Editing a Pixar World

by Bobbie O'Steen | Published July 6, 2011

The accomplishments of an editor can be both mysterious and underappreciated, and nowhere is this more evident than among the editors at Pixar Studios. I discovered their special role in the animation process when I visited Ken Schretzmann at Pixar shortly after he won an Eddie for Best Edited Feature Film in Animation for Toy Story 3. He then became the focus of my panel at EditFest NY; and after all our discussions I now realize how fully Pixar uses the editor’s talents, one of many brilliant strategies that has led to the studio’s extraordinary success.

Pixar began with John Lasseter, the visionary animator and chief creative officer of the studio, who started out at Cal Arts—the brainchild of Walt Disney—where he met other animators whose spirit of enthusiasm and collaboration would later set the tone for Pixar. Soon Lasseter had, he said, “Disney blood running through my veins,” discovering how to create thinking, feeling characters and compelling stories. Like Disney, he was always pushing the boundaries of technology. Disney, and later Lasseter, also developed this idea of “plussing it,” which involved motivating people to always do more than they imagined they were capable of.

After Pixar Studios was founded and Lasseter’s team created the first CGI-animated shorts, Lasseter would realize his dream of directing Toy Story, the first computer-animated feature film. He hired editor Lee Unkrich, telling him that he didn’t want it to be cut like a cartoon, but instead like a live action film. Unkrich said he soon realized that his role as an editor “for animation is much more participatory than editing for live action… Because you’re involved at such an early phase, you get the opportunity to really help shape not just the structure of the movie, but its tone and pacing.” Pixar spent four years completing Toy Story, and was able to keep the bar high, due to the film’s unprecedented triumph.

Three years after Toy Story was released, Ken Schretzmann joined the fold. He had worked on television and features and had assisted editor Jim Stewart, who was now at Pixar working on Monsters, Inc. Stewart needed a co-editor to help him get ready for a screening. Schretzmann told the audience at EditFest that what struck him initially about Pixar was that it “felt like a dot-com company combined with a movie studio.” He recalled, “There was a screening room with ratty couches and people would bring their cereal in and watch cartoons. And everybody had a scooter.” When he started cutting storyboards he “just really took to it, maybe because of my interest in animation. It was fun and different.”

Months later, Schretzmann would experience the powerful work ethic and dedication underlying all that fun. After much of Toy Story 2 had already been animated, Lasseter decided that the story wasn’t satisfying so he shut down production and, in front of the entire crew, pitched his idea for reworking the movie from beginning to end; and after he got through, Schretzmann said, “Everyone knew exactly what movie we were going to make.” All those working at Pixar were thrown into finishing the film with a virtually impossible schedule, and he soon realized that these people would give everything they had for a film. In addition, he discovered that the creatives ran the studio, that it was director-driven. He had also been used to being one-on-one with the director, but for the first review of his cut he experienced a group of people behind him taking notes. He ultimately realized that everyone critiques each other’s work, that there’s a whole culture of honesty and openness.

Schretzmann was initially hired for a month but ended up staying for 12 years, working on Monsters, Inc. as a second editor and then went on to edit Cars and Toy Story 3, which averages four years per film. When I asked him, ‘What took you so long?’ he responded, “It’s kind of a backwards process. You edit first then they shoot the film later. It’s a long haul and for about the first two years we’re in the story process.” After the script is completed, the story artists sketch out cartoon-like boards, which they act out for the writer, director and editor, who can give notes and ask for such things as different angles and other lines. Then the editor starts editing boards with scratch dialogue, which is recorded by any staff member they can grab. At EditFest he showed us a series of edited boards from Toy Story 3 where Buzz Lightyear is trying to escape and demonstrated how he had to repeat and adjust certain boards to stretch out the action, pre-visualizing the real time it would take Buzz to get across the room, as well as pace it out according to the rhythm of the dialogue.

Later, when the scenes are approved, the actors are hired to record the production dialogue. They might improvise, the script might change or scenes might be re-boarded, so the editor is constantly creating Band Aids to make it work. This storyboard process is where they discover, what Schretzmann calls, the “DNA for the scene.” He questions every single beat, considers what the characters are thinking and what he is trying to accomplish in each scene. Then, he said, “When I get into the later stages I know exactly what I’m aiming for.”