something to do with Bob's office.
But, this was one of the first things that I did with Pixar, where they only built it this far and they wanted to go on. So, what I do is to set extension where I add a lot of details, add little things.
I don't know if you remembered this, this was a matte painting but this was when Dash put a tack underneath the teacher's chair. And this is just what I was given. And the poor little kids don't have whole bodies. So, more set extensions.
Somebody told me that half looks like Robert Murdoch. Does anybody?
Audience Member: [indecipherable]
Paul: Jeffrey Gassenver? Wow, yeah, God, we're so mean.
[laughter]
Paul: It was like that all the clocks are saying the same time. But, here would be the case where I would get this... [laughter] What are you laughing at? [laughter]
This is what I'd be given and they would want sort of a, this was from the BNC "17" version of the... But, what I would be doing would be, they wanted really boring bits.
The funny thing is that I was actually a fan of British office. And I tried to sneak in Warren Hag, you know, that building and I got in trouble.
So half's in the hospital, and a lot of times, what was fun on "Incredibles" was that Brad would get into trouble with the budget because he had so many different scenes and so many different locations, that we started running out of money.
And because Brad came from 2D, he would kind of be like, "Yeah man! Get Paul. Get Paul paint it." And so, I felt wanted and loved. I don't know if you can see the little sticker, the little stamp up there. That's kind of what Brad is.
When he okays the design, each director got their own little stamp that they stamp and so. I think that usually said, "Yeah, man" because that is how Brad is with the baseball caps.
It was funny. At Lucas' film, they had the 'OK' or 'fabuloso.' When maybe you got one fabuloso in your life. He used to have a stamp that said, "Sucks!" on it. But, there were so many tears and things.
I do research on the web. Just looking at stuff and then I was given this render and what I do is I paint from scratch using that reference as a guide to get this:
[Recording: Please go to the [indecipherable] room immediately]
Paul: And I saved them a lot of money. Bob's done all this great photographs that are based of on real, real things that we've go Gerald Ford; we've got the original idea. I was given this very, very strange render because we only had three women characters that were working.
So, they all look like in slight states of chemotherapy. And you could see that I create all these little photographs and hats and all these things to help cover the fact that there's just three different models.
Sometimes, I would be given something weird like this, and I thought it was funny incredible gash.
[laughter]
Paul: I got to entertain myself somehow. And all those other things where I take bits and pieces from other paintings that I have done to create these little photographs. I love this one.
Actually, you can see this in the Artscape downstairs. This was based of Clark Gable and Dean Martin. And it was neat because Brad had, with all these photographs, he wanted some of them to feel candid, some of them to feel really sort of staged.
This was the idea of the [indecipherable], I don't know if you have seen that in New York City. But, I thought I would put a woody big balloon up in there.
For this, painting in backgrounds, painting the waves, and putting in airplanes. This was actually the submarine from "Finding Nemo." So, this is what they gave me and it scared me [laughing] because it looks so great in "Finding Nemo," but I did not think it looks so great when they gave it to me.
But, you can see I'm doing the old matte painting trick, where I am putting little birds in it to help it sort of come alive. This was Bruce, of course, this is my friend Rob Kinkaid. Then, I put them against the water.
This is going to be a little bit 'nerdy' but Ralph Eggleston was the production designer that also helped out on the film and "Shark Tail" was coming out and Ralph had very definite ideas about how he felt about the qualities of "Finding Nemo" versus the qualities of the other movie. And so, he said, "You've got to put a beauty mark on the shark" because Robert De Niro's character had a beauty mark.
Nobody gets it. But, I did put on the seagulls from "Finding Nemo" they are saying "mine," people keep on thinking that they say "made." But, you can believe whatever you want. I mean, it's a free country.
A Lou Romano sketch? I thought Bob should have that nice sort of sunburned chest and that little white things and I say, "He's got a months using shirt and Helen's got a "Finding Nemo" moo moo." I stole it from this photograph that they made me change.
"O, hello? Oh, charm? "Hey, hey. No, I said yes, story, story, story. [laughter] No, I love you too. [laughter] No, no, OK, yeah, yeah I'll pitch that thing. Yeah.
Please watch this.
[film clip starts]
Edna: Nothing super about them spoiled stupid little stick figures with poofy lips with [indecipherable] bottom selves. Pweh! I used to design for Gods! But, perhaps you come with a challenge, eh, I am surprised to get your call.
Bob: Ed I just need a patch job.
Edna: This is mega mesh outmoded but very sturdy and you have torn my truit. What have you been doing Robert moonlighting hero work?
Bob: It must've happened a long time ago.
Edna: I see, this is a hobo suit darling, you can't be seen in this. I won't allow it. Years ago maybe but now [indecipherable]
Bob: What do you mean? You designed it.
Edna: I never look back darling, it distracts from the 'now.' You need a new suit that much is certain.
Bob: I need a new suit? Oh where the heck am I going to get a new suit?
Edna: You can't it's impossible! And part of this is to ask me now before I again become saying.
Bob: Wait, you want to make me a suit?
Edna: You pushed too hard darling. But, I accept. It will be bold, dramatic.
