"Hi, I'm Dan Scanlon, the director of Monsters U and one of the film's writers." "And I'm Kori Rae, the producer." "And I'm Kelsey Mann, story supervisor." "This is Pixar's first prequel." "We loved the story of Mike and Sulley from the first film, and we really wanted to do something that explored the relationship more." "And so, early on, we met and talked about the possibilities of a film." "And I think it was Andrew Stanton that really said, "We should go before." ""We should go back and see how these guys met."" "And I think, I wasn't around for the first film, but I think that there were..." "Somebody said they did some storyboard stuff where they explored, at least mentioned college." " Right." "I think that is true." " Yeah." "When they were trying to figure out the backstories." "Yeah, it seemed to me it was called Scare U or something." "I think you're right." "Yeah." "So we felt like, "Wow, there is a lot of possibilities there."" "Yeah, and so much of college is finding out who you are, and that's what this film's all about, is finding out who these characters are and why they became the best friends we know." "Yep, absolutely." "And so that brings up a good point, which is we loved that idea, and then we quickly realized, in watching the first movie, that there's a line in the first film where they say..." "Mike, I believe, says to Sulley," ""You've been jealous of my good looks since the fourth grade."" "And there's even more than that in the teaser." "There's talk about fifth grade and a big..." " Yeah, Suzy Boils and all that." "Yeah." " Exactly." "So we really thought about that and thought," ""Well, maybe there's a way to suggest" ""in this early part of the film when Mike's young that Sulley is young, too."" "And that maybe they did meet young." "We wanted to..." "Show that meeting, yeah, when they're literally in the third grade." "And you and the team storyboarded so many versions of that idea." "Having Mike and Sulley meet." "And though it was entertaining, and though it was true to the chronological background of the movie, in the end, we realized that it was feeling a little bit like we weren't delivering on the promise of Mike and Sulley meeting." "Mike and Sulley were meeting in the prologue, and then they were meeting again at college." "It felt like you either had to make a movie called Monsters Elementary, where it's all about these kids getting to know each other in grade school, or lose it." "And that would have been a very different movie." "And we wanted this to be a very mature relationship and about dealing with their emotions and about self-discovery." "And it just felt like it had to be more adult." "It had to be in college." "Right." "And I think even one version was we didn't even have either of them as young," " right, in one version of the film?" " Possibly." "Yeah." "I think there was one where we left it out completely." "And then we put young Mike back in." "For me, I feel like even though it would be great to have that perfect lineup, the intention is still the same." "These guys knew each other a long time." "And Pete Docter and John Lasseter were really great about saying," ""You have to do what makes this story great." ""And what tells the story best, and don't worry about that."" "So take that, Internet!" "I don't want to hear about it anymore." "We are aware of it." "All right." "So, that led us to the beginning of the movie." "The beginning of the movie took a long time, as I think most beginnings of films do." "We want to get it just right." "You really have to set up the character." "And so there was a lot of work done on just figuring out the best way to sell the idea of how much scaring means to Mike, how much his dream means to him, and how much it means to him to want to belong." "I think that's what Mike wants more than anything is to fit in, in a world of monsters." "And he decides that scaring must be the thing to make that happen." "And so there were several versions boarded of this." " Several versions of it." " We did a lot of versions." "They were not only here at the Scare Floor, but also at the Scare museum." "And what was that?" "That was Mike..." "I'm trying to remember what that was, the Scare museum." "That was meeting Mike and we wanted to establish Mike's passion for scaring." "In the past museum versions, too, we met Mike and he was already loving scaring." "He was already knee-deep in it," " knew everything about it." " Right." "This was one of the first versions where we actually saw the birth of this dream." "And so, I remember we did it where he was at a field trip, much like this, only it was at a Scare museum." "We thought that would be an interesting location to see the history and past." "Right." "And he saw paintings of Scarers very similar to what happens in the party sequence in the movie." "Yeah, later in the film, yeah." "And it was really, I think, I remember," "I think James Robertson really said, "I think he needs to see living Scarers."" "And we weren't sure about going to MI because we wanted to save it for that scene where they all go on a field trip." "But James really pitched the idea and said," ""He should look through a peephole in the door and see a Scare happening."" "And so we all embraced that." "And then we took it further and said," ""No, he should go in the room and see it for real."" "And so it really brought the whole thing to life." "And really made us fall in love with Mike's dream." "One of the things I love here is Mike's expression, his look of wonder." "He's not petrified." "Even as a kid, Mike is bold and fearless." "He goes in here, and it's just a look of wonder." " He's into it, he loves it." " So into it, it's so great." "It was nice to see a monster hide." "This is something we hadn't really seen in the first film." "We see a moment where a kid mistakes a monster for a cloth, for a shirt, and then realizes it's a monster later." "This was a great opportunity to see some of what makes it tough to be a Scarer, some of what you have to learn how to do." "What you see this Scarer do in the room is almost all the things you see them do in the Scare Games throughout the film." "Dodging toxic toys, hiding." "This is also stuff that we revisit for Mike at the end of the film when he's scaring the little girl in the cabin." "We really wanted to evoke some of the moves that he saw way back when, when he saw this Scarer." "This look on Mike's face was really important to us." "We really wanted to show he's fallen in love with scaring, and that he's just in love." "And we worked so hard on making this expression just sell that idea." "I love the lighting right here." "It just feels like a baseball player who's just hit a home run, with the stadium lights up there shining down on this fan here." "And so this, we really wanted to make sure we set up the school." "And so that's what the cool Scare was all about, to give Mike the goal to go to MU." "And this opening title sequence, we wanted to do something fun that was a throwback to the first film, but also make it ours, and make it original." "And Adrian Molina, who is one of the story artists on the film, really took control of this scene and really designed the look." "It's based on his drawing style." "He has this great, fun drawing style." "And it also gave us an opportunity to tell a little story, and to see, again, all things in favor of how much scaring means to Mike." "Really build up his dream, and just see how hard he worked, just to get to MU, just how much work that was." "Yeah, that's what I really like about this title sequence is that this one is actually introducing actual storytelling elements through it, which is great." "And now we have Mike arriving to school." "Early on, we used to have Mike getting a ride there from his parents." " Yeah." " It was a lot of..." "There's some funny stuff from that actually." "There was a lot of fun entertainment possibilities of," ""Imagine Mike Wazowski's parents."" "And so we did a lot of versions with that." "And it was very fun." "But Dan Fogelman who was a writer on the first Cars, we showed him a pass of the movie, and he gave me a great note." "Which is he said, "It's really entertaining," ""but if everything's about getting behind Mike and Mike being an underdog," ""have him get dropped off alone."" "And he said, "Give him the biggest luggage you can give him," ""and just make him not care at all." "It's not even bothering him." ""He's got the weight of the world on his shoulder," ""and he's excited as he can be."" "And it really made a difference." "It really made you feel subtly, like, he's in this alone." "And I thought that was such a great suggestion." "And this whole sequence is the epitome of Mike Wazowski just showing up and having all the faith in the world that this is going to all go his way." "Yeah, which is exactly the way you are when..." "This is the feeling you have when you first go to college." "Right." "In this sequence, in the opening title and in here," "Randy Newman, who did the score for the film, starts to introduce the alma mater." "And it was one of the first things that Randy wrote when he got started was the Monster's University theme." "And I thought that was really smart to start with that." "Because then he could pepper it throughout the film, and get you humming it, and use it throughout the film to really get you excited and give the school a personality." "And we had to, of course, throw in the Mike photo gag." "Yeah, yeah." "This is all great, too." "There's so much of this film that we started with like," ""All right, what was our experiences like at college?" ""What kind of things?"" "Like the dropping off of your parents, that's, like, a thing." "This stuff was added." "I think John at some point said," ""No, you guys have to..." "This is what happens, you guys." ""There's the orientation tour and then you get this thing, and there's the RAs."" "Yeah, John Lasseter was such a big proponent of just making sure we were hitting every college beat." "And he really kept us honest." "We were focusing so hard on the story of Mike and getting that to play." "He was a guy who was always being the cheerleader for entertainment and for hitting the college beats." "And this scene in particular he really just helped us come up with gags and really make college come to life." "Yeah." "I remember meeting someone at Harvard or something." "There was an RA that showed us around that was just super bubbly." "Exactly like the Smile Squad." "Yeah, yeah, yeah, which helped influence the Smile Squad." "One of the other things that I'm really proud of, of this film are the background characters." "We had to make a lot of them." "It's one thing we knew." "When we were stuck in story and struggling there, one thing we knew is that we had to fill this campus with tons and tons of students and monsters." "Yeah, and the story wasn't ready at the time, meaning our story was still in flux." "So the Characters Department and the Art Department couldn't design main characters yet, 'cause we didn't know who the main characters were." "So, the Characters Department used that time to design the background characters." "And as a result, we have a very rich variety of background characters." "Character Supes, Sanjay Bakshi and Christian Hoffman, along with Manager Sabine Koch really came up with that plan to get that done." "What's great, again, with college, it's