Working Out the Bugs
An Interview
with Pixar's Lee Unkrich,
Supervising Film Editor of A Bug's Life
Interview by Nick T. Spark
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One of the top-grossing films of 1998, A Bug's Life is the first of five features to be produced over the next 10 years through the partnership of Pixar Animation Studios and Walt Disney Pictures. The companies previously teamed on Toy Story, which set the box-office standard in 1995, taking in more than $350 million worldwide, and earned director John Lasseter a special achievement Academy Award.
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Lee Unkrich |
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What prompted you to become an editor?
I grew up loving movies and it seemed like the natural thing to do for a career. I did my undergrad at USC, as well as several years of grad school. I just ended up gravitating towards editing. In the middle of my last semester, in 1991, Avid made a deal with USC to open up a lab and conduct training sessions on campus. I got into the very first class and was totally hooked.
It turns out I finished film school at a fortuitous time, in terms of how the industry was changing over to nonlinear. When I got into the workforce, I didn't have to sit on my couch too long before the phone started ringing. The first project I did was as assistant editor on a show called Renegade. The claim to fame of that and its sister show, Silk Stalkings, is that they were the first two episodic television series to cut on the Avid.
I cut as much material as I could after hours, and luckily I worked with some great editors who were happy to show the producers what I was capable of. After just one season, I was promoted to editor of Silk Stalkings. I moved on from there to a network movie of the week. It was about that time that I got the call from Pixar. I flew up here, met everybody, and we really hit it off. I've now been at Pixar for the last five years.
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Did you
know about Pixar at the time?
What was your impression of the company from the
interview?
I had been a fan of Pixar for years - I had seen all of their shorts and loved them. One thing that was evident from day one was that, even though this is a computer graphics company, the main thing on everybody's mind is story. In fact, I remember during my interview I stressed that I had a strong computer background, and while they were happy to know that I had those skills, they kept coming back to story and structure and all the important things. That impressed me very much because, frankly, I didn't expect them to be that way.
Were you excited about becoming an animation editor?
I didn't know what to expect at all. I had absolutely no idea what an editor did on animation. I had the same misconception as a lot of people, which is that you are given a bunch of shots and just cut off the slates, tape them together and there you go. Now, when people ask me about the difference between editing live action and animation, I tell them that the goal is the same: to control the pacing, performances and structure in an effort to end up with an entertaining, riveting film. It is just that the path to get there is wildly different.
Talk
about that process.
How does editing animation differ from
live-action?
We do a lot of things in a different order than you would in live action, and I'm involved in a lot of things that an editor would not ordinarily be involved in. My role changes quite a bit from beginning to end on a film like A Bug's Life. For the first year or so of the production - these films typically take about three years to make - I work very closely with the directors and the story department developing the story. The whole story-development process is almost like sitting in a room with the writers and being able to pipe in and shape the film, define the characters, and just knock ideas around to see what you can come up with.
That
sounds like a lot of fun.
At that point, are you working with the script and
storyboards?
Yes. We do very elaborate storyboards of the film, and at first they are just pinned up around a room. Later, we take those storyboards and put them into the Avid. We record all the dialogue with people at Pixar and cut together what is called a storyreel. We use the storyreel as a blueprint for the film. I do very elaborate soundtracks for these storyreels, putting in full temp music tracks and sound effects. And if I have done my job well, after a few minutes of watching one of them you can really get wrapped up in the story.
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What happens after the storyreel is finalized?
Once we've locked the storyreels, we go ahead and begin a process called layout: defining what the movie is going to look like, in terms of what the shots are going to be, what the camera moves are going to be, how the characters are going to be blocked with any given shot, etc. I've been very fortunate; because of my live-action background, [A Bug's Life co-directors John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton] have always looked to me to be an active part of that process. It's great for me because I have the opportunity to make sure the material is going to cut together well.
What do you mean by that?
Well, in live action, the editing process is a game of taking a huge amount of material and wading through it, trying to find the best way to put it all together. If a director neglected to shoot a certain angle on the set, you have two options: try to work without the shot or, if you are working with a big budget, go out and shoot it. In my world I am not bound by that. The sky is really the limit. It is as simple as me getting together with the layout people and saying something like, "Hey, I need a shot of this length with these characters in it. And let's do a little camera move in it." They deliver it to me and I work it into the scene. Keep in mind, this is all before any animation has actually happened; we're working with still figures or figures that have very rudimentary blocking. We're really building a solid template for the scene and the animation that is yet to come.
Does that mean you are previsualizing the entire film as well as the sequence of cuts?