Bob: Yeah.
Edna: Heroic!
Bob: Yeah! Something classic like "Dyna Guy," oh, yeah great look! All the cape and the boots.
Edna: No capes!
Bob: Isn't that my decision?
Edna: Do you remember, from the head tall "Stormicide," ice man good with kids.
Bob: Who isn't?
Edna: November 15th 1958 [laughing] Swell, another day you see when his capes snug on a missile [indecipherable].
Bob: "Thunderhead" was not the brightest balls man.
Edna: "Stratogale" April 23rd, 1957, cape caught in a jet turbine.
Bob: Eve, you can't generalized it about this thing.
Edna: "Meta Man," in express elevator, "Dynaguy" snagged on take-off, splashed down, sucked into a vortex. No kicks! Now, go on, your new suit will be finished before your next assignment.
Bob: You know I'm retired from hero work.
Edna: As am I, Robert, yet here we are.
Bob: Eve only need a patch job for sentimental reasons.
Edna: Fine, I will also fix the hobo suit.
Bob: [laughing] You are the best of the best Eve.
Edna: Yes, I know darling, I know.
[film clip ends]
Paul: Of course, you all know that is the voice of the director Brad Bird. The 'big freeze' that was in the back, that was the kind I have been showing you before about architecture except this way it's a relief. So, this is just displacement map painted huge, huge painting.
And whatever is white pops forward, whatever is dark recedes. There's a color version of the same thing. And something just gives a tactile sense of texture. And all these things are combined in that way when it is lit beautifully by Janet Lacoy.
Here, you get a sense of depth in it and you can walk around it and actually becomes forth. All these scenes begins a storyboard, and it was being a storyboard artist who to be looking at the stuff and be sort of scouting shots.
Then, it goes into a color script, again Lou Romano beautiful color scripts. What I love about color scripts is that you can see the whole movie at once even.
If you look at the very top second row down, it's all sort of monochromatic and gray and that sort of symbolizes when Bob's life is the worst.
The top row is when he is saving people, when he gets married, the happiest time of his life. And as things progress, from the bad bits, color is starts getting re-introduced. And so, it's fun to be thinking about these things as you are doing the paintings.
Concept designs are made for the characters. Sort of early version that I did the sky. Lou Romano drawing of the city. And they wanted the city to almost look like a bad movie's back lot. So, in this scene it almost has a sort of faky feeling.
I used my texturing background to do all the paintings for the plane. And I got into trouble because I thought, "Hey, I love the "Iron Giant," I'm a nerd, I'm a geek. I'm going to be called giant airways. But, I did not tell anybody."
And it got shown on a sneak peek thing on the Disney Channel and people went on the Internet and they said, "Wow! Giant airways, Iron Giant, Iron giant."
And then all of a sudden somebody comes to my office saying, "Who told you to do that?" And it was like, "I'm a geek." I love the "Iron Giant" which is also directed by Brad Bird.
[laughter]
Paul: The elevator is one big tall painting so if you imagine a camera going up when the guy gets his cape down. That was actually based off in this geometry was "Toy Story 2." So, you can see the simplicity of the gray scale geometry compared to if I do a very, very tight painting and it gets projected on to it.
It's all fake, it's all trickery. "Dyno Guy," very simple geometry, made by a friend of mine Gray Wong. Again, me doing sort of old school painting where color displacements like this tiny little bricks specularities sort of showing what thing is going to be shiny.
All that gets attached and you can see how these windows, because it's heavy displacement, how the windows go in, details come out. A light is put in so we got this nice shadow raking across. And boom! This is where real magic happens where you starting to paint in and all the lights and all the windows. The light coming from the windows and the sky. And all the sky is moving.
And then this, we just move the camera around and that became the set for this and that. And the end where they get sucked into the funnel. This is just a static painting that was distorted, I think, after effects are shake which are two programs.
Sometimes, I just get something really simple like this, color script. This was all that they built for the geometry and this is Bob coming back. And this is a good case why matte paintings are used. This is the only time that we see the scene. And it was important thing to see Bob coming home as part of re-invigoration of his life.
It was an important scene, but all I had to do was just start doing research, start making a painting. Because it was a health camera, it was just one status landscape image. But, it was still important for Brad's storytelling.
Naked Bob, but he's sort of in a factory area so those buildings off to the side in the sunset and the clouds are all me. Color Script, matte painting, foreground onus. And sometimes the underwater sea thing, I do sort of a sloppy painting like that.
But then, what we see is... And this isn't lighted but this would be the something that they would give me early on that I would be able to sort of gauge what they kind of need.
The Dead Super Heroes, I had a lot of fun working on, because some of these things were supposed to look candid. Some of them were supposed to look posed. Again, you get these weird sort of Sinead O'Connor people. What was fun was I got a lot of latitude. I could do what I wanted to.
You, OK? I'm sorry. Damn, I lost one. You guys are with me, though?
Audience: Yeah. [laughter]
Paul: Pathetic. Do you know how far we've come?