stepping out of your small world and into a larger world." "We really wanted to have..." "I think the background pool does this." "You meet all kinds of different people that aren't like you," " are different." " Yeah." "It just feels right to have it in a monster world, where there's huge monsters and tiny monsters and flying monsters and swimming monsters." "And then there's Randall." "So early on, that was another idea was, it'd be great to get Randall in there and have him be the opposite of who he is." "So much of the fun of these prequels is turning the expectation and seeing how someone became who they were." "And so we loved the idea of having Randall be Randy, a really positive version of himself." "Anything you can do with these prequels," "I think we've learned, is surprises are really hard to do in a prequel 'cause you know where it's going, so anything you can do to surprise the audience is great." " And Randy was great for that." " Absolutely." "The prequel part of it was a big struggle in story for a long time." "It's a whole different animal." "When you know how a movie is going to end, it's hard to find drama at times." "And so you find that you kind of have to own the fact that everyone knows how it's going to end." "And we always said, "Well, you almost want to give people" ""new information up front that makes the audience say," """I know how this is going to end, and I hope it doesn't end that way.""" "Yeah, right." ""I know Mike's not going to be a Scarer," ""but you didn't tell me how much it meant to him."" " Yeah, exactly." " Yeah." "Yep." "This guy!" "I'm so glad this is in the movie." "This is one of those gags that when we watched it, there was just this fight of making it longer." "Longer and longer." "God bless them, Editorial was like, "I think that's long enough."" " And Story is, "Longer!"" " I know, I know." "Yeah, there's many different camps for that shot." "I still think it could be longer." " We tried." " We'll do the special edition." " That will be the only change." " It's just much longer." "So here we are in the Scare School, which I'm so, again, happy with how it came out." "The idea was that this has been around forever." "That this, you figured scaring would have been one of the oldest careers." "And so this thing has to feel like it's been around forever." "A lot of the campuses we went to, there's one building that's the center of campus." " Yeah, the heart of the campus." " The heart of the campus, yeah." "Our Production Designer, Ricky Nierva, and Robert Kondo, who's our Art Sets Director," "really worked to make this school have history." "They really put so much energy into every little detail to make sure that this felt old, that it was both awe-inspiring in one moment and intimidating in the next moment." "And now we have Dean Hardscrabble, who I love, and is played beautifully by Helen Mirren." "Early on, originally, her character was a man." "And as we started to develop the film, we really felt like we were missing an opportunity to open up the world." "We had never seen a great female Scarer in the first film." "Or at least we didn't know, not one that had lines." "And so we thought, "God, what a great opportunity to" ""make her character more original and more interesting."" "And so we had designed Hardscrabble already as a man, and with the Monster characters, we thought," ""Well, maybe we can just make some small adjustments and add eyelashes."" "Lipstick, don't forget the lipstick." "Lipstick and eyelashes." " That was my hope, as the producer." " As the producer." "It didn't turn out that way." "But we realized," ""No, this is a different character, and she needs to be great."" "And we worked very hard on her design." "And our Character Designer, Jason Deamer, along with..." " Yeah, Daniela." " Daniela and..." "We brought Daniela back." "She'd already wrapped from our show, and we brought her back specifically to work on Hardscrabble." " Yeah, that's right." " To get the female perspective." "Yes, absolutely, and the design was so difficult." "And we went through so many different iterations." "We were trying to find the balance between so many things." "She needed to be authoritative, she needed to be an amazing Scarer, so she had to have the goods." "You had to believe that she was a top Scarer in her time, and then be a professor, and be respected." "And so that was hard to do in the design." "Yeah, she's one of my favorite designs in this film." " For sure." " She's gorgeous." "And now we bring Sulley into the movie." "Sulley was a big challenge as a character, surprisingly." "Because he is such a sweet guy in the first film." "And we all felt like he's a sweet guy." " But he kind of is a boring guy." " Right." " Who is he, really?" " Without Boo to react to and without the situation, we didn't know who he was and who he needed to be." "And so we did several versions of how Sulley belongs in this movie." "We did versions where he wasn't a good Scarer." "But that just didn't seem believable." "He was designed to be great." "And so in the end we just said, "Go with the design." "Make him great." ""But he's 18 and he can be flawed, make him cocky about being great."" "And it's Mike's movie, so through Mike's eye, it's okay for him to be kind of a jerk." "As long as it's fun, a fun jerk, it's okay." "And so that was really a turning point." "And it also helped with the conflict between the two guys." "Setting up Sulley and seeing Sulley for the first time as this cool guy." "Allison Rutland did this amazing animation of him just being the biggest jerk in the world, but just owning..." "I just said, "He owns the place." "He's comfortable everywhere."" "And I was so blown away by how over the top she went, and how she captured this jock machismo energy so well." "Yeah." "But still in an entertaining way." "That line of just not making him too unappealing." "This is Archie the Scare Pig." "And, Kelsey, you storyboarded this sequence, I believe." "Yeah, with Stanley Moore." "We split this one up." "And we just wanted, again, something that felt crazy college," ""What in the world is Sulley up to?"" "And there was a lot of question with Archie." "Like, "Is Archie a student?" "What is Archie?" ""If he's a monster, how do you make a monster as sort of an animal?"" "And I think, in the character design, in looking at my own tiny Japanese Chin dog's eyes, which are constantly walleyed, we thought, "The walleyed thing really works well."" "It's always funny." "That's all you got to do is make the walleyed eyes on any character." ""Look, he's hilarious."" "And then the Art Department found these images of goats that have these rectangular pupils." "And it's the kind of thing you couldn't make up." "You have the "Winds of Change" poster back there." "An homage to Randall's quote from the first film." "The Art Department just did such an amazing job of every little detail of this dorm room." "All those graphics on Mike's side, all of those posters." "Frightening Frank McCay, which was a call back to an earlier character that was in the movie." "Yes, it's the guy that gives Mike his hat at the beginning, voiced by John Krasinski." "Mike doesn't really care about catching the Fear Tech's mascot, so we needed to get something that would make Mike want to go after him." "Do you remember we actually had a notebook?" "It was his notebook filled with his notes." "And that's what Archie took." "And we had an editor." "She said, "Well, have him grab his hat." ""You already have that built in, how precious that hat is to him," ""so have him grab that."" "It's funny how often the obvious choice is right in front of your face." "You do all this work to come up with something, and you've already got the built-in thing right there." "I thought John Goodman did a great job with this playful Sulley." "We keep referring to this as the "Pig Chase" Sulley." "This is when we're really like, "That's him!" "That's him!" ""He's fun, he's entertaining, he loves being there." ""But he's a bit of a goof off," ""and he doesn't really work that hard, and everything comes easy to him."" "Absolutely." "Absolutely." "I think John really just captured right away." "He seemed more okay with changing this character than anyone." "And making him this wild guy." "And I think for Billy Crystal, what was so great was to see him..." "Mike is still funny and wild and crazy Mike." "But for this movie to work, you have to believe in Mike's dream, he has to have sincere moments, and he has to be this real guy you believe in." "And I think Billy did such a great job of understanding that and finding the line between keeping him the guy we know, but also letting him be sweet and sincere and honest." "So again, parties." "John was so great about, "You got to have parties."" "There's people wrestling in the back." " Guys break dancing and..." " Plastic blow-up pool." "There's a guy back there eating out of a garbage can." "Go back and pause it." "In real college, all those things would be on fire." "But we couldn't go that far." "And then we have Johnny Worthington played by Nathan Fillion beautifully." "And we wanted to go for these really great fraternity, really talented, like Sulley." "But in order to make them different, they're also more refined, and probably come from wealthier backgrounds." "And for some reason, all the great college movies seem to take place in the '80s." "Now we always want our worlds to be timeless." "But we did keep a touch of '80s in mind as we went for it." "It just sort of worked well." "And Johnny is your classic '80s villain even with the popped collar." "Popped collar?" "Yeah." "Yeah." "Dice Tsutsumi had these great ideas about color." "And he is our Lighting Lead, along with JC Kalache who was our DP." "And the two of them together talked early on about how we were going to use light." "And how we were going to use it to separate Mike and Sulley." "And I want you to just watch the film." "And I'll point out here and there moments where Mike is either in the shadow or in the light, and Sulley is either in the shadow or light." "They're always separated by light and shadow when they're not getting along." "And you'll also see when they are coming together how we bring them together in the light." "And also how light is used to show characters making decisions." "You'll see them oftentimes when they change they'll be stepping into light." "So this sequence was again, number one, just a fun opportunity to see more college and more college experience, but really to show how Mike could beat Sulley." "To really make this seem believable, we really wanted to show," "Mike has more of the smarts, he has more of the knowledge." "And you want to come out of this sequence feeling like," ""Mike really has an opportunity to be a better Scarer than Sulley."" "In story, you have a lot of scenes." "Some of them are really scripted out." "You get a scene and you have every line of dialogue there and you work with it, you can push and pull a little bit here and there to make it better." "But then there's sequences like this sequence, where it's more built on a montage." "You do a lot of writing when you are just given basically a broad outline." "Like you just pitched, this is the point of the scene is that it's the passing of the baton of who's on top." "And we try a million different things, and this montage is a result of that." "Alfred Molina, who did the voice