"Toy Story" is the first full length feature film which was generated exclusively on computers by John Lasseter and his team at Pixar. With this film 3D animation as a tool in film production was finally fully accepted.

"To infinity and beyond!" - That is where Walt Disney Pictures and the northern Californian computer graphics specialists from Pixar Animation Studios have gone, taking the art of animation to previously unknown dimensions with "Toy Story". "Toy Story" Is the first animated feature film to be created not on the drawing board, but entirely in the computer. It took four years to complete the pictures and sounds of the adventures of Woody and Buzz.

The Genesis of the Characters

If you compare the production of a computer animated cartoon with that of a feature film with real actors, you could say that the computer technicians are like the film team and the animators are like the actors. "I define the animation of a character so that you have to think this character," says Lasseter. "Every single movement or feeling this character shows has to look as though it has come right out of the animator‘s mind." Once the story has been written and separated into individual sequences, once the cameras are rolling and the scene starts, it is the animators‘ job to breathe life into the characters. The characters‘ expressions and movements are key-controlled by means of so-called "avars" (articulated variables) integrated in the model forms, which may be compared with the strings on a marionette. This allows the animator to separately determine certain gestures or movements like raising an eyebrow or twitching the corner of the mouth, and the computer puts that together with the rest of the face or body.

For instance, Bil Reeves, the technical director, provided Woody with more than 700 control functions of this type, with 212 of them just for his face. The program that Pixar developed especially for computer animation is called "Menv" (Modeling Environment), and it has been continuously improved and rewritten over the past nine years. This program allows animators to construct three-dimensional Figures from scanned drawings and to move certain parts of these virtual models with the avars. The Menv program and also a special 3D-system originally written by programmers at Pixar, called "RenderMan" (which mounts the complete information of a digital setting to a perfect three-dimensional image, including lighting, surface structures and color shading) were run on PIC computers (Pixar Image Computer), which were developed and produced by Pixar.

Unlike the traditional working methods at Disney, where each animator is responsible for one particular character, for "Toy Story" all the animators worked on all the characters together to produce individual complete sequences of three to seven seconds in length. The results were presented to the whole team each day, so that each person could see their work in the overall context and add criticisms and suggestions for improvement. For Buzz, the animators had to consider a different series of movements than for Woody, because, of course, Buzz is made of plastic and thus needs to move more stiffly and methodically than Woody. Eben Ostby, the specialist for computer model construction, integrated roughly 800 animation controls into the Space Ranger. "Our mottos for thinking about the main characters‘ motoric were ‘Think in snake-like dangling movements for Woody!‘ and ‘Think in daring angles for Buzz!‘", remembers Ostby.

One of the most complicated and difficult sequences for the animators, which also turned out to be one of the most rewarding, was the "reconnaissance mission" of the "Green Army Men" at Andy‘s birthday party. In order to get a feeling for the way these plastic figures would move with their boots attached to these little plastic bases, Pete Docter nailed a pair of old jogging shoes to a plank. He and his team" took turns hopping around the studio halls with this construction, analyzing the movements and each of the most daring steps.

How to create a world of caricatures?

At Director Ralph Eggleston was assigned the task of providing the settings in "Toy Story" with a "decidedly realistic" and plausible appearance. The result is a world populated by caricatures, in which the figures themselves are artificial, but whose form and surface structure appears entirely realistic. Among the main "shooting sets" that Eggleston designed are the two different worlds of Andy‘s and Sid‘s rooms, the spacey interior of "Pizza Planet" and the moonlit gas station, where Woody and Buzz must join forces to get back to Andy.