I got a lot of leeway on these, so I decided that this would be Bob's first girlfriend. [We've got a whistling.] I always thought Frozone should get his own tickertape parade. Things are going down south now. More characters. It was fun because I sort of tried to come up with neat little things where I thought it would be kind of cool if she's on the roof in the spotlight, and she's all - yeah, I've saved the day.
Then, you get these sort of cheesy things where I had to go through all of these men's catalogs to try and find the right hair to paint in - the Elastigirl at the White House. And this was the case where Buddy Pine - has everybody see 'The Incredibles'? OK.
Buddy Pine, you know, is a super fan of Mr. Incredible who later turns out to be this bad guy, but we wanted to show him as a kid, show how obsessed he was, just to show what a sad little life he had.
This was the case where one of the big fights between the director and the producer, whether it be, as we were talking earlier, you want this but you are going to have to cut something over here. Brad kind of freaked out and it was one of those things where I came in and we did these two shots in a week and I still have a drinking problem because of it.
But, what we have I got from a friend of mine, Chris Klein. He did a nice, very simple gray scale model. I did a lot of research. I had friends at CR that would give me these prototypes for some of the toys.
And then, I did a matte painting. This is no computer lights, no nothing, just straight matte painting, and it was fun. I kind of geeked out. I had these dog-eared scrapbooks that he had, and I thought he would have Mr. Incredible cereal and Mr. Incredible models and you'd see paint drips on the table and photographs. And, the photographs get more and more funny because Bob is really tired of signing the same autograph; so he's like, thanks again, buddy; for the last time, buddy. I even had him writing poetry that you never see because he's right there. The reverse angle, Color Script.
This was a set that I was given. I took some wood, a wood painting that I'd done to make this 1960 wallpaper, put that in and there's the shot.
[sound from a movie]
Paul: So, 'The Planet,' matte painting. A big painting of the earth that gets projected onto a sphere, so you can get that curving, and then there's two layers, a layer of the cloud shadow, a layer of the clouds, a little bit of light. Color Script, blue Romano.
What I did, it was a huge, huge, huge painting. The reason that I had to do it was... This was what took them about 38 hours to render. Just this one frame, and it wasn't that big, and they were like, "How are we going to do this?" And so we just went back in time and did the old Tooty trick where we separate things out into layers, so that there's a slight sense of parallax. So, I'm going to show you the film.
[film clip]
Paul: It's subtle, but... OK good. Outside Frozen's apartment matte painting, color script. I found some photographs of some, they're kind of one of these sort of boring sort of 1960's architecture. From that, I made digital paintings from scratch. I do these, I'm horrible with perspectives so I'm always putting these little lines out just to make sure I stay honest, and then painting. And then sometimes, what we do is then I sort of separate out the windows so that when the Omnijoy comes by that you see his reflection in these things.
And then, one of the final shots in the film, set extension, and I want to talk briefly about Cars and then Ratatouille and then we're going to do some questions. And again, in Cars you sort of see this idea of what matte paintings are for: sets that you only see once so you've got the Hollywood sign, city sort of middle ground sign and hills, and then final shot.
Other sets when you think about the house in Incredibles or things that are multiple shots - those are all built beautifully in 3-D and shaded so that they can be used over and over and over again.
This is one of my favorite shots where McQueen is imaging himself in this sort of superhero kind of movie where he's got these evil sparkplug aliens, so this is the matte painting. This isn't the shot fully lit, but the matte painting was actually based off an earlier shot that I did in which we used these sort of this plane and this highway and all these little monopoly buildings. And I did this incredibly painstakingly, horribly painful shot in which all these, it was a huge painting too, and all these tiny little nooks and crannies just about killed me. But, you can sort of see the difference between a matte painting with and without.
And what's neat is that painting gets projected onto a plane and it doesn't feel like a painting right? Hopefully? Yes? Back me up? I came thousands of miles? And then, the reverse angles. These were the clouds that McQueen came out of flying. Lots of other matte painting, cities, and this a perfect example. I mean, it would take somebody weeks to plant all these lights by hand or do all these things. It's a lot easier sometimes just to paint things.
This is the same set as the [indecipherable] one that we saw. So, this is a matte painting that gets projected onto those monopoly buildings, but this is what the painting looks like. And again I get to sort of geek out and put little... I don't know why I put fire escapes on there because they're cars but... And then, also we always kind of sneak in the pizza-mobile from Toy Story. So, the pizza-mobile is actually at the Dynaco Gas Station. I'm such a nerd.
Other things, this is all paintings. There's no real geometry. Each one of these stocks of corn I painted. This is the pastel... Do you guys mind me saying pastel? You guys say pastel. I've been getting a lot of crap from my American friends. I just want you to know what I'm talking about.
This the sky, and all those clouds are on separate layers and they drift. It was painstakingly done and yet nobody even notices that they drift. And here's the shot. Sometimes, I get things like this. There's a lot of adding sagebrush in this movie.
But, this was actually the first matte painting that I did for "Cars". They wanted this interior, so I put in the interior where Lizzie is. The only thing that I found out later was that John, when he found out there was a matte painting for this, got really angry because he was just saying, "Continuity, continuity, continuity. I don't want this to be a matte painting." It spread out around, and this was when I first got on the show.
