My pleasure.

Yeah, these shorts aren't places to do research and development as much recently. That's happened with some of them in the past, but lately it hasn't been the case. We've been wanting to make them lean and mean, relatively quickly and inexpensively.

Even within the story I pitched, I think one of the reasons they liked it was because it was so simple, there weren't three thousand characters, it was very doable and that's an important thing. There were few sets and few characters, which was certainly a part of how it was set up.

At one point, we were working on issues with the hair, and people were telling me, "Oh, they've solved a lot of those issues for Brave", but we were limited to Toy Story 3 technology for La Luna.

Now, of course, I still wanted to do something different and find a unique look, which we were able to do with the tools and the technology that we had. The difference is in the artwork we had from scans. We used scanned pastel drawings to add texture to our glows and backgrounds, which gave a feeling of actual media.

There weren't major technological breakthroughs in this short, we were really just trying to serve the story.

Yeah, the whole thing was roughly 9 months I think. They overlapped so much with other projects that it's kind of hard to tell.

We usually refer to the beginning of production as the time when you're starting to really go into layout, building assets and modeling, but before modeling we need to design everything, so really working on art is the first step.

Everything overlaps so much, it's hard to give a solid timeline. I think we were probably in layout for a month. They're all small teams, just one person doing all of the layout, it's great. You have a good rapport and quick communication because of how small the team is.

Then once you lock layout and finish modeling, you go in to animation. Animation was very roughly 3 months. In the meantime you have shading and make sure that you build all the assets you can before you light.

After that, lighting was probably a couple of months, and then post production, a lot of sound mixing, timing and music. That can trickle over a long time.

We weren't done for so long, as we were finishing, I was already on to a new job, though there were a few things that still needed to be done on La Luna, and we were like "Wait, what were they?" because a few months had gone by. Given that we didn't have a hard deadline, we knew we wouldn't show it until June which was our premiere, it went slowly.

Yeah, that's a good question. I think the hair was hard, as I mentioned before. Hair and grooming is something that's usually simulated by the computer. It was particularly difficult for us because we wanted the animators to have control over the hair. We needed to animate talk and expressions, and that was particularly difficult.

Normally we don't have those controls, hair just gets rendered by the computer, it comes back, and you hope it's alright, but that would not have worked for us. We needed to give controls to our animators and see what kind of shapes the hair was taking, so that it could animate to voices and expressions, and also for the eyes.

No, I don't have a themed office, I - well, actually I do have a themed office, it's 'Messy', that's my theme.

As for my favourite, Andrew Gordon is one of our top guys, he's an amazing animator and he has a very famous secret door, which leads to (?)little lucky 13(?).

It's an awesome thing, in his office there's a library with a sculpture of a bust, which has a button that you push. A secret door opens to this tiny little secret speakeasy kind of setting, which is awesome, we had a lot of parties there.

That's certainly my favourite. Animators know how to party!

Ah, that's a good question. For modeling, Renderman does a lot of our work. Almost, I would say, 90 percent of the work is Renderman, but there is also some Maya modeling. It's a bit of a mixture. I don't know as much about the shading side, I think it might be proprietary, but mostly Renderman, tiny bit of Maya.

I've often felt, and I don't know if it's a pitfall or not, but the important thing is to understand that you need to stand well above everyone else to really be noticed. Finding personal work that really represents you is important.

One of the things that I hear sometimes, which I don't understand, is that people come and tell me "Oh, That's my dream, to work at Pixar!" and then I say to them them "Well that's great, but what do you want to do?". It's important to know what you want to do, and it's important to have a passion for something specific.
Pixar is a big company, so they appreciate someone being very specific about their talent. They will want to cast you in a certain position, so I find it important to be specific with your portfolio. You could apply to Art and Story if you wanted, but I would send two completely different portfolios.

Eventually, someone will certainly ask you "What do you want to do? What do you really want to do?", and that's a good question to ask yourself. It's a tough company to get in to.

There are very, very high standards, so you need to excel at something and show that it's specifically what you're great at.

And usually I say "Just put something in that is totally your work". In story specifically; it can be a comic book or a little short, something that you made and wasn't work for hire. Something like that can tell a lot to a recruiter, more than examples of work for hire, where it's a lot harder to tell what was the person's contribution and what wasn't.

Yeah, it's an interesting problem. I feel in general that I wouldn't shy away from being dark. We've had movies where things have gone pretty dark and I liked that. We were tasked with the extra problem of simulating moonlight which is pretty specific, but in La Luna, before the moon rose, I was not afraid of going dark, you want to feel the contrast when the light is there, you know?

But we kept it pretty saturated in the dark, it was very stylistic and a very 'production design' kind of choice, where you choose blue as your color. But I would also say don't stay away from the blacks, I think using more black is cool too.

Yeah, that was a practical joke that has been a part of the legend there. No, the orangutan was there for a couple days, and has never been around there since.

Yeah, it was just silly, funny stuff, you know? Unusual, certainly eye catching and attention catching.

There's a lot of them, many literary. I like to read books and get ideas, so I try and read, you know, all around.

Italo Calvino is a famous writer in Italy and his work has inspired me, he has a wonderful story about the Moon, which made me want to tell my story about the Moon.

Miyazaki's certainly my go-to guy for wonderful, amazing movies that are unusual, diverse in tone, and challenging even though that's for kids. I find that very inspiring, the idea of making a movie for kids that doesn't talk down to them and is still fascinating and magical for parents.

Right now I'm pretty busy helping Bob Peterson on his next feature, it's coming out a couple of years. It's a dinosaur movie, and right now it's "Pixar's untitled dinosaur movie". We don't have a title yet, but there's dinosaurs in it! It's been fun, I'm a head of story there, so I'm leading a story team and helping the director, finding the story he wants to tell. That's going to be my focus for at least a year or so.

Meanwhile, I'm planning to incubate other ideas and slowly let them grow. I'm also looking for inspiration, reading and developing ideas.

With the right idea I'd love to pitch for a feature sooner or later.

Yeah, I think it's just a case of trying to make something that you are passionate about. It's a little bit of 'Build it and they will come'. It's all great to get a job and get your foot in, that's another good suggestion too, I learned a lot on the job in smaller studios, so that's certainly win-win. But while I was in the smaller studios, I was just making my own comics or trying to do my own projects.

So that would be my suggestion, to try and make something with your peers or by yourself, because that's the thing that could turn into your best business card, something that you made.

Well, let me see. Find your stories and mine your experiences. There's a lot of stories in our past, in our childhood, and in our everyday experiences, so I would say use them, tell them to the world. It's fun to share them.