of Professor Knight, another great, fun guy, just super..." "A lot funnier than a lot of the roles he plays." "He often plays very serious roles." "I was very terrified to meet him at first, but he turned out to be a lovely man." "This is great." "This was added from..." "Pete Docter gave a note," ""I'd love to see..." "They need to be competing more." ""I need to see them trying to one-up each other."" "So we came up with that little treadmill beat which I think is really funny." "We did several different versions of this." "Every now and then, there are shots that you just do over and over again, 'cause you want them to be great and you want to plus the humor." "Right." "I think that particular one, the treadmill one, is probably three or four times longer than it was originally, right?" "We just wanted more." "When in doubt, make it longer." "So now you see Mike is on top." "So Mike is now in the light, and he's succeeding." "And Sulley is now in the shadow." "So, usually when we get the story feeling in a good spot, sometimes we'll have opportunities where we look back, we're like, "Where can we punch up the humor?"" "Actually, right there was a great example, where it was an opportunity like," ""We could do something really funny there with monsters and finals."" "And that was a result from one of our gag sessions where we all get together in the same room, and it's not people who are just on our crew." "Actually, we'll get people from other movies and all get together in a room and coming up with, hopefully, funny stuff." " Hopefully funny." " Hopefully." "It was fun to redesign the simulators from the first film." "We loved this idea that they would be..." "Not only are they 10, 15 years earlier than the simulators in the other film," "Monsters, Inc., but that they would probably be hand-me-downs already to the school." "So if the one in Monsters, Inc." "had this super realistic kid, these would be these sort of crash-test dummies, these beat-up looking simulator kids." " I love this guy." " I know." "He's great." "It's sort of unclear whether this is a good Scare or a bad Scare intentionally." "We make it kind of good and kind of bad." "We did several versions of that Scare." " The Seasonal Creep and Crawl?" " Yeah." "We tried one that was very literal." "Raph Suter animated a version that, literally, he turned into a Christmas tree." "It made us all laugh." "It made us all laugh in dailies." "A lot of times that'll happen, and then you realize," ""This makes no sense in context." "What is this?"" " Yeah." " But it was funny." "Another tricky thing with a college movie is finding the stakes." "Because college is a wonderful privilege by its nature, and so it's hard to really feel like there's a life and death stake with the college movie." "So one of the first things we said is, "Well, then we've got to kick them out."" "First thing to do is just get them out of college, or at least get them out of the program so that they can be underdogs." "And what better way to kick them out than to have them do it to each other?" "I think we got John and Billy recording together for this moment, right?" "'Cause it was so important to get them this big face off moment." "Even the roaring and growling and stuff is just back and forth is so great." "Whenever we could, we'd get John and Billy together." "We couldn't always do it, but they wanted to do it, too." "And it would lift the energy up in a scene so much when the two guys were together, 'cause they make each other laugh." "But then they also play off each other beautifully in these emotional scenes." "And it was just so fun." "The hardest part was just getting them back on track, 'cause they'd be goofing around and telling jokes." "Sean Hayes and Dave Foley, we also recorded together every chance we got." "Again, they'd be giving each other jokes, pitching each other ideas, and it was just..." "I could have sat and watched it all day, but I couldn't." "Yeah, a lot of choreographed light and shadow as we mentioned earlier, and this scene was no exception." "Again, you have Hardscrabble going into light," "Mike and Sulley in shadow." "And you'll see them stepping forward to make a decision." "And there's always this back and forth." "We always wanted to keep Hardscrabble backlit as much as we could." "It kind of fit her better, it made her more intimidating." "Another thing we went to great effort to do in this scene was to make sure that Mike and Sulley's fighting is what caused them to get in trouble." "But we also wanted to make sure that" "Hardscrabble was being a little too hard on them." "In other words, the punishment still seemed unfair." "That was the only way we really felt that you'd be rooting for Mike and Sulley to get back into the Scaring program." "It was a tricky balance to make whatever Mike and Sulley did big enough to get her attention, but not so big that it felt justified to be kicked out." "I love the little additions that all the animators add, that little glance she gives him." "I'm constantly blown away by what the animators add to every one of these shots, and all the little subtle nuances." "And in particular, finding comedy where we'd never really thought there would be comedy." " I know, yeah, yeah." " For example, this decision," "Guilherme Jacinto made the choice to have her not turn around." "And I fought him on it." "I thought, "I don't know." But again, just a smart decision." "The best thing for me to do is just get out of the way, I've found." "That's what directing is." "Everybody knows what they're doing." "So, yeah, we really just wanted this to land." "This is the big turning point in the film." "And really feel like Mike's dreams are dashed." "Yeah." "You're really bound to feel the devastation here." "And just come straight out and say what is his biggest fear, and that is that he's not scary." "And she just says it." "This scene was storyboarded by Brian Fee." "Brian has a weird habit of drawing characters with dumb bowties on." "And he had this in his boards, and I said," ""I don't care what he ends up looking like, but keep that bowtie on."" "That really makes that guy look ridiculous." "Voiced actually by Pixar's own Greg Dykstra, who is a sculptor here, and we just thought he did such a great job of being bland." "Yeah, we tried to get other people but he was just too perfect." "In one of our brain trust meetings," "I think it was John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton," "I think even Brad Bird who really felt like" "Sulley should be almost obsessed with Mike at this point." "For the first time in Sulley's life, he's hit a wall." "And Sulley's never had a failure in his life up to this point." "He doesn't know what happened." "He knows Mike was clearly responsible and he should just be stalking him." "We don't know what he's going to do when he gets ahold of him." "He doesn't know either." " It's brewing." " And it all started with Mike." "So that's why he's waiting outside the door here." "And then the Scare Games." "This was an interesting one to wrap our heads around." "I remember early on, we didn't know how much this was being run by the students and how much it was being run by the actual university, the faculty." "And we ended up going a little bit of a middle ground." "'Cause we knew we needed Hardscrabble to value these games so that she cared whether or not Mike and Sulley won them." "That's why we made her the one who created the games to help it really matter to her." "This character of Brock, we knew that we just wanted him to be this wild guy, and just be kind of always on." "In Animation, we always said," ""Even when he's not moving, he should be breathing."" "He's one of those guys that's just breathing all the time." "Then at some point, we started to realize that he turned into Mark Andrews, the director of Brave." "And not on purpose, not on purpose." "If you've ever met Mark, he's a very enthusiastic guy." "That's right." "Always breathing." "This is a great example of the crowds in this film, and how many enormous crowd shots we had." "And I believe this was one of the first times, correct me if I'm wrong, Kori, that as a director I got to see the crowds in the layout." "That's right, we usually did it in Animation, the next step down the pipeline, but we backed it up this time." "So it was great for me making choices about shots and actually getting to see a very rough idea of how many monsters would be in the background." "J.D. Northrup, who's the Crowds Tech Lead, and Adam Burke, who's the Crowds Animation Lead, really did a phenomenal job with their team, as far as planning what crowds would be where, or the smartest way to put those crowds into the shot" "and get the most bang out of their buck." "And it really creates a feeling of a really rich college." "Terry and Terri only have two heads for that joke." "That joke was written." "We designed them around that." "Now we then did more with it than that." "But sometimes that's how characters are born." "This is our first moment of Randall making a bad decision." "Randy is choosing the cool kids over his friends, which, in the end, is Randy's undoing." "He's choosing popularity." "He's choosing notoriety over people that actually care about him." "The amazing thing when it comes to crowds animation, one of the biggest tricks is making it interesting, but not distracting." "And the best crowds animators are so good at it." "And it's unfortunate because, if you're doing a great job, hopefully, no one is looking at what you're doing." "But if the guy in the background is waving and blinking wildly, and jumping up and down, it might be great animation, but we always have to lose those characters." "Now we have the Oozma Kappa house." "We really felt like this story really came to life once we came up with the Oozma Kappa team." "The writers, Dan Gerson and Robert Baird, were such a huge part of finding the voice of these characters." "And I think we all really felt like, once they came into the story, it just added this level of fun." "They served as kind of a surrogate Boo in some ways." "Mike and Sulley's relationship is so fun in the first film, 'cause we get to see them react to this child in the room." "And Oozma Kappa, in a lot of ways, they're like their children." "They're these very sweet, sincere, innocent characters." "And Mike and Sulley get to be these bickering parents around them." "Yeah, this is one of the first sequences." "Is this the first sequence?" "The first sequence we put into production, yeah." "Yeah, this is really..." "And usually, that happens when you get a scene that's working really well, and this one just kind of clicked, and hasn't really changed for a very long time, actually." "There's little changes, especially with Terry and Terri here." "We adjusted their characters from the beginning." "Actually, most of that moment was reanimated because Dave Foley and Sean Hayes improvised their introduction based on some basic ideas." "And it was really fun, 'cause they recorded together." "Similar to John and Billy, recorded together sometimes." "But we always got Sean and Dave together to play off each other, which was a lot of fun." "We got together early on in developing these characters and talked about, "Who do we want them to be," ""and how can they help support Mike and Sulley's story?"" "We liked the idea of two bickering twins to just represent two guys who aren't