The painting was done and it was hilarious, because I wanted to show it, "Hey, look what we can do," and everybody was like, "No, don't show it at my meeting. You're going to ruin my meeting. He's in a good mood right now." But, he actually saw it, and he loved it.
Bill Combe, the production designer, became a fan because he was like, "Well, I don't want the light above, I want it off to the side." In half a day, I put the light off to the side. I think, people thought of matte painting as this thing where once you do it, it's set in stone and you can never fix these things. [indecipherable], paintbrush, extension. It was neat. Sometimes, you change an entire set.
Here's what I was given. I like that it's sort of a V8 engine in the x-ray machine thing. We've got the little eyesight things. More photographs, giving something like this for Doc Hutson. It's kind of depressing. I went on the Internet to research all these auto crashes from the 1930s and '40s. Thank God we got seatbelts now.
This is the worst thing I had to do. Does anybody know Jay Leno here? That's the ugliest set I've ever seen in my life. I also got to do these fun little Ferrari posters and little photographs.
This is a little inside joke. We cut to Emeryville, which is where Pixar is. That's how, when you go out, you can see San Francisco on the other side of the bay. It's subtle, but you can see the difference between my painting on the right and that thing on the left.
I just showed you this before. This was a shot for "Ratatouille" that you barely can see in the film, so I wanted it to see the light of day. We paid a lot of money for the rights for this, because there's a famous photograph of a young Resistance girl from World War II, a French girl, that's taken a German machine gun. When you see the movie it makes sense, when this woman becomes an elderly lady, why she likes firearms. We paid for the rights for this. I saw it in the movie, and you can't even see it.
This is what I've been doing for the past year, a bunch of different shots of Paris. This was my little thing, a painting that I really enjoyed doing. I thought I'd put some streaky light clouds up top so it looks like Remy's smelling something good.
I really like "Ratatouille" and I hope you guys see it. I want to thank you guys for your patience and for coming today. I think, we're going to open it up to questions and answers, but first of all I just want to thank you. Thank you for coming.
[applause]
Paul: How are we doing on time, by the way? We've got half an hour left?
Woman: So, questions?
Audience Member: Since Pixar's been bought by Disney, what's the difference? I mean, are you a separate unit still? Do you think of yourself as Pixar or do you think of yourself as Disney?
Paul: Yeah, we still think of ourselves as Pixar because... It's funny, it's been really nice that people have been really worried about us. They're always like, "Did anything change?"
You know, aside from the blood test and stuff that we have to do... No, I think, technically we're Disney-Pixar but I think... I mean, the good thing is that people recognize that there's a Pixar, there's a... I don't want to use the word "branding," but, I mean, when people hear the word "Pixar" they've been thinking "good films" and...
[audio cuts off abruptly]
Paul: Really, I mean, as a company we've been growing but there hasn't been anything bad that's happened. Oh, oh, sorry! We get to go to Disneyland for free!
[laughter]
Paul: We get it. It was funny because we get this thing called a "Silver Pass," which means that you can get into... You can't get into Tokyo, Japan, but all the other theme parks you can go into for free. It's been just right after we'd been bought and they gave us our Silver Passes and they were playing... It happened outside the big rotunda and they were playing all from like the Electric Day Parade and stuff from Disneyland and... [laughs]. It felt like medication time from "One flew out of the cuckoos nest"!
[laughter]
Paul: Yeah, it was like: coming out to get our passes and we were wondering, you know, "Does a bit of our soul go?" You know. But, it's been good. Sorry.
Audience Member: Yeah, I'm just going to ask... This would apply to background and all, maybe, any part of the production, but when a Pixar film goes into cinemas, is it locked off at that point or will you ever go back and make changes for DVD and will you...? I mean, thinking much further down the line, would Pixar ever do what your old boss did - George Lucas - and re-issue films in twenty years and make sweeping changes, do you think, because it's all on the computer?
Paul: Yeah, I doubt it. I think, Elise would agree. Yeah, no. I mean, I think that there's kind of like a... I know all the directors know George and they all like him and it still kind of puzzles me, some of the changes that George Lucas made, but I think, everybody's got a good sense of closure at Pixar, when the movie's done.
I think that, you know... John always tells the story about... He was on some flight, I guess to Hawaii or something, and he saw this kid with a Buzz doll or a Woody doll and it was almost like: he saw how much the kid loved the doll and he kind of felt like that the film was over, it's no longer in Pixar, it's no longer us arguing and trying to get this thing done. It's gone out of there and luckily kids have found something that they love about it.
Yeah, I think, there would be a little rebellion if they put a bit with Han Solo in with Greedo shooting first.
[laughter]
Audience Member: I've got a very geeky question, or a number of geeky question.
Paul: Yeah!
Audience Member: That particular picture, how long did it take you? What is the actual size of the file in Megabytes and what's the resolution?
Paul: Right. The funny thing... This was all done in one brush stroke.
[laughter]
Paul: Nobody knows that and I got really lucky with it. Actually what's interesting... I was kind of showing you guys about reuse, so this was me changing a lot of stuff but it's pretty much this...
Unidentified animated character: Wow. It's beautiful!
