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Are you excited for Cars 3 to race into theaters on June 16th? While I was in San Francisco for the Cars 3 Event, I had the awesome opportunity to chat with those who made this amazing movie possible. You’ll find some interesting interviews with those who have a huge part in this film’s creation. Before you read on, here’s a little more about The Story of Cars 3 and some Cars 3 Activity Sheets! 

Until I went to the event in San Francisco, I never truly understood all that went into making a movie like Cars 3. Disney Pixar is truly an amazing company and has fantastic employees who make these amazing ideas come to live. Cars 3 is going to be a wonderful movie thanks to these talented individuals. We met with two teams and received presentations on “The Nex Generation” and “Production Pipeline.” Below you’ll find these interviews as well as exclusive images! First, check out the movie trailer:

 

The Next Generation

During this session, we received an overview on designing, creating and bringing life to the next generation of cars – Jackson Storm and Cruz Ramirez. We were able to chat with and learn from Jude Brownbill (Directing Animator), Jay Shuster (Production Designer) & Michael Comet (Characters Supervisor). 

Jay Shuster, Production Designer

We learned that Pixar starts with a blank sheet of paper and that they have an iterative design process where they plaster the wall with imagery. Did you know that for every movie, they do 100s of sketches. The team is constantly reminding themselves that with these designs it’s characters first and vehicles second. They pay attention to things like the eyes and the mouth relationship. “We can’t angle that windshield too far or otherwise it looks like the eyes are staring up into space constantly. We need to be very attentive to that angle of the windshield.”

Check out these progression images:

Jackson Storm

As you know, Jackson Storm is introduced in Cars 3. There have to be some differences in these two characters so Jay and his team worked their magic. While McQueen is round and flowing, Storm had to be angular and sharp with a super low profile. While Storm is low to the ground, McQueen has an upright posture.  The team works in clay because you can’t cheat in clay. These are characters not just vehicles. Even with the clay sculpt, they’re taking photos of that and overlaying sketches on top of that to push the design forward. Every line has to say something about the character. In one image it is showing that Jackson Storm is a weapon on wheels. The team is really pushing the creasing and stealth fighter like quality of this design. Then, once they pass the clay stage, they start building Storm in the computer. 

Jay and the team also took a close look at the graphic design of NASCAR these days. We wanted Storm’s graphics to be different. Just like McQueen has his iconic Lightning Bolt, we wanted to give Storm his own icon. So we took the International symbol for Hurricane and transformed that into Storm’s iconic S — did you notice?! 

We gave McQueen a rival that completely defines the next generation and we exploited paint, shape and graphic to yield a character that needs very few words to express his actions.

Jay shares that “further down the line in the design process, I really want to add some of the NASCAR/stock car DNA back into the design and give it that mass and muscle that we see out on the track these days.” This is when they brought sketches to Daytona 500 to gauge and get their blessing.

Cruz Ramirez

Their next biggest character was Cruz Ramirez. The team really wanted her design to be based in American Muscle Car yet informed by more European sports car stylings. The team tells us that she was a unique design challenge. She’s not a race car yet she’s a strong female character who has to meet the next generation race car at their level. They put designs together to create a pretty clean set of plans. They call this a final model packet which is ultimately the thing we give to the folks building these models on the computer. It’s like their instruction manual. The key for Cruz was to get her somewhere n between McQueen and Storm. Just enough creases and edges to look modern, yet with more flowing elegant shapes. 

Michael Comet, Characters Supervisor 

You may wonder, just like we did, what the character department does? Well, Michael tells us that it is an assembly line. 

“The character team is essentially responsible for taking the concept art out of the art department and bringing it into the computer and providing it to downstream departments like animation. So we’re doing digital sculpting, digital shading and painting, and then digital re-imaging.”

Lighting McQueen

When they started on Cars 3, the first thing the team did was to bring over our characters from Radiator Springs and some of the other characters that we would meet again. Just like any character prop, they started with the model process, which is just like clay.

This model is sculpture only. It doesn’t move. It’s not posable. It doesn’t really have any shading or painting on it. How do we go from grey to color? Well, they have a team of shading and paint artists who control things like color, shininess, reflectivity, and we create different material for all the different pieces of the car that we have to make in a computer. They also get graphics from the art department and much like you would apply a decal on to a real car, they can virtually apply stickers or graphics on to these vehicles. The software is so realistic for Cars 3 that in some cases, they had to animate cars that were off-screen just because you could see them in the reflection, because these cars are so shiny. After the team shades and remodels the character they also have to set them up to be animated. This is character rigging. An example test that we put all cars through various poses. It’s helping create a virtual puppet. There are controls in it for the face, the body, the wheels. 