getting along." "Very literally, that's what Mike and Sulley need to do is get along." "Yeah, they're not in sync with one another." "And then the idea that Squishy..." "We started out just wanting a character that was cuter and sweeter looking than Mike, but still ends up becoming scary, because we wanted to make sure that it wasn't Mike's looks that made him not scary," "it was sort of an indefinable quality about Mike." "The way he held himself, the way he performed, something." "And so we loved the idea of having a little guy who's even cuter than him that ends up being a great Scarer." "And then Art, he doesn't mean anything." "Art, we have no idea." "He's just a mystery." "We couldn't figure him out." "And then that became who he was." "I don't know anything about that guy." "He's just weird." "Yeah." "He's just that guy in college you know nothing about." "He still teaches him something." " I'm not sure what, but..." " Does he?" "Yes." "I have faith that he does." "Okay." "I'm going to watch this again and see if that's true." " I don't think it is." " Pay close attention." "This is a fun example of when storyboards and the set can't quite match up, but you can get the feel of it." "Jeff Pidgeon, who boarded the scene, had boarded this room so incredibly small." " It was basically a closet." " It was so tight." "And David Eisenmann, who's a Set Lead, we looked at it and said," ""Well, how can we get the feeling of it being really tight," ""without it literally being so small?"" "And so his team did a great job of just cluttering the room." "Even the way we lit the scene, just to give it that feeling of being really small without literally being the size of a closet." "I remember early on, I don't know if it was in boards or the early designs," "I remember seeing an exposed toilet in the corner of that room, which I thought was always hilarious." "I don't know why it's there." "There's a toilet in the corner." " It's more prison-like that way." " Exactly." "And then we have Mrs. Squibbles, who we love." "She's all of our moms wrapped up into one, played beautifully by Julia Sweeney." "We knew we wanted to have an initiation scene." "It's such a great college thing." "This scene was surprisingly difficult." "We loved this gag very early on." "But as often happens when it takes three to four years to make a film, things become less funny over time." "And so we felt like we had to make this funny again." "And in Animation, Michael Chen, who's the animator, did a phenomenal job of finding the funny again." "And John even pushed us, John Lasseter, to even make the joke a little longer." "Keep the dryer going even during this..." "This, which was intended to be a sweet moment, he's like, "They should be screaming over the dryer."" "And I love it, 'cause it takes the edge off a little bit." "It makes them kind of loveably inept and sweet." "There were also long debates as to whether or not Sulley should break the paddle or not." "A lot of people felt that it was too mean." " So we did a version where Sulley just..." " That was me, that was me." "Really?" "You were on the breaking paddle team?" " I don't remember that." " No, I was on the..." "Didn't want it broken." "Okay." "Yeah, I thought it was too mean up-front before we really knew who Sulley was." "Well, you weren't alone." "And we tried it." "We tried a version where he held the paddle up which actually looked worse." "It looked like he was going to hit them with it." "And he beat them to death with their own paddle." "So there were two different versions." "In the end, we realized that when something breaks it makes people laugh, for some reason." "It's funny." "John Goodman actually improvised that line. "Mom!"" "Actually, both of them did a little..." "Yeah." "And Billy Crystal improvised the line before it about the..." " The stable boy." " Princess and stable boy." "Kelsey, you actually had pitched the idea of showing them in that crowded room, bumping into each other, so that we would have this nice bookend in the scene later on when they're working together to see how perfectly they move as one." "Yeah." "See their growth." "Have them kind of change and, really, a lot of what that is, is reflecting what Terry and Terri have to go through." "But it was a great visual idea to show that." "This particular game, this first one, was one of the most difficult sequences on the film." "We really wanted to start off with a bang and something fun." "But it seemed, in every department, we struggled." "And the great thing is, in every department," "I feel so proud of what we finished with." "Story, for the longest time, we couldn't figure out what this should be, what the most legitimately dangerous thing would be." "And the clearest, too." "There are so many aspects of scaring that we wanted to cover." "And I feel like our first passes, there was so much stuff." "If you remember, they were running through multiple..." "I think they ran through 10 different door station areas, and each of them had their own theme." "It was like, "Avoid the Christmas decorations,"" "and, "Avoid the kids' drippy artwork stuff," and it was very complicated." "And it wasn't until Adrian boarded the urchin..." "He boarded an urchin gag for semester montage." "And we thought, "Boy, that's really funny."" "The urchin, when you touch it, you get bigger." "And so we lifted that from that sequence and put it into this one." "We're like, "They should be avoiding those urchins." ""That's really funny." "It could be really comical when they puff up and stuff."" "And so we knew we wanted them to run through an area with all these urchins, and initially I remember I was talking about, "Where should it be?"" "It should be at midnight, out in the middle of nowhere, like, "What did I get myself into?" type of environment." "We talked about like an open field, outside, the outskirts of the school." "I remember it was a meeting with Art and Story." "We were discussing where it could be," "I remember Kondo, Robert Kondo, saying..." "We kept referring to this as, "They're kind of underground games."" "And he said, "Well, let's literally have them underground in the sewers."" "And we're like, "Oh, my gosh, that's perfect."" "Everything just kind of just lined up." "It was a great example of having Art and Story together in a story meeting really paying off." "And Art being there to come up with a great idea like that." "Yeah." "It's great when you can go back and forth." "You're influencing each other." "I remember us going to a university dormitory, and we went up into the attic, and it was this space that reminds me a lot of what we have here, only this is kind of underground rather than above." "And the place was just spray painted with the history." "It'd be like, "John, 1968."" "They had all kinds of years of people who had been there, and it was covered with all this colorful graffiti, which I think was captured beautifully, like here." "It still feels like, even though you're in a sewer, you're like, "What's college-y about that?"" "But I don't know, it kind of goes hand in hand." "Right." "They've been coming here and doing this for a long time." "Yeah." "Yeah." "We hadn't planned to do this with the models." "The character department really had to push these characters and stretch them in ways they'd never planned." "And even figuring out the shading, the textures and how they move, and what they look like after they get stung." " It was a big group effort." " Yes." "It was very fun writing all Don's swear words, and hilarious hearing Joel Murray rattle them all off as loud as he could." "My favorite is "Oktoberfest."" "That's not in there." " No, we did not use that one." " That's an outtake." "As I was saying earlier, this was a tough scene for every department." "It took us a long time to figure it out in Story." "And then into Layout, it was very difficult getting this all to read." "Animation was very difficult, timing out where the urchins would be and which urchin would hit whom." "And once we finally got through that, then it was on to Lighting and this very original interesting lighting where these urchins are actually the light source is really cool, but it proved really hard to get readability." "And so it just felt like every department has this first Scare Game as a badge of honor to have gotten through." "I think we all came out just about as bruised and beat up as the Oozmas." " But all worth it." " Yes." "Amazing scene." "We had John Goodman and Billy Crystal stuff their mouths with bread to get this sort of swollen effect," "which was a lot of fun." "I knew that would lead to both of them kind of hamming it up." "And gave the animators something really broad to go off of." "Pushing these characters to have these broad designs and these big swollen faces was really difficult for the characters crew." "It was really John Lasseter who pushed us to make these even broader." "That's what he's so great at is..." "We had a couple of bumps on them, but he was like, "You're gonna want to read them from the back of the room," ""really swell them up." We were like, "Okay."" "This sequence was all about an opportunity to see Mike not listening to his coaching instincts." "Mike is somebody, even at the beginning of the movie, who can notice great qualities in people." "He's the one who mentions Randy should use his invisibility to his benefit." "But we always thought that, when Mike is backed up against the wall by Hardscrabble, he stops listening to that, and he starts panicking." "And he becomes a bad coach for a little while." "He's literally asking them not to be themselves in this scene." "Sometimes the simplest scenes are actually very difficult, especially in Layout." "The Layout DP, Matt Aspbury, was saying how this was a tricky scene." "Sometimes when you don't have a lot of fun, crazy camera moves, and you're just shooting people talking, to make it interesting can be very tough." "Lee Unkrich, director of Toy Story 3, was a big help for us, to sit down and help us figure out just how to make these scenes a little more interesting." "We really learned a lot from him." "I think in the boards, we just had them kind of running in place." "And he was saying, "Let's have them run up and down stairs," ""so at least you're getting that dynamic movement of up and down" ""rather than just have them static in one spot."" "Right." "I think we went through three or more, three or four or five locations, just looking for where this scene should happen." "Where should it be staged." "It's fun." "It's more like a live action movie, where we walk, we went around the campus and tried a little bit of everything." "Again, Mike and Sulley separated by the light." "Mike is in the dark." "Sulley's in the light." "And the misfits are actually in dappled light." "They're in their own." "Everybody is separated." "Nobody's on the same page." "But you'll see Mike walk over to the dapple light here to represent that he's kind of at least joining them more than Sulley." "We really went crazy with this light stuff, but it was a lot of fun." "So the idea of having a library in the film, this was a long time ago." "We actually did old, old versions of this where we had them training in the library, and that eventually evolved into a different scene where the event was actually out in a cave somewhere." "Rather than the librarian, they were sneaking past the MU mascot I