Unidentified animated character (with French accent.): Ze most beautiful!
Paul: So, it's me taking this set that I had slaved over for months. In the computer I changed it, I sort of relit it. I think, it was about four thousand pixels. I don't know what the size of the file was. In the shot, when you see the movie, there's a big camera move that leads to that, so it needed to be a little bit bigger. Those of you that are geeky and want to know, cinema size is 1920 pixels by 803 pixels. So, a pixel is a very tiny little thing. Still, it's very manageable.
I'm painting pretty small, and you saw how those guys would be painting twelve feet wide. But, Paris, that just about killed me. Still there are things I'm angry at myself for. I still think the Eiffel Tower is a little bit too contrast, but when you meet me tell me that it's not. Did I get all the questions?
Audience Member: With the movies that have been done in 3D recently, "Meet the Robinsons" and stuff, is Pixar going to do any of those? Like the actual 3D with glasses movies?
Paul: I don't know. I know that they've looked into it. I don't know if they ever made a decision about it. I know "The Polar Express" did great for being such so ghoulishly weird. I didn't say that. Louise, do you have anything?
I know that they've experimented with it. It's a very expensive process. The Star Wars films, that's yet another way that they're going to try to get money out of you. They're trying to make those into 3D.
Audience Member: Because when you see the other ones in 3D, you leave and you go, "I wish these were Pixar ones."
Paul: I know that they think that too. The good thing is that they separate us out from the business stuff. I know that the process is very expensive, and there's only so many IMAX theaters that do that 3D stuff around. I'm sure that if there was the proper reasons, people might look into it more.
People laughed at me once on "The Incredibles" when we were trying to do this neighborhood and I was like, "Why don't you get the neighborhood from 'Toy Story' and we can change it," and they're like, "No." The technology changes so much that they can't open the stuff from "Toy Story" on the computers. Every movie the whole computer language changes.
They would have to ship it off to another country and get people to build primitive models by hand to put the thing onto the thing. That's a technical term by the way, the thing. Yeah?
[laughter]
Audience Member: Can you talk a little bit about your transition from being a matte artist to creating images on computer?
Paul: Like what I was saying before, I was terrified of pen and ink. I'm not a bad painter or a bad artist in real life. I do a lot of drawings of people. The weird thing is that I've always felt myself to be a documentary, traditional artist where there's somebody in front of me and I can draw them.
What I like about working digitally is that I change my mind so much and I mess up so much, and it's so easy for me to change the work as I'm working and dabbling. It frees me up to be more experimental. Normally, if I was working in oil on a huge thing, I might be a little more careful and I might not get the most exciting, juicy painting, because it's not really in my nature.
By having a very malleable tool like Photoshop, I'm just able to make a juicier painting.
Audience Member: [indecipherable]
Paul: My dad was a Xerox repairman. We always had copy paper around. It was a funny thing, because we bought an Apple II when I was a little kid and I started to learn how to paint, even on this silly little computer.
So, it wasn't that bad and poverty is good, when you don't have a job in this business and you want to be in this business. It's like you get your running shoes on.
Audience Member: Are you able to watch a movie, just movies you haven't been involve in without looking at "Oh, there's a matte painting and there are [indecipherable] or so stuff."
Paul: Well, it depends if it's a good movie. I think, that's the thing with everybody. Well I was watching some movie the other day and I was like, "Ah, those are really beautiful costume. Oh look at that. That's good design." And then you like, "Oh! I hate this movie." [laughing]
But I think, any kind of good movie like "Casablanca." I will[sp] kind of laugh when I see that cheesy airplane flying. But, it's also an amazing movie. So, it's only like if it's a bad movie does really take me out or things.
Audience Member: You mentioned Photoshop and Painter, which one do you use the most, and if you use any other program with it? And how many brushes do you have?
[laughter]
Paul: I've got a lot of brushes. People are impressed with my brushes. I use Photoshop, I'm not smart enough to use Painter, and I don't mean that in a dumb way. No, I guess I do.
[laughter]
Paul: Actually, what I do is very intricate and that really works best for Photoshop.
For me, the worst comment that a director or production designer can make is, "Oh, that looks painterly," and you like "Oh!" It really doesn't need to be a very tight like this foreground element is geometry but then the [indecipherable] and everything else is a matte painting that has to blend.
And other programs, I actually used to model [indecipherable] and light and I do my own paintings. Pixar uses Mayad to build things, but then to actually get them in and light them, it's all proprietary.
So, like I said, I don't know if I mentioned this but I always got teamed up with somebody smart so there was a guy named Alex Harvell who is really, really a young guy. I want to hit him too.
So, he is the one who will take my painting and then project it back on to the geometry. But, he had it trying; it's nice if I was working in Britain I would have to be really more like a one-man team. I get babied and cuddled a lot at work by them giving me smart people to work with.
Rough piece of geometry and I followed it just so that there will be something to play with. I don't know if you know Photoshop but it has these scaling tools where I have done all these photographs and other people have done these little comic books and you can shift the perspectives and scale and fit them on to the things.
