What does a technical director (TD) do at Pixar?
Quite a number of things. A TD could be a modeler (someone who builds sets or characters for the film), a shader (someone who adds the surface qualities to these objects), a lighter (someone who uses light to provide illumination and accentuate the mood and emotion of a scene), or a number of other things. It's a job that requires technical knowledge but it can be artistic too. I do both art and technical, but some TDs are more into writing programs and code exclusively. Some TDs specialize in a single type of thing (like shading), others do a number of different things (like modeling, shading and lighting). TDs who do a little of everything are referred to as generalists.

Are there advantages to that?
There are advantages and disadvantages to both. Some people like spending all their energy focusing on a specific thing, and they're usually really good at it. Generalists do a lot of different things, and sometimes jump back and forth between different tasks. This has some advantages, like if you're going to create a model and shade it as well, you can use certain tricks at the modeling stage because you already know how you plan to shade it. On the other hand, having it split up between different departments has advantages of overall consistency. I think it's a good idea to have both generalists and specialists, that way you get the best of both worlds.

What kind of shots do you work on?
On The Incredibles, I worked in two departments: Effects and Second Unit. Second Unit was a group of people who provided various environments, or “ digi-mattes,” for the film. We would receive the final frames with the main characters, and it would be up to us to fill in the background using whatever method we wanted to use. These digi-mattes were used in a number of places in the film.

What are some examples?
My favorite was the railyard sequence, where I got to model, texture, light and composite the backgrounds (matte painter Paul did the skies and cityscapes). I got to make five different types of railcars and an engine, and various props like rails, train signals and cranes.

Another example is the test chamber sequence, which I did along with Mach, a TD. I modeled, textured, lit, composited and performed effects animation on the interior chamber room, the machines and most of the mannequins. For example, I did the effect of the suit getting twisted, and Mach did the explosion at the end of the shot.

What factors do you have to consider when creating a digi-matte?
Digimattes work best when the environment will only be seen once or twice, in a limited number of lighting setups, and from a limited number of camera angles. If your environment is going to be seen from many camera angles and has a tremendous amount of interaction with characters (like the Parr household), the environment would be done in the regular pipeline. A perfect example of something you might want to use a digi-matte for is an establishing shot that would have traditionally been done as a matte painting. Now many of these shots are done as a combination of 2-D and 3-D so you can get dynamic camera moves without having to build every single little detail in 3-D.

And you were on the effects (FX) team as well. What are effects in the 3-D animation world, and what effects did you work on?
Effects covers a broad spectrum of things, from explosions to water to ricochets on walls from bullets. It's filling in the cracks in the film, especially if it's an action film like The Incredibles. FX work is broken up into two phases: research and development (R&D) and shot work. R&D involves coming up with the effect, while shot work involves putting it into every shot in the film. Because an effect may be in hundreds of shots, shot work is sometimes split between multiple people.

On The Incredibles, I did the R&D and shot work for the zero-point energy effect used by Syndrome, the waterfalls, the surface water explosion, Dash's dust cyclone, and the book pages flipping in the shot where Bob's drying the books with a hairdryer.

How did you create some of those effects?
Some effects are done with in-house software from Pixar, while some are done with third-party software like Maya. For the dust coming up as Dash is running across the ground, I created a simulation that shoots out small particles from a point attached to Dash's feet and are affected by dynamics like wind and turbulence, you control where and how they move. Then they're shaded to look like dust.

How long does it take to create an effect?
Some can take months. Some can take as little as a few days. For the zero-point energy effect that Syndrome uses to trap Bob, I had the first test done in a day, and it was pretty close to the final effect.

How many people do you have working on effects for a single movie?
We had about 15 to 20 I believe, but that fluctuates a lot. You don't need a team of 20 people the entire time. You start with a few doing R&D and when it ramps up they start assigning shots to the larger team.

The Incredibles had so many effects. Does the film's budget ever affect an effect?
A TD's job is to make the effect look as good as possible with the resources available. There are certainly plenty of examples where we thought to ourselves “Oh my goodness, how are we going to do that?” Sometimes we managed to pull it off (like the icebridge effect that Mach did), sometimes an effect wasn't 100-percent perfect, but you get it as close as you can. It's a big balancing act.

How many effects did The Incredibles have?
I don't know the number of shots, but it was staggering. Hundreds and hundreds of shots. The motto of the film was “Nothing left unexploded.” That was the biggest challenge. It wasn't that any one thing was impossible but that there were so many.

How do you research and come up with your effects?
First, you need a lot of reference. You need the storyboards, so you can see how the effect is going to be used and how it's going to act. We also use real-world reference. For example, in Jack-Jack Attack, we had the shot where the baby gets shot with the fire extinguisher because he's on fire. We blasted a real baby doll with fire extinguishers and shot footage of that so we could see how the mist reacts in the real world. Actually, some people in a tour group happened to come by while we were doing it and were quite disturbed when they saw what we were doing. At the same time, you want the effects to live in the reality of the film, the effects to some extent should be stylized, so the real world reference is just a solid starting point.

How are your shots reviewed?
We have an immediate supervisor, then the art directors, then the director. First, I show the shot to my supervisor. When my supervisor thinks it's ready, it's reviewed by the art directors (such as the lighting director, etc.). They would say do a little of this and that, and when they like it we show it to the director. At Pixar, you get to sit down right next to the director and receive suggestions and fixes. That one-on-one is a nice thing, you don't get that at all studios.

Did you always know you wanted to be an artist?
I was interested in art at a very young age. Once when I was 4 years old, my dad was repairing a fence and I took a hammer and a screwdriver and chiseled a snow walker (from the film Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back) into a piece of leftover wood. So it was very obvious very early that I had an innate desire to be an artist. I began taking semi-private classes when I was 6 years old with Canadian wildlife painter Renate Heidersdorf. At one point I wanted to be a toy designer. Then I wanted to work on video games when they became popular. I eventually got into film work.

What experience did you have before coming to Pixar?
I got a bachelor of fine arts from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada in 1999. Then at Blur Studio in Venice, Calif I worked on a lot of video game cinematics, like The Lord of the Rings video game. And I also did theme-park ride films like Batman. I worked three years at Blur and then went straight to Pixar. Oh, and I also worked with a trucking company and a brokerage firm before Blur to help pay for school. There are different ways of getting to your final destination! I was actually working on a computer science degree before realizing I preferred the art aspect and moved to a fine art degree. But doing computer science helped me, because my job now involves both art and programming.

What advice would you give someone interested in being a TD?
The most important thing is if you want to do the more technical stuff, get a technical degree such as computer science. If you're more artistic, get a regular fine arts degree. Or if you enjoy both, see about incorporating both into your schooling. I didn't learn 3-D in school. I did a lot of drawing and painting and that kind of stuff. Learning software is oftentimes more about reading a manual and learning which buttons to press. The hard part is understanding color and composition, observing how a real object looks in the real world. So be wary of schools that just specialize in teaching you how to use software, make sure they have a strong art curriculum as well.

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