believe, right?" "And it was a big dragon, more or less, right?" "And they just needed to sneak by and get their flag off of the dragon's nose or something." "And I remember, at some point, we decided," ""Why don't we combine those two?"" "You always want to find something in the human world where you tiptoe through a kid's bedroom, some sort of equivalent that would hopefully be college-y that they could do here to train." "And sneaking and tiptoeing through a library just felt perfect." "The dragon made the story point, but it just kind of felt a little foreign, like it belonged in a different film." "And the librarian, we always loved the librarian." "She fulfilled that need that we had." "Being the monster world, the librarian could be a giant horrifying anything." "We worked really hard in Art to make sure she didn't look like Roz." "Early versions of her, we kept just redesigning Roz." "Ricky Nierva did a great job of changing her and really finding an original take on her that we really love." "I remember you tried very weird stuff early on and I remember..." "Do you guys remember this?" "The librarian would grab somebody and put them in her mouth and she'd spit them out a blowhole at the top of her head." "That'd be a fun toy." " Why didn't we do that?" " Blowholes were too hard." "We don't have blowhole technology." "You used to see all the other misfits getting thrown out in really funny ways." "They all got thrown out by the librarian, the same way the kid at the beginning did." "It was really entertaining." "Everyone was laughing at them being thrown out." "But we realized it didn't work from a story point of view." "Once we realized," ""No, actually it should be Sulley who's endangering them" ""and the misfits who come to the rescue."" "And even though the scene is great now," "I remember at first a lot of people said, "The other scene was funnier."" "But we figured, it doesn't matter that the other scene is funnier, you have to do what's right for the story." "And a lot of times, you have to do that in Story." "You have to get rid of entertainment that you've all fallen in love with, in favor of doing what's right for the story." "And I always feel like, we'll think of something else entertaining and funny to go along with it." "And I really think that the story team did." "They really kept the humor in this scene in a completely different way." "Yeah." "In that version, too, what was really broken about it, was Sulley was really the one who was the broken member of the team." "And Mike in the older versions, he was kind of on board with the misfits." "And we realized we needed to carry that bad coach that was started really in misfit frat, where it's so clearly the two of them, they're so caught up in their own competition, in their own need for success," "that they don't really care about these guys." "We discovered early on that Art is capable of doing some pretty crazy things." "So it was fun to have a moment to really get to showcase what he can do." "Tentacles are very difficult to animate, so these wide shots are pretty impressive and pretty difficult to do." "But you wouldn't know it looking at 'em." "Yeah, they're great." "This next scene is another fun example of light and shadow." "Literally, as these guys are walking, Sulley is in shadow." "And then Mike is in light." "We've spent all this time really trying to craft every little moment of that." "Which was so fun." "Again, I don't know if anyone will notice it, but I love it." "I think people notice, but don't know that they notice." "Yeah, yeah, that's how a lot of things work." "The cinematography, and lighting, and color, it's all subliminal, it's, hopefully, supporting the story, and not calling attention to itself, but everything is working together." "This idea of going to a party came very late in the story process." "We always knew, in versions of the story we had, that we wanted these guys to be humiliated." "But we really just kept thinking," ""It needs to be a bigger, more public humiliation."" "We added a lot of this here, where they're actually very nervous to go in." "Initially, they were just excited to go in." "They just went in, they had a good time." "But we felt like, when the story progressed that way, you didn't feel so much for them, so we added this little bit of them being nervous coming in here, so you kind of feel for them" "when they actually are embraced into this community." "This idea of going to a party was really fun, too, 'cause it's college." "The more parties, the better." "And there was something fun about seeing these guys actually get to go inside the RORs' house, and get an opportunity to see what the positive side of being a Scarer could look like for them, or at least what they think it is." "And it's just fun to watch 'em dance." "I like this dancing, this goth dancing." "It's really just standing." "It's really..." "Yeah, standing with attitude." "Don." "Awkward dance move." "That looks like me at my wedding." "And this moment is great here with Squishy and Sulley." "James Robertson, he's one of the story artists, he and his friend used to do this, so James pitched this idea as a way for these two to bond." "We always liked the idea that Squishy really looks up to Sulley." "It came from Sulley not wanting to join the group." "And we know we wanted to have him kind of reluctantly join them." "I remember Adrian came in early the next day and boarded this whole thing out." "Yeah." "There was a deadline of 9:00 the next morning, and so he came in at 6:00 a.m. and did that from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m." "And it was brilliant." "One pass." "This scene used to be in the beginning of the film, when we had a moment in the movie where Mike, little Mike, when he was a little kid," "was at a Scare museum and he saw this Hall of Scarers with all these great giant monsters" "and little tiny him dreaming of one day being a Scarer." "We always liked that moment." "We always liked the visual of showing what Mike was up against." "And it was nice to find a place for it," "I think, at a really nice time in the movie, to remind you of his dream, and to remind you that his dream was kind of working out." "And as I said before, reflections are very difficult." "And this one was really hard, because it had to tell a little bit of story." "Rob Russ really did a great job of actually animating him into this shape with the help of Lighting." "It was a real team effort to make that beat play." "This was a hard thing, too, I remember." "How do you disguise this moment?" "How do we disguise them toasting the Oozma Kappas, and one thing I think worked really well was he's calling on all the teams that are left, so we'll go individually." "It's difficult, too, because they're trying to make the point that these guys are cute by making them cuter, which was tough." "And again, another moment seems simple, but just finding this final image of how to make these guys really, really comically cute was a difficult thing between departments." "Posing it in Animation and designing it in Art, and doing these phenomenal effects of paint coming down, it was very difficult." "But again, it was John Lasseter who really pushed us to say," ""Don't worry so much of the logic of how they ended up looking like this."" "Yeah." "Yeah." ""It's in the moment, they're captured." ""Just get there and work backward." And he was right." "This sequence was also about just pushing the humiliation." "Just how embarrassing can this be." "And we went for it." "If you look online at pranks college kids do to each other, this is not that outrageous." "No." "Didn't you say your brother had this happen to him?" "Yes, he came back from work, and his whole office was posted with pictures of himself." "And there was no stone unturned." "Even for weeks, he'd open his drawer and there'd be a picture of him in there." "So we knew we could not possibly take this too far." "One-upmanship is a course I think they teach in college." "Everyone has a minor in that." "And, yeah, a major in shaming, and a minor in one-upmanship." "You see a lot of monsters wearing T-shirts, which is a very difficult simulated effect." "One of the other difficult ones was backpacks." "You see a lot of monsters wearing backpacks in the film." "And strangely enough, it is very hard." "Unfortunately, it's one of these things maybe not too many people know is very difficult." "But Christine Waggoner and her team in Simulation just did such a great job of making this world feel real and supporting any story point, like a lot of monsters wearing T-shirts." "It's very difficult, but if it's funny and if it makes them look more humiliated, they were right there ready to do it." "They just asked, "Can they be tight?"" "Yes." "Also Christine said, "Could you keep any tentacles off the grass?" ""It's very hard to have tentacles intersecting with the grass."" "And we always joked, we need to put a "no tentacles on the grass" sign." "And we never did." "Sorry, Christine." "Don's story has always been one that I really love." "He really represents, almost more than anyone in the group, that idea of selling yourself short, or it never being too late to make a big change." "I think that all the Oozmas represent that." "But Don really represents it more than any." "I like that Chet has gone and gotten more stuff." "He's got a hat and a mug." "We assume they also made tote bags, and..." " Key chains." " Right." "This idea of going to Monsters, Incorporated was one that, I suppose, came somewhat early-ish." "But it was an idea that really solidified a lot of the emotion we were going for in the film." "I remember Jason Katz pitching the idea that Mike's purpose for taking them was to show them that there's more than one type of Scarer." "And I think that that really affected the movie in a lot of ways." "Originally, in the film, this was the first time we were going to reveal Monsters, Incorporated." "We later added the moment at the beginning where Mike goes, just because we wanted Mike to fall in love with scaring, we really felt we needed to see it." "It changed a little bit of the way we played the scene, but not much." " Mike is still introducing it to them." " Right." "Really what Mike is doing is taking these guys to the place where he fell in love with scaring." "And he's kind of taking them to hallowed ground, where his dream was born." "It was fun to show them sneaking around, all that back area of Monsters, Inc." "That's all stuff we never got to see, and so the Sets Department and Art Department really needed to look at the first film and say," ""Well, what would be back there?" "What kind of pipes and things?"" " And they also..." " Like a window, for instance." "Which is not there." "We added this window conveniently." "But also, it was fun to go back and think about the technology." "What would the door stations have looked like?" "And if you look at the original movie, they're much smaller." "We bulked them up in the same way that a cell phone would be bigger." "The scoreboard is more old-fashioned than..." "I think even the cords behind the door stations are bigger and bulkier." " If not there at all, I think." " Yeah." "I think you're right." "Fun little details that few people will notice." "But probably cost millions of dollars." " All worth it." " Yes." "We wanted the misfits to see characters that represented them." "Squishy sees