The scrapbooks are also painted by hand and like it's me painting the dog ears, and painting the cellophane, and painting all that. It's a little bit of a blend. I got teased sometimes when I copy and paste stuff in. But, it is a blend of paint and getting art work and stuff and putting it in. Does that really answer your...
Audience Member: It does, it does. I was just wondering, when you say 'by hand painting' do you ever actually do your sketches and then just transfer it like scan them in or everything is done directly into the area.
Paul: Yeah, it's so slow. Sometimes I think, people might think that I go to the director and I say, "This is it, this is what you are going to do." And it's not like that. It's kind of like those Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland things. Everybody is putting on a play.
But still, it's so iterative that you might get 90 percent right and then Brad or the production designer will have things that need to get changed. And to actually re-paint that in real life as opposed to like shifting something around or it's a lot more pliable.
Audience Member: You obviously like the malleability of Photoshop and the technical forward and backward that you can do with it and the pushing around. Do you ever find that the technology gets in the way of, perhaps, the intuitive process that you might have a run of creative thinking about a painting?
And do you ever find that the technical necessities of having to think about how you actually achieve something actually gets in the way of that creative flow or that intuitive pushing in the creative process?
Paul: Well, I almost think, it is almost the opposite. I remember in high school, we still had the old typewriters and that is how we were taught how to type. And you would be typing and you would make a mistake. And you would have to get the White-Out out. And it was this horrible thing.
But then, when you have a word processor sometimes you can just do stream of consciousness. And then you can move your sentences and paragraphs. And Photoshop is kind of like that. I am able to be incredibly sloppy.
And actually, it is an easier way for me to go from creativity to image, in Photoshop. Because, usually I sort of swearing at myself, "Crap! Crap! Blue, yellow! I am an idiot!"
[laughter]
Paul: "Yes! No! OK, back! Yeah! Oh! Hey!" And then I look at it the next day and I am like, "Oh, God I suck."
[laughter]
Paul: But, it is so much more fluid when you think about. [laughs] Every time, like, I was doing some portraiture in oil paint and I am looking for the undo key.
[laughter]
Paul: And then, sometimes, the medium is fighting against you. The more times you work in something in oil paint, the more muddy it gets.
Whereas, Photoshop is just, I find that it helps me. But, that is because I am lazy.
[laughter]
Audience Member: Jeremy, yesterday, was talking about how it took almost a year to get approval on Sulley. Do you ever have that same, maybe, not on the same sort of scale. But, with the approval, are you constantly going backwards and forwards with directors and people up the chain of command to get approval on a map before you OK it?
Paul: Yeah, it kind of depends. Every now and then you will get a really bad one that will kind of get kicked back a couple times. "Ratatouille" was under such a bad deadline, it seemed like everybody was firing on all cylinders. I was working with a very good production...
Part of it too is that the director's time is so valuable that a lot of times you will meet with a production designer a bunch of times, hammering it through with him, and then you show Dad. And then, hopefully Dad likes it. And, yeah, Dad has been pretty good.
And I am on "Wally" now and we are not really in the heat of things. So, they are still trying to figure out exactly, really, really nail the look of it. But, no it is relatively painless.
The one kind of funny thing. I was mentioning this one time earlier. Is that John Lasseter is a really friendly guy. And he is always jolly. And he is sort of like [patting himself].
I remember being in a screening room with 60 people. And he was like, "Let me tell you why I like this." And I was like, "Wow! This is..." And then, he will slap you on the shoulder and he will slap you on the knee. And then you will show him something and you do not get the slap on the knee or the slap on the shoulder. And you are kind of like...
[laughter]
Paul: But that kind of answered it?
Audience Member: Just one, bit of an ego question.
Paul: All right.
Audience Member: What has been the hardest, matte paint, painting you have had to do for Pixar? And what is your favorite, matte paint, you have had to do for them? The one that you have just been, that is why I can die happy.
Paul: Right. Well, maybe the second part first. I like qualities of some, but yeah, no, I am always seeing the things that I screwed up on. But, I think, the hardest was actually the Paris shop that I showed. That big pan.
We had to do a lot of weekends, a lot of late nights, to get it. And it was interesting, because it was mainly three of us that did that shot.
But, I think, it is just because I have got "Ratatouille" on my mind. I kind of like that one shot we saw of the rat smelling the, and to be honest, it was Harley Jessup that showed me a photograph of the colors that he was wanting for that sky. I painted it looking at that photograph. There was something about that feeling, that time of day that makes me happy. That's actually the last matte painting I did for "Ratatouille".
Audience Member: Who are you artistic influences and the type of art you like generally?
Paul: It was funny. We went to the Guggenheim opening, and I'm a jerk when it comes to modern art. I'm awful to be around. But, I'm actually a big fan of the artists from the late 1800s. A lot of the Pre-Raphaelites and Post-Impressionists, people like Sorolla and Sargent, the Social Realists. It's a very small niche of time.
I was studying art in England and I got all this crap because I'd be doing portraits. My teachers would be like, "Paul, the 20th century never happened to you, did it?" I had friends drawing a painting, a box black and putting lace around it and saying, "This is a piece about femininity, and yet it's a critique about femininity." It would go on for half an hour.