Definitely. And the only thing that I have to go on in this early stage is the rhythm of the dialogue. Very often the dialogue is going to define where you are going to cut, but of course there are other times where the graphics of movement define where you cut. It is in those instances that I really have to imagine something that is not there. I have to get an idea about how one shot is going to link to the next, and I have to make sure this is communicated when the shot later goes on to animation: "This is what I was thinking, this is how these two shots would cut together." I have to follow through and make sure the directors and the animators are clear about what I'm thinking.
With that amount of pre-planning, you must be able to precisely shape your editing style. How does that affect your editorial choices?
Well, what is unique about Pixar, and computer animation in general, is that the imagery looks so realistic that it is almost like watching live action. What we decided early on in Toy Story was that rather than look to animation for guidance, we would instead look to live action. We really defined, I think, a whole new aesthetic for animation that is unique to Pixar, which is the fact that you are watching animation but most of the creative choices are grounded in live-action film grammar. We've made a conscious decision not to do anything that is going to call attention to itself just for the sake of showing off computer animation.
Despite the fact that everything is computer animated, I take it that you work in traditional animation fashion, without any handles?
Right. Computer animation is still extremely time-consuming to produce. The animator who is posing Flik [the main character in A Bug's Life] and really doing all the physical acting for the character might spend two weeks on a shot that is going to be on screen for a couple of seconds. If I ask them to animate 12 extra frames that I am not going to use, those 12 frames translate into a day or more of work. And we can't afford to work that way. So it becomes critical for me to be very involved in the animation stage to make sure that the animators are doing work that is going to cut together, and that the purpose of any given shot is coming through. I attend dailies every single day where we watch the current state of all the different shots, and I often put rough versions of the shots on the Avid so I can keep a running blueprint of how a scene is coming together. I can try to catch problems early on before they have gotten in to the really fine-tuned animation.
You talked a bit about using sound in the storyreels. What about in your rough cuts?
I always create very elaborate temp tracks. Including dialogue, effects and music, I think I was 22 tracks wide on the Avid. It was a lot of temp work, and I spent a lot more time on it with A Bug's Life than I did on Toy Story because I thought the material demanded it. We had to do a lot of Foley and sound work to make the bugs' world come to life. And I was pretty honored, because when we got into the final sound work with [sound designer] Gary Rydstrom, he asked for all of my temp tracks and used material from them in the film.
What happens after the animation is delivered?
When the final animation is delivered, you have credible performances on screen but you still don't have textures and lighting. That's a whole other stage where I have to be on the lookout for continuity issues. From that point until we finish the film, I'm really looking at the current state of every single shot, watching as the lighting is introduced, as textures are introduced. I have to be the one person who is looking at the film as a whole, looking at global continuity issues, because everyone else is really focused on the minutiae of the shot they are working on.
At what stage does the animation end up on film?
It is not until the shots are completely animated, completely lit, looking the way that they are going to look in the theater that we finally shoot them out to 35mm and run that film on dailies. At that point we are shooting out exactly the frames that I have defined to be in the film. My role by that point has become very much like a live-action editor, in that I continue to shape the scene and trim shots and lose shots. We even swapped the order of a few scenes in the movie.
What's your editing room like?
We have a pretty traditional cutting room. We had three and sometimes four Avids tied together on a Media Share system, and I worked with an associate editor named David Salter - he actually ended up with a second editor credit on the film. I had a great first assistant named Tom Freeman, a crew of about six Avid assistants and another four people running the film operation. So it was a pretty large crew, I'd say comparable to a big effects picture.
How did the use of Cinemascope affect the editorial process?
Well, when we went into A Bug's Life we knew that we were going to shoot anamorphic and I knew that would affect my editorial decisions. So, I have a long narrow office, and I put as large a projection screen as possible in the far end. And that's the only screen I ever looked at. I tried to work as big as possible. The main thing in Cinemascope that I think an editor needs to think about is "eye fix," being aware of where the audience is looking in the frame at any given moment, and using that as one of your tools for making an editorial choice, in terms of matching action across cuts or determining general timings. On an anamorphic screen, with an image of that size, the audience has a much wider range of possible places they can be looking. It was important for me to be aware of that and to account for it.
This movie has obviously been a great deal of work. Was it worth it?
When we started having our preview screenings, we started to get a feel for how big the film was going to be. The audience responses were through the roof. And that is all the reward you really need after chugging away on a film for three years. To see people enjoying it, that's what it is all about. If you have a fully entertained audience in front of you, you don't need anything else.
Nick Spark is an assistant editor.
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 20, No. 1 - Jan/Feb 1999
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