Despite the high tech production standards that Eggleston had to deal with, he impressed Lasseter with "his unique sense of color and his talent for providing the surfaces he designed with depth and form." Following long discussions with the director, the art director designed a color palette for the 28 most important sequences of the film. For this he composed the main color shadings for each scene according to the atmosphere and lighting. He was inspired in his work by paintings by Maxfield Parrish, which are characterized by saturated colors and strong contrasts. Andy‘s room was intended to be a safe harbor, a pleasant and comfortable environment in which the toys come to life. Everything is bright and sunny and full of warm pastel colors; even the blue wallpaper with the white clouds on it conveys a feeling of openness. Sid‘s room, on the other hand, is a dreadful torture chamber for toys, where hard rock posters glow on the walls and there is rusty barbed wire wrapped around the bed that has no comfortable blanket or sheet on it. The only light in the room comes from a bare light bulb hanging above Sid‘s workbench.

The Gigantic Pipeline

Every creature, every toy, accessory and every landscape in "Toy Story" exists solely in a virtual space. Absolutely everything. It is a world that no one can touch or even see directly. From the violent storms to the enchanting sunsets, from every single blade of grass to the 1.2 million leaves on the trees in Andy‘s neighborhood, from the telephone poles and pebble paths to the flickering of a burning match - they are all artificial pictures.

As with any other animation, the artists begin with hand-drawn storyboards that are then joined to create action sequences. The working texts or the finished dialogues of the speakers are written into each of the pictures. Then action sequences are developed bit by bit to form a patchwork of story-boards, individually drawn details and series of movements, and partially animated computer files until they become completed images. Since most of the work at Pixar is done digitally on different computers, video proved to be the most helpful medium at this stage for the two cutters, Robert Gordon and Lee Unkrich: it is very easy to call up a video on the screen, and individual pictures can be frozen and worked on.

All the animated objects and characters are "modelled" three-dimensionally in the computer to attain a complete 3D image of their surface. To do this, the computer follows steps similar to those of a classic model builder: first a 30 framework is made from the scanned drawing - this is somewhat like a skeleton of bones and it can be moved the same way, then this framework is covered with "skin". A total of about 2,000 models were made this way for "Toy Story". Scenes (rooms, hallways, streets, etc.) and furniture or other room furnishings were modelled with computer supported design programs. These "model packages", which may be compared with an architect‘s blueprints, arrange the size and features of each object in relation to everything else in this artificially created world.

After that, the layouters are responsible for the cinematographic resolution of a scene and the camera movements. They pay their respects to traditional cinema by consciously adopting the camera settings of film directors. When the animators finally receive a scene from the layout department, the outlines of the characters are usually indicated by rough polygon shapes ("polys") or by frame-like figures. This simplified representation allows the computer to work much faster than it could if it had to construct the complete 30 image, and the animators can concentrate on the characters‘ "acting".

Once a scene has been animated, it is given depth focus, lighting and finally the complete coloration with the shadows and all the fantastic lighting effects. "Shaders" are mathematical programs that the computer uses to determine the surface structures: color, texture, reflection and roughness. For instance, there is a copper "shader", a wooden floor "shader", and one for the wallpaper in Andy‘s room. This kind of "shader" program provides the rendering program, which composes the completed image, with information ;, about how the various surfaces reflect light. In the final step, the color artists give these shiny, perfect surfaces a final touch to achieve the used, worn out, dirty or dull appearance they are supposed to have.

Many of the surfaces used were not created directly in the computer, but rather from scanned photos or pictures. The spread on Andy‘s bed, for example, was designed on the basis of an actual piece of material that was scanned in. And the carpet in the hall of Sid‘s house was taken directly from Stanley Kubrick‘s thriller "The Shining". Every one of these images was processed as a separate surface file. All in all, there are over 2,000 of these files for "Toy Story". A scene is given its dramatic visual effects by the lighting, the last process of the computer graphics. Here the "lighting crew" designs the appropriate atmosphere by using every imaginable light source that an ordinary film team would use - including a virtual sun and a virtual moon.

The process of constructing the final details and color highlights of a three-dimensional picture is called rendering. Here the information of every single component of the image is collected and composited. The computer composites a 30 image by compiling all the available information about the outlines of all the occurring objects (models), their positions (animation), their surface structures (shader) and their lighting and renders this information graphically.