The funny thing about coming back to "Star Wars" was that I realized that I wasn't stupid for liking the movies. You look at all the artwork from Ralf McQuarrie, Joe Johnston, all the matte painters and you realize why those movies were great.
Audience Member: [indecipherable]
Paul: The question is how long I take to do a matte painting.
A lot of times it's how stressed out people are. These paintings, those two were done two days each, which was painful but necessary. It just seems like sometimes I'm better than I was in high school. Sometimes, it is a little bit like a term paper where you're not firing at all cylinders until there's a gun to your head with the producer at the trigger.
A lot of times I'll be working at a whole bunch of paintings all at once. A lot of times I'm waiting for the foreground elements to be completely lit for me to match the stuff. So, I might have started a bunch, but it's interesting, it's all over the place. The photographs were a much different deal as opposed to these big signature shots. But, a lot of it depends on how much of a bad mood people are it to get this stuff done.
Audience Member: Hi. I was wondering, with the shots in "The Incredibles" where you had to take the pictures of the naked superheroes and convert them into newspaper pictures - and they're just static shots - do you also have to paint their clothes on?
Paul: Yeah. You have to paint the clothes on, paint the hair on. Sometimes that happened early on in "The Incredibles" where they were going to do a big pitch to John and the clothing shaders weren't working. We lied and faked it, painted it, and we didn't tell him that that was just a painting.
[laughter]
Audience Member: [indecipherable]
Paul: The question is, do I ever get frustrated.
Technically matte paintings are always like, yeah. No, it was funny. We weren't sure how Brad was going to have the focus pulled at this one shot for "Ratatouille". So, I did this really detailed painting because we never knew what the lens was going to be like. Brad loved the painting, and he was like, "Yeah, Paul, I'm really sorry but we might blur it out." I saw it in the movie and it was all blurry. It had been this really tight painting, but it was a good story point, and it actually looked better blurry. Like I said, if the movie's good, you don't mind it.
The thing that I always hate is when I see people falling in love with what they've done. There's some shots in movies where you can just tell that they're really proud of this thing they've spent all these hundreds of thousands of dollars on. It's all overlit. I hate the bit in "Titanic" where you're flying around the boat forever. So, I don't mind.
Audience Member: [indecipherable]
Paul: It's not that bad. I used to work for a German company and that was worse. I'm sorry if there's any German people. There were nice Germans there.
I think, on "Ratatouille" with that parrot shot, that was my friend Alex. We're really good friends. People thought that we were a couple because we hung out so much. I even got a marriage certificate. But, he kind of snapped at me.
That was funny at the end of "Ratatouille". I had done something that messed him up. He had told me how to do this thing, and I forgot. He's like, "God, why did you do that? Why did you do that? I told you how to do that."
Usually it's only subtle stuff like that. It's only been at other companies that I've seen nuclear meltdowns. Sometimes one of our director's faces gets really red, and you can put little Pantone chips next to his face and be like, "Oh, OK, bergundy."
Audience Member: With the texture mapping that you were looking at with the buildings, you're doing that in Photoshop. What's the next process in that?
Paul: It's almost like this projector. I do a painting, and it gets projected onto geometry. Sometimes that's a simple geometry and sometimes it's complex. The reason that I do the displacement, the color and the specularity is because usually there's a moving camera.
All those qualities that I painted, like the windows on a separate layer, and the displacement and the color, all stick to these pieces of geometry. These things are like boxes or vases.
Audience Member: In a 3D program?
Paul: Yeah, in 3D.
Audience Member: A part of matte painting, because in the final product where they're actually...
Paul: Those buildings were part of the neighborhood, and so they needed to be projected onto. If that was for a matte painting, I wouldn't do it like that. I would just paint it from scratch. Usually I only do stuff like that if the camera is going to be really moving, or the light's going to change during the scene or--I had something else brilliant to say and it's gone. I just walked in front of my own train of thought.
Sorry.
Audience Member: I'm just wondering, the geeky references to previous movies, who decides where they're going to be and what they're going to be?
Paul: That's a good question. I don't know. Sometimes they'll say, "Hey, we need to get the pizza truck in there." I know that it's in "Ratatouille". I did the thing with the Wernam Hogg for the British Office and I got caught for that, but I really actually don't put stuff in movies because I think, it's bad karma.
There was a mistake that almost happened on "Nemo" that luckily got caught that I can't really tell you about. It had nothing to do with me.
Audience Member: [indecipherable]
Paul: Oh, about the magazines in the dentist's office? Yeah. I guess it's not such a bad story. Do you want to hear about it? Oh, all right.
Sometimes, they put in these temp magazines, like they are going to be magazines, in the dentist's office in Sydney. I don't know why this person did it, but they scanned a Playboy Magazine cover and put it in and then they forgot to actually replace it with proper art. So, it actually got to what is called digital dailies which is almost the final thing, and I think, Andrew, was it Andrew that caught it or Lee, and I think, they went mental. [laughter]
The funny thing was that it was like every magazine in the dentist's office was Playboy. I think, that was even the magazine that he goes to the bathroom with. But, wait, where were we?