this cute, adorable little ball." "And Terry and Terri see a three-headed Scarer." "And Don sees this cool older guy." "And Art sees..." "Art, again, he has nothing to do with the story." "Quit trying to make him more important than he is." "I'm just kidding." "Art, he's off looking at the stars." "He's behind 'em, turned around the other way." ""I think I see Jupiter!"" "It's a fun moment of Mike and Sulley bonding there." "And it was animated by Andrew Gordon, one of the original animators of Mike in the first film." "And he really adds a nice familiarity to that scene." " It feels like classic Mike." " Yeah, it does." "Our first versions were pretty close to this." "Then we thought we needed to add more, to show more teamwork or something, but I remember..." "Usually, adding more is how you solve problems in filmmaking." "I don't know what went wrong." "It was funny stuff." "There was a great gag where they were running away from the security guards, and Art said, "Keep going, I'll hold them off!"" "And he grabs a pipe..." "We could have had an action figure where it was Art with a pipe that beats police officers to death." "Why did we get rid of that?" "That line of Art saying, "I can't go back to jail,"" "was a moment where the one line can create a character." "That was one of the early lines where we thought," ""What?" "What is this guy's past?"" "And it really inspired us later to say," ""He should just be this bizarre mystery that we know nothing about."" "And it really made him come to life for us as a character." "Yeah, he was really born on that line." "We wanted Sulley to literally be carrying these guys." "He hasn't been very supportive of them up until now, so we thought it would be fun to have him literally carrying them." "This was a beat added, too, later." "We thought we could have a lot of fun with the mom." "The mom is driving your getaway car." "We thought would be hilarious, and the whole seatbelt thing was all added." "My Aunt Jeanette used to always say," ""Do you boys want candy," before we'd leave." "And the candy would be Certs." "Like, spearmint Certs." ""Okay, I'd love candy." "I don't know what that is."" "This sequence was primarily boarded by Adrian Molina." "He's a really brilliant visual storyteller." "And he's a great story artist, and he's a great writer as well." "And he did a really wonderful job of telling this story." "Yeah, a lot of times you look at the work that everyone's done, and sometimes, you can really see an individual's thumbprint there." "You can really see Adrian on this one." "This is all him." "And we just give him a loose assignment, and he goes for it." "Right." "You kind of go, "It needs to start here and end here," and, "Go."" " Yeah, pretty much." " "Yeah." "See ya!" ""I'm going to take the week off." "But let me know how it works out."" "And Dice felt really strongly about having this rain moment." "He wanted to show how important it was to these guys to train." "And really felt like literally seeing them in the rain, really seeing them in the morning, seeing a real variety of time passage," "it was very important to him." "And I totally agree." "It really shows how much this means to them." "There's some great use of color in this scene, too." "We really planned to have green start to overtake the sequence as we went forward." "As the Oozma Kappas are succeeding." "Another gag session thing that we added at the end." "It was Josh Cooley who suggested that, as the signs pop out, they have an audio clip that's played along with them, which I thought was a great addition." "I love that you don't learn that they breathe fire till that moment." "For the longest time, we had Don breathing fire." "That was the thing that he needed to learn." "He was kind of always coughing, and like, "It's the heartburn."" "He was literally taking pills to keep down the real monster inside him." "Which was this heartburn that turned into real flames." "Some very broad animation by Travis Hathaway." "These are great, great poses." "If you just paused on the picture of Sulley with jazz hands, and made that a publicity still or a poster, it would look ridiculous." "Why didn't we use that?" "It should be on kids' shirts." "Yeah." "Again, here's the bookend to the moment that you had set up, Kelsey, of these guys not working together." "And seeing them flow as one." "Again, beautifully animated by Michael Chen." "And it works really well with the drum line." "We always wanted this drum line music, that sort of drum corps college feel." "Here we have a little cameo by the great Bill Hader." " Playing the referee." " As the referee." "He also plays the slug." "We had a lot of discussions, too, as to how all these Scarers hide in this space." "That was an addition by Scott Clark." "He thought, "He should be hiding as a globe, actually."" "Initially, he was hiding behind the globe, and Scott said," ""Hey, what if he actually is the globe, and he spins around?"" "So it's pretty fun." "We get together with Story and Animation, and brainstorm with the actual set once it's created." "A lot of times, we'll take a pass in Story and then the set will be designed, and we'll have to reimagine things a little bit." "Again, it's great when you can go back and forth, and inspire each other and come up with better and better solutions." "Absolutely." "I always like to look at Claire whenever Brock's talking." "Claire is the president to the right." "Just always uninterested." "Looks sick of him." "It's fun." "Just look at her when he's talking." "I remember there was debate over whether or not" "Johnny should actually slap him, but like you said, hitting is funny." "Was that what I said?" "But yeah, you're right." "So you'll see that even the lighting in the cul-de-sac area is now green." "It was red in the sequence when Mike and Sulley first met to represent the RORs." "And now we just have that subtle feeling of green, just to celebrate them." "We had a moment where Hardscrabble tried to explain her point by telling a joke." "She told a very weird joke in a very dry way, her point being that you can know how to tell a joke, but if you're not funny, it won't work, and scaring is the same way." "We thought it was an interesting way to describe what Mike lacked, but it just didn't quite play." " You realized you didn't really need it." " Yeah." "And what I like about that, too, is that Sulley is the one putting it all together." "She doesn't really explicitly say it." "So, Mike has his retainer on here." "We wanted the retainer to make Mike look younger, but we also wanted him to be able to take it off because the whole movie is about whether or not he's scary." "Well, originally he had braces, and we thought," ""If he's wearing braces the whole time," ""maybe someone could make the argument" ""that if he just lost the braces, he'd be scary."" "Scary, yeah." "We were like, "How can we have both?"" "And I remember my wife saying, "Well, don't they have retainers?"" "I thought, "Yeah, exactly." ""You can put them in, and take them out."" "Obviously, this scene we want to subtly say that he's not quite scary and so he's wearing it." "And Animation had a tough job of how to make it look like Mike was really trying his hardest, but also make it look a little bit off." "And one of the things we realized is we were animating him with an angry brow, which is just when your brow is down, pointed down in the middle." "Scott Clark, who's the Lead Animator, and I were looking at it, and we realized, "Well, if we just put that brow all the way up," ""it would still look like he was being intense, but it would be a little off."" "Yeah." "Yeah." "Tom Myers, our Sound Designer, designed really great roars for Mike." "It was a tough job we had to make them build." "We had to trick the audience a little bit into feeling like," ""Well, maybe Mike has a shot."" "And it isn't until Sulley makes this face that we realize," ""No, that's not good enough."" "And I think he did a great job of finding that fine line between scary and not so scary." "Yeah." "So originally, we recorded this alma mater with the whole crew of Monsters University." "The whole crew got into a room and recorded it." "We weren't able to use that version for the film, but I believe that version is in the trailer, right?" "It is." "And I think it'll be available on the soundtrack." "I think, Kelsey, this was your idea to actually have an alma mater to, again, always looking for fun college stuff." "You pitched the idea of them singing this song." "Yeah, yeah." "We had a fight song at the beginning." "I remember at my school, particularly formal events like graduation, we'd always sing this alma mater." "And it's just something I thought would be really funny to have as this kind of serious song sung by a bunch of colorful, goofy monsters." "Yes." "Originally, when we were coming up with this final competition, we had a giant obstacle course that led up to this final Scare where they went through all the things they'd learned so far." "They went through the urchins again, they had to hide again, they had to do the sort of "scare the teenager and not the student."" "Yeah, the maze type thing." "We felt like it would make the scene more exciting and energetic, and a nice call back to all those things, a way for them to use all their skills." "But it was really just..." "It wasn't working." "It didn't seem to make sense." "It felt like filler." "We weren't sure that the scene would be exciting enough if they just went in and scared, but we found a way to get the same feel of" "that obstacle course in the room." "When we were working on this..." "This is another case where we wanted to make the Scares fun." "But they actually have to look somewhat scary." "We wanted to show that the RORs are great, and that they're a formidable team, and that they're tough to beat." "So we wanted their Scares to look pretty scary." "But John Lasseter came in and was looking at some of the animation we did with the misfits." "And he said, "You need to push them, too." ""If we're going to believe that they're winning," ""they have to be scarier, broader Scares for the misfits."" "And I'm so glad he did." "We really then pushed it, and the animators had a lot of fun." "We went to a lot of work to figure out how Sulley could rig the system for Mike, but not for the misfits." "We wanted to make it feel like the misfits, the Oozma Kappa team, had actually done their Scares successfully," "and that it was only Mike who Sulley had tampered with." "It was only his Scare." "And so, that was part of setting up Mike going last in the beginning there, and then setting up this idea that each Scare has a difficulty level, and it's only Mike's that was turned down to an easier level." "Yeah, and when we make decisions like that, sometimes, we'll go back earlier into the movie, and we actually added to the scene where they get kicked out, where Professor Knight actually shows those and establishes that he's setting them to the highest level." "So it's not coming out of nowhere at this point." "We've already set it up earlier." "It was a great opportunity for, as I mentioned earlier," "Tom Myers to not just do roars for every Scarer." "When we were writing this, we just had monsters saying," ""Roar," over and over again." "And Tom really added a lot of original creepy sounds to these characters." "And the animators even took a pass at really finding something