Jackson Storm 

This is a brand new character. The team starts with a very simple sketch model and they look at rake and angle of windshield. The team uses the sketch as a guide and start adding details and pull controls around. They have to do this for every piece of the car. They have to model every nut and bolt. When his wheels come off during a pit stop, they have to model the lug nuts and things like that. The team had to really be careful with how much the mouth can open since he’s very low to the ground. In the computer, the team can really duplicate realism even down to paints. Primers. Coats. Flakes in paint to control density and size and color. Virtual clear coat that makes it all shine.

Cruz Ramirez

Once the team gets past the sketch model process, they move into digital modeling where they will add tons of detail like license plate, logo. Details of the headlights. Their rendering software is so realistic and you can see they actually modeled a lens and a bulb and a reflector. They have to set up every single thing that can be moved with the character. They open the jaw. They can move the lips. They can move the corners of the mouth. The eyelids, the eyebrows. All these things get moved. 

Jude Brownbill, Directing Animator

The team asked themselves at the beginning of Cars 3, “What did we learn from the first two films?” What worked? What can we take and make better? And what’s going to be different about Cars 3? They knew that the story for Cars 3 was very emotionally grounded and then they were seeing these renders coming out that were very visually grounded. They knew that their animation had to live in incredible detail in the world that was created.

Jude tells us a little more about that process, “For us in animation terms, that meant maybe pulling back a bit from big broad cartoony movements. Instead having these several thousand pound cars feel and move like they should we respect their weight and physics to ultimately give truth to materials.” 

You may wonder what the team learned from Cars 1 and Cars 2….. they learned a great deal about McQueen! “He’s not quite as agile. He’s been challenged and he’s desperate to avoid failure. We wanted to contrast that with Older McQueen.” Their next challenge, they have brand new characters. Each are very different from McQueen and each are very different from each other. What can animation do to support the uniqueness of each character? Here are the three ways:

1) One is the way they look. Animation can control the shape of their mouth and the shape of their lips.

2) Then there’s the way that they move. 

3) Third is the way that they act. The way they behave.

Jackson Storm

Storm’s very angular and sharp. So it’s up to animation to take those controls and support the design of the car and the body. So for Storm, the team took that angular and sharp design and tried to do just that. Created straight lines, sharp corners of the mouth. They even asked for extra controls so that the team could make the top of his lip even sharper and more angular. Then they continued to reflect that with his eyelids. Same with the way he moves. He’s lower to the ground, tighter suspension. He doesn’t lean into his turns the way McQueen does. He’s very strategic in the way he drives. It almost looks effortless. He’s very overconfident and arrogant. He only really cares about himself and winning. Minimal body movement and over articulation of the mouth helped get that across. If they contrasted what his eyes were saying with what his mouth was saying, he would really come across as that type of character you’re not really sure if you should like or not. His eyes would be telling his true feeling. 

Cruz Ramirez

Cruz. Her design lies between McQueen and Storm. Animation wanted to echo the curves of the design. Experimented putting that into her mouth. Cruz is a powerful trainer and she’s full of enthusiasm and energy but she doesn’t really know how to harness that power. She’s very out of control in the real world. Cruz is really based on Cristela Alonzo – smart, determined, funny, from modest beginnings. Just as the story artists had done figuring out who Cruz was (based on Cristela), we went to the source. The team watched a lot of her standup, her TV show and tried to pull inspiration where they could from facial expressions, comic timing, etc. The team kind of immersed ourselves in that and found we could be a lot broader with her body movement because she has such a big personality.

Start to Finish: Pixar’s Production Pipeline

This session taught us about the technical achievements and challenges that artists experienced in the making of CARS 3. We learned from Bobby Podesta (Supervising Animator), Michael Fong (Supervising Technical Director) & Jon Reisch (Effects Supervisor).

Bobby Podesta, Supervising Animator

We first learned that all Pixar films are grounded in something relatable and a lot of times this is something tangible. This concept goes back to 1986 to John Lassiter. Did you know that the Pixar lamp that you see in the logo that hops, moves and jumps along was his (John Lassiter’s) desk lamp? He said he wanted to take something tangible and make it into an art form. Pixar has gotten better and better over the years. Now there are films like Finding Dory that the teams hope that the viewers can smell the salt in the air.