One thing I did in the Curio Shop which was that shop where the interior, I did put my dad's, well my family's motor home license plate up there. But, other than that, I think, it's bad karma.
There was one guy at ILM that worked on that horrible movie, Spawn that he hated the guy he worked for. He did all of these drawings of this armor, and if you look at it intricately there are all these swear words and these awful things about his boss in minute detail etched in. God, when is this guy going to stop talking...
Oh, Jerome. Jerome Ranft, ladies and gentlemen. We do have Adrian Ranft and we've got Lisa Klubien from Pixar.
Jerome Ranft: Why don't you do displacements and shaders on characters?
Paul: I think, they do.
Jerome: No, why don't you?
Paul: Because it's kind of boring work. I want to do the...
Jerome: No, that's the good stuff. That's what Tia does, right?
Paul: You're saying that as a character sculptor. I'm saying that this is like a landscape painter. I don't want to do that.
Jerome: That'd be stopping at a pay cut, man.
Paul: Do you think these people would pay $15 to see if I'm like, well I put these buttons on and... That's a very bad question, Jerome.
Well, I was the first one hired, but what's kind of nice is there are some very, very amazing, amazing artists that do matte paintings as well. So, there's a guy named Randy Barrett. He was the guy that designed the Emperor Zurg, and he's an amazing illustrator. I've known him since the mid '80s, but he does a lot of skies and he does matte paintings as well. There's a guy, Ernesto Nemesio, that he's got some work downstairs.
Sometimes, these guys maybe come from being more of a painter background. There's this guy, John Lee from Disney. These guys will also do Color Scripts and things, but I'm the only one that's like anal retentive enough that it's the one that I mainly do.
Audience Member: I was just wondering about Disney and Pixar. Is there a possibility of working for the other organization, or is it very much that you will stay with Pixar or is there an exchange program or do you share concepts or ideas and try and become one organization?
Paul: Well, they're down in Los Angeles. I think, what's neat is that they'll look at each other's movies. They screen movies. They are trying to do a similar thing at Pixar which is they have what's called a brain trust of very smart people that deal with story and stuff that will look at movies. I've heard that sometimes people will look at...
Disney has been doing some great paint technology that actually has to do with matte paintings, but it's weird. I don't really deal with any Disney people. Do you deal with any Disney people, Jerome?
Oh, Jerome gets to work with the theme parks and stuff so he gets to go to Disneyland for free. So, do I.
Audience Member: This is kind of on the same lines, but with that technology that Disney is developing do you see Pixar developing any kind of 3-D paint technology that makes more, I don't want to say artistic, but artily 3-D Works.
Paul: Right. Well, they've got a system, and I've never used it. They've got an in-house system called Picasso that works really, really, really well, and the stuff that I've seen people do is great. I think, what's interesting is that each company's got their own stuff.
BlueSky with robots - they've got these amazing, sort of procedural, things with metal. Usually, a painter when two things seem together... it will be a painter that will be painting sort of the rust that might meet up with them or the stainy bits. BlueSky created this amazing way of automatically saying, OK these two bits are together, or this thing might have a streaky, stainy bit and it does it automatically but I still think that doing it by hand is better.
But, yeah, I think, luckily the technology is just this funny back and forth thing. So, I've used old technology of sliding layers of stuff, just sliding like they did in Snow White. And then, all of the eggheads do the most amazing physics, but I think, incrementally things just get better.
It's kind of like Photoshop. Photoshop is an amazing thing, but each version of it is a little bit better but it's not so groundbreaking that they will fire me, hopefully.
Audience Member: Hi. You mentioned you did a lot of earlier work in Portraiture. I'm just wondering, how did you find your passion for landscaping and doing backgrounds?
Paul: Oh, kind of desperation, you know. It was kind of weird because when I was in University... I had a relatively happy childhood and I didn't have this angst in me that I thought you needed to have in fine art. I was trying to figure out, what do I do, and that's when I started getting interested in illustration.
I knew that if I'd be drawing people I'd have to draw the backgrounds, and I just remember being really scared, you know, making coffee for people at a caf just thinking I might be stuck in this caf forever. I'd see friends from high school, and they'd see me saying, do you want chocolate and cinnamon on top of that? It'd be, didn't that guy used to be Paul Topolos.
It was one of those things that I knew I couldn't really make it as a portraiture artist. I mean, I'm not bad, but it was this weird thing where it's like I studied with an illustrator, then I met, actually a guy that's going to be out... We're teaching together at the VCA next week, Ian McCage. He may be the best draftsman I've ever met in my life. He was actually the guy that got me a job at Lucas Film, and I think, it's just one of those things where you want to stay employed and you are always trying to get your game better.
I think, it was one of those things where I realized that in film especially you don't want to get pigeon holed. You don't want to be known... I got tired of being known as the guy that did the model textures when I really saw these juicy matte painting shots, and that's what I wanted to do.
I remember applying at ILM. They'd be like, this stuff is a little gamey, but then you go back and then I got to go to Lucas Film and then you get a better portfolio and all that helped me get to Pixar. I always had a love of matte painting shots, but for me my studying was kind of incremental. It was jumping from job to job, from story board artist to concept...
[audio ends]
|
|