original that the monsters could do." "So it was another opportunity to open up the world a little bit." "This was a great change I remember us doing." "Sulley was initially not going up against Randall." "And I believe it was James Robertson, one of our Story Artists, who said," ""You know what?" "We should put these guys head-to-head for the first time." ""There's such a rivalry between the two of them in the first film." ""We should do it here, we should have them go head-to-head" ""and have Sulley beat Randall for the first time" ""and actually see it on film."" "And it's nice, 'cause it explains why Randall is so competitive with Sulley." "Yeah, the birth of that rivalry right here." "It was great hearing Steve Buscemi say this line." "He plays Randy slightly different in the film." "That's right." "Yeah." "But then when he did this line, it was just so familiar, and I got a little chill in my spine when I heard him do it." "We actually talked a lot about Sulley's roar." "Sulley does a lot of roars in the film, and it feels like a lot of what Mike teaches him is that it's not just about being loud." "So conceptually, we thought it would be nice if Sulley didn't do a big roar." "But entertainment-wise, it felt odd for Sulley to come in and growl or hiss or something." "We thought, "You know what?" "You really just want to see him roar."" "It feels right." "It has the right idea." "This is another case where we actually pushed Mike to look scary." "We broke the rules a little bit." "We wanted the audience to get caught up in the moment." "It's more about how Mike felt the Scare went in that scene." "And we felt it was really important to feel like you were really seeing the end of this movie," "that this could have been the end of the film in order to put you in Mike's head for what's to come." "Kelsey, you pitched the idea of Mike hearing those voices again in his head." "And when you first did, I thought, "Well, that's stupid."" " I thought it would be..." " As you do with most of my ideas." "I just thought it could come off a little cheesy." "But, boy, it's one of these cases where sometimes, if it feels right..." "And when we heard it, it really felt right." "It was really the right idea." "But..." "You need to listen to me more." "Yes. "Listen to the voice in my head that is Kelsey."" "In particular this scene, Crowds really pushed the envelope for me, personally, when I remember seeing this fully animated." "I always felt something for Mike here." "But it wasn't until they really got in with the crowds where they actually rush the field, that suddenly I had this rush of emotion that was added to it." "That was fantastic." "It's great when a department can add to the story and add to the feeling." "This is a nice case where Dice and JC have made a lighting choice here." "That you'll notice the lighting is just ever so slightly sicklier." "A little bit yellow-ier." "A little bit off what it was in the scene before." "Just a little hint that something's coming up, something's not quite right." "We always wanted this to have that feeling of you're backstage and at the Oscars, and you've just won an Academy Award, and everyone's left, and you can't believe your dream came true." "In a lot of these shots during this conversation, the Scare School is behind Sulley." "We always tried to, whenever we could, have the Scare School behind them during these big conversations, when Hardscrabble's talking to Sulley about Mike." "Just so that it was..." "It's the goal, and that it was always present." "Their dream was always present." "We needed the gauge to be kind of easy to do." "In early versions of the drawings, it was a lot of wires that had been rigged around." "And we thought, "Well, Sulley, he's not studying engineering at the school."" "Yeah." "John and Billy recorded this scene together." "And a lot of times when they record together, they do these great comic scenes and they play off each other." "But this was a great example of how recording them together really brought out an emotional scene and some great dramatic acting." "Remember the first time Billy saw this sequence, and I think it was when he really saw the potential and the emotion of the film." "I think he was blown away when he realized that," ""Sulley really tells Mike he doesn't have it?" ""That's harsh."" "We always felt like Squishy really admires Sulley, that there's a hero worship there." "I remember telling the animators," ""This is as if Superman just walked out of a bank having robbed it." ""That should be the reaction on Squishy's face." ""You should really feel like his hero let him down."" "And I love the little "bloop," last little light going off there on Sulley." "I think it was a great touch." "This was surprisingly hard to do, the dialogue of them walking out." ""What exactly do they say?" "It's not too distracting?"" "You know, yeah." "So reflections are very difficult to do." "And we have lots of them in the film in trophies and in mirrors." "I'm not exactly sure how it works, but Animation can't actually see the reflection when they're doing it, and Lighting has to go and show them what it looked like." "It's very, very difficult." "This jacket that Sulley's holding, there was a continuity issue with the jacket." "Something that no human being would ever discover." "And Edgar Rodriguez, who was one of the sim artists, said that it was bothering him." "And I thought, "Look, no one's ever going to notice it."" "But then I thought, "It's going to drive him crazy."" "I said, "All right." "You got one thing." ""You got one thing that only you will ever notice that we'll fix."" "Everybody gets one thing to just say," ""Can we please fix this so I don't go nuts?"" "So that was his." "It was very important to us to show the consequences of cheating, that what Sulley did was wrong, and that he pays for it." "We felt it was very important for him to do it, and that it was very important for his character, and for him to be flawed and to make that mistake." "But we wanted to show that he did the wrong thing, and that he was punished for it and learned from it." "Yeah." "Professor Knight's not going to do anything to help out." "It's Friday, he's going home." ""Not my problem."" "These movies change a lot in the process." "And it's great when there's one thing that's sort of an emotional core, just one idea." "Sometimes it's not a big idea, but there's usually one or two things that you keep coming back to." "You really know you want to build to that." "This moment was always in the film." "From the very beginning, we always knew we wanted Mike to try to do a Scare and find out that he wasn't scary from the very, very beginning." "We did a lot of versions of this, too, where he wasn't going just into one room." "We had him going into room after room after room after room after room." "It was more of a montage building up to a final exhaustion." "And just seeing it in context with the film, we were just overstaying our welcome." "And it wasn't until we kept it simple and made our point quick and faster that you kind of got it." "I think in one of the early versions, early, early versions, they had tethers on." "I remember that, yeah." "Going into the human world with tethers." "Yeah, when they get into trouble, they'd yank on it, and then they'd pull 'em back through the door." "Originally, we had the misfits do an elaborate plan to help the guys out." "They were all involved." "It was very kind of a crazy plan to just show how they all work together." "But in the end we thought, "You know what?" ""The movie's chugging along." "We really got to get to it." ""Let's just have Don do something crazy" ""and get knocked out of the way."" "It gives you the same feeling, the same idea." "But sometimes, you got to cut these things short." "We always figured for Sulley, this is like jumping out of an airplane." "For any monster, going into the human world should be so terrifying that there's that pause before you go in." "When we get into the human world, it was really important for us to make it feel scary." "We always called it the reverse horror movie." "The monsters are now the victims, and the humans are the monsters." "So you'll notice as we get into this scene, the color has been sucked out." "We knocked the saturation way back." "We wanted it to feel like a horror movie." "We went to great lengths as much as we could to obscure the humans' faces." "We wanted to make sure that when you looked at these two movies together, the first human face that you really connect with is Boo's." "There's some great, what we call "backting," here, or the animators call it backting." "It's back acting." "Not as easy as it sounds." "And there's some great backting by Nancy Kato here." "Less is more in this scene." "It was very important that we don't see Mike's face." "So that we don't know what he's thinking." "We just know he's hurt." "And so she did a great job of conveying a lot with a little." "So the backting award goes to Nancy." "Another reflection." "Very hard to do." "And, again, this is another example where Sulley's in the shadow and Mike's in the light." "And you'll see Sulley make a decision to connect with Mike and step forward into the light." "And in this case, it means a lot more because they're literally being hunted." "So he's going to put himself out there and step out into the light." "You did a couple passes of this confrontation, but I really, really love where you ended up, where we get to find out what Sulley's been feeling all this time, where his insecurity comes from." "The first couple passes, I remember, were really focused so much around Mike." "Yeah, it was all about him, and Sulley was just pulling him out of the dumps, is really what the scene was." "This scene solidified for me, personally, in one shot that's coming up, it sums up what the scene really needs to be about." "The two of them together in the same boat." "It's this shot right here." "They're both failures at this moment." "I remember Layout delivered a shot like that." "We didn't board that, actually, that shot." "And I remember Layout delivering it as an alt, and we saw it." "I remember Greg Snyder and I were like, "Oh, my God!" "That's it." ""We have to get that in there." "We have to get that in there."" "Matt Aspbury and his team in Layout did a great job with this sequence." " Yeah." " Yeah." "But to your point, it's about the two of them, versus just about Mike." "This was a case where we wanted to keep the decision to be friends, to connect with each other, vague here." "We intentionally interrupted that with Sulley getting chased away, with the two guys being separated, rather than Mike agreeing to be his friend." "We wanted to see it in action." "And primarily him helping Sulley, but also see them work together as a team in this next sequence coming up, where they're scaring the rangers." "We wanted to actually see them work together." "And that's why this camp is called Camp Teamwork." "So we always talk about, I think, what's called the "match blowing out" moment in reference to Toy Story." "When Buzz and Woody are on the back of the rocket and they've got the rocket and they're about to light it." "And it would solve all the problems in the world, and then a car drives by and blows out the match." "Just so your ending isn't that easy." "You throw a curveball." "And for us, that was the door being off." "We weren't sure