At the core of all of this isn’t about being visually tangible, but also emotionally tangible. Something that you can connect to. The story of a bunch of lamps isn’t just a bunch of lamps, it could be a family. Whether you’re watching a lamp, a fish or a car, Pixar wants you to get down to it and say, “wow I know that person!” Everything in Cars 3 stems from this same view point. Pixar animation takes the things that people know and love and twist it just a little bit to make it visually and emotionally tangible. “I know that thing” – at the heart of it, it has to be emotionally tangible. For example, what does a demolition derby have to do with this? Have you ever been at a crossroads in life where you feel really out of place? That’s the point of this scene in Cars 3. The audience feels like McQueen does – out of his element.

The team watched a lot of demolition derbies online and looked at pictures to get a sense of what it was like to be in a demolition derby. Then, they come back and the animators and story artists get together and come up with ideas – moments that might happen at the derby with the characters. Then, they’re able to walk away and give these drawings to the animators to do something with. The animators will do these animation tests to figure out what these characters will do in this environment. Then, they’re able to string them together to make little clips. The nice thing about this is that they can build upon all of this and edit all the way until the final frames are done. Then all the departments are working together. The goal of this is to visually put it altogether.

Jon Reisch, Effects Supervisor

Jon started as an intern on Cars 1 and is now the supervisor for effects for Cars 3. So, what does the effects team do? Water, Fire, Smoke, etc. As well as how the characters interact. Skid marks, tire peel outs, etc. What was the most challenging effect of the film? Mud!!

Effects is providing believable interaction that grounds the characters in the film. Visual component of the tangible object. Then they can add emotions to the characters. There is something very powerful, unexpected with engine smoke and all. The sense of realism and detail – helps the audience to identify with the characters. They use physical simulator effects software. Laws of motion and physics. Inputs and do simulations – velocity of the car, how fast the wheel is spinning, traction, etc. Tire smoke, skid marks. Air flow around the cars – gives you a sense of reality with the cars going around the track. In a much larger scale. At the end of the day, they’re focused on the basic laws of effects – giving weight and balance to each effect and character.

Mud – what’s so hard about it?

It isn’t solid or liquid all the time. It’s hard to simulate. You’re going to get stuck in the mud. So just like in animation, they are true to our materials, different characteristics of mud, etc. Brian (director) wanted it look like chunky oatmeal and soup. That’s what they started from. They experiment over and over to get to the reality of it all. A lot of these experiments looked terrible – like chocolate. Until they dialed in and got something that is more appropriate, more scale, etc. To get to the final images, they have to work with a lot of other departments. They took the mud puddle to the shaders (to make sure that the mud edges are wet), high resolution flashes, etc. If they effect the characters, we need to talk with the character shading department. Lighting friends are close. That the mud is responding appropriately to the lights. We need to be aware of where the camera is. Do this in 160 shots with about a half dozen departments. On the crew for Cars 3, are a lot of talented people.

Cars 3 represents another level or scale of effects of what they can do visually. When the effects work helps the film as a whole is when they are successful. It gives them a chance to shine. Effects are able to help tell the story.

Michael Fong, Supervising Technical Director

The story is king effects every department at Pixar. The story is the most important aspect of the film. Everything that all of the departments do is affected by the story. All of this is there to help the story telling – explosion, etc. Sometimes things can be too big or too dramatic and they have to tone them down.

Crazy 8 Scene 

McQueen has legitimate fear. He lashes out at Cruz as he was afraid for his life, his career. If they wouldn’t have made the scene as serious, it wouldn’t have done anything. 

Legitimacy 

Mistakes have to feel real. Yo u have to believe that the school bus is going to hurt you, the sawmill of death, etc. You need to understand why McQueen is afraid.

Along these same lines, a tangible world is something that we wanted. This is done in layers to make the characters more realistic and the world around them. The goal is that the viewer would feel like they could reach out and touch. They don’t want a photo reel, reality isn’t always the most aesthetically pleasing they. The viewers want directed realism. Lines showing around McQueen’s mouth – during night time racing. They broke physics to put the highlights somewhere else. You want the eye on McQueen. The team wants storytelling to come through. The story writer’s job is iterative and they do this thousands and thousands of times.

The movie is broken down into bite sized shots and they move through all of the departments. We have to turn this all so quick as this has to be in theaters on June 16. While all of this is going on, story is still going. While they’re doing this, the technical team is trying to get the movie made. As technical is fleshing out the world, story finds new things to implement. Technical influences story and story influences technical. 

Production Pipeline

At the time of our interview, the story was still going. So you may wonder, HOW this movie is going to get done by 6/16? Well, every department on Cars 3 has been affected by story changes and modifications and they embrace it. 

The entire production pipeline is built around the fact that story is constantly changing. Technical & other departments must be able to absorb these changes. This is Pixar’s greatest challenge but also its greatest accomplishment.

Engage the viewers in the story.

 

Thank You For Sharing!!