how we were going to solve the problem, but we knew it couldn't be that easy, that they'd just run back into the door." "Yeah, it was a great "match out" moment." "And so we spent lots of time trying to explain how this works, that, when you Scare, it causes enough energy to power the door up from the other side." "We had scenes in the film early on." "We had a play in the film that Mike and Sulley were in that described the history of how the Scream Effect works." "And sometimes, you just don't need all that explanation." " Hopefully, people just go with it." " Yeah." "This was a great scene boarded by..." "Dean Kelly was the story artist on this one." "And this was really difficult to do, it was a big task." "We knew that it had to be the greatest Scare of all time." "And having that as an assignment, it's a pretty big assignment, but I remember us getting together and coming up with all these different ideas and I remember discussions on whether it should be inside or outside." "Do we need to go really, really big?" "We had stuff where Sulley's shadow was huge, like, projected on the trees outside." " We thought we had to go super big." " Big bonfire." "Yeah." "But we ended up realizing that the more intimate and quiet and tight the space was, the scarier it was for them." "Right." "And figuring out how they work together during this whole thing took a ton of work, and a ton of tries with all the..." "Yeah, there was a lot of," ""How can we get them working more as a team," ""but appropriately bringing their skills to the task?"" "And in particular, Mike's skill as a coach." "You wanted to feel like this was Mike's plan, and that he was giving Sulley what Sulley needed to perform, but that it was really Mike who was literally pulling the strings." "This is a great example." "If we wanted Sulley to look scary, he has to look scary to believe that these adults would scream." "However, we don't want little kids to be terrified of Sulley." "Run screaming from the theater." "And so one of the animators did a great job of making Sulley scary." "His first pass was horrifying." "And I said, "That is too scary."" "And he said, "You said make it scary."" "And like, I... "That's too scary."" "And it was nice to be able to end the icon of Mike's hat." "Mike's hat serves as his dream throughout the whole film." "And this was a nice way to show that that particular dream, the way that he saw it, had been destroyed." "I remember Jason Katz saying," ""If we're going to have the CDA in the movie, it has to be a pretty big entrance." ""They can't just..." ""We got to take it up a little bit from jumping through the windows."" "And so we pushed that as far as we could." "Speaking of cameos, another great cameo right here." "Yeah." "I love the idea that if you haven't seen the first movie, you won't know who that is." "It doesn't spoil anything." "But it tracks with the first film." "She's in the CDA, she's number one." "We really wanted to end the film with Mike and Sulley being kicked out of school." "We wanted to show this idea that there's more than one way to succeed." "And it felt like the right way to go." "And we made sure that when they did this big grand Scare, that all the cans that they filled emptied before anyone else, other than Hardscrabble, saw what they had done." "And it was important that they leave as failures." "That no one other than her know what amazing event they had just pulled off." "I remember, too, the idea of getting them kicked out was also, "What are people gonna expect from this film?" ""You're going to expect to see them in a graduation cap" ""holding their diplomas at the end."" "And we thought, "Let's not go there." "Let's surprise the audience a little bit."" "It's very difficult..." "Again, we said this over and over again." "It's hard to do surprises in a prequel." "Some great animation by Robb Denovan." "Very disturbing animation." "It's amazing how just Don pulling that shirt down is so suggestive." "I know, I thought that was a very..." "It was such a..." "It's just his shirt." "And yet..." "Everyone who sees it goes..." "I love the misfit story, that it's never too late to go after your dream." "And I think that Don really is the epitome of that, more than almost any of them because he's older." "Because he's already tried another career and given up on a dream maybe a little too early." "And so I've always loved the moment where Don hands Mike that card and we see that Don is still going for it." "What's nice about the misfits is we realize that, for some people, there's circumstances out of your control and you may not end up getting what you want no matter how hard you work." "And it's true for the misfits." "They do really work hard." "And some people, it does work out that way." "Yep." "Yet again, we have Mike in the shadow and Sulley in the light." "Kelsey, you really pushed for this kind of good-bye moment." "I think, in original versions, we had Mike and Sulley become friends again right after the moment where they're in the cabin." "They had bonded." "And it was, I think, a really smart choice to hold off, even though everyone knows they're going to end up together, just hold off as long as you can and show these two separating." "And then you pitched this idea of the call back to Pig Chase and how they met," "Sulley jumping through the window." "I remember we did versions where they were just together and happy leaving the school." "They were kind of a team already." "I think there was a version, too, where Waternoose pulled up literally in a limo and offered them jobs right then and there." "And we realized, you know what?" "They shouldn't be handed this on a silver platter." "Yeah, these guys, they cheated and broke rules and blew up the power to the school." "They have to pay the consequences a little bit." "Even though it does happen to some people in life, but we didn't want it in our movie." "I love how this is all earned at the end." "Even Hardscrabble..." "We debated when Hardscrabble showed up, should she wink at them and say, "I think you should apply for this job"?" "Or, "I know someone over at Monsters, Inc." ""You should give them a call"?" "And it works so great now." "There's nothing about it here where she's giving them a leg up or help in any way." "It's completely in their court." "You feel so great when they're in that mail room and when they make their rise, when you know it's because of what they did together as a team." "It's nice to see Hardscrabble smile." "We held back on that through the whole film." "And we wanted Mike to really own the insult that Johnny gave him earlier, and use his abilities to make something from nothing," "and turn it into both of their futures." "And we wanted them to be geeks about going to MI." "They're just so excited to be in the mail room." "They love it!" "And these guys, no matter what they would do in life, they would be a great team." "'Cause they're going to work hard and be the best at that job." "And here we have our John Ratzenberger cameo, bringing the Yeti back." "Yes, I know they don't recognize each other in the next film." "But hey, do you recognize your first boss?" "I don't think so." "They weren't there in the mail room very long." "Yeah." "They rose quickly." "So yeah again, we just really wanted to show that these two are going to work as hard as they can no matter what, and go after their dreams no matter what obstacles are in their way." "I remember having a long discussion as to where is all this memorabilia?" "Is it on a bulletin board?" "Where is it at?" "And it wasn't until we got together and started thinking about, like," ""Let's have it in the locker room so we can link up to this moment here."" "It was so fun getting the movie closer to Monsters, Inc." "Even with the lighting of this next shot, we really tried to get as close to the feel as we could of the original film." "And having George Sanderson, who was in the college with them, now working with them." "And for Mike to step over the line one final time." "And to step into the light as he makes this decision and goes towards his future." "Andy Jimenez did the After Effects here of the Scare Cards." "We wanted something that called back to the fun of our opening titles, and also the opening titles of the first film." "But also that let us know that the Oozma Kappa team also went on to work as Scarers, that they made it." "Monsters, Incorporated is a big company with many different Scare Floors." "So, just because you don't see them in the first film, there are all sorts of Scare Floors in that factory." "And so we just wanted people to know that they made it." "And see some of the other students that went on to work for different Scare companies." "And introduce the idea of different Scare companies." "Yeah, this is kind of like a "where are they now?" type of thing." "Right." "We wish we could thank every single person that worked on the movie." "So many people did so much great work at making this movie possible." "I watch the film now, and with every shot," "I still see the faces of everyone involved in it, everyone who designed the characters, the story artists that boarded the scene, the editor that cut the scene, the animator that did that very shot." "And..." "And I see the manager who told me that they couldn't do it." "Yes, absolutely." "But unfortunately, or fortunately, none of you can." "I guess that would be an awkward way to watch the movie." "But there are ways to learn more about the crew that worked on this film." "There's an Art Of book." "There are great documentaries on this very disc to learn more about the crew, and I would definitely recommend watching them." "But yeah, just the biggest thank you in the world to everyone involved in making this movie and making it so good." "Yeah, it's one of the things I love about animation is the collaborative effort." "And you really feel that, especially in this film, you see how everyone takes it to the next step and contributes to it more and more." "It's not just one person executing one thing, it's everyone adding their little element to it that builds upon it." "It's honestly why I got into animation in the first place." "I just love that collaborative effort, everybody working together to make something great." "Indeed." "Yeah, way back at the very beginning of production, we had our own Scare Games on the crew, and they were these, not necessarily sporting events, but events." "Because some of them included chopsticks and jelly beans and toilet paper rolls." "But we created these games, which were competitions among departments." "So it wasn't individual competitions but they were between departments." "And at that early stage, I knew that we were going to have an amazing crew because they all just got so into it." "And playing each other in dodgeball, and just getting so competitively riled up." "But then talking about it afterwards, and having a beer afterwards," "I just think it created an amazing camaraderie and collaboration amongst the whole crew." "And I feel like this is absolutely one of the best crews" "I've ever worked with in my history at Pixar." " I'm going to miss everybody." " Yes." "It's very bittersweet to say good-bye to one of these movies." " Well, good-bye." " Goodbye, with that bittersweet..." "Bye-bye." " Thanks, everybody." " Till next time." "Now go watch Monsters, Inc." "and see how it plays through." "Thank you."