What do set dressers do at Pixar?
Working with the production designer and director, we choose and place all the props—vegetation, furniture, etc.—in the 3-D movie sets. Everything you see in the foreground and background has been placed by a set dresser. Our goal is to best support the film’s characters and their needs.

The art department makes “shader packets” that show what types of textures we have to work with. After we put all the props in place, we apply all the graphics, such as a soda can label, and textures, such as a prop that has different types of wood to choose from. (Wood could have a walnut, ash or maple texture and either long or short grain variants.) We apply shader textures to architecture, foliage and props of all types.

You mentioned supporting the characters’ needs—how so?
As in, which props will best tell the story of a character or something about the character’s personality. Also, simply making sure animation has the props that the characters need to interact with.

Where do you get your props?
We get them from the modeling department—they live in a huge directory. There are many props to choose from, but we also need to build props individually. Sometimes we need to reuse items, shrink them down to a tenth of their size, and make them appear to be something else. It’s always exciting to solve how you’re going to make something look very different when you have a limited number of props to use for a particular scene. It keeps us on our toes. You have to know every prop in the catalog and be thinking of more creative ways to use props and textures.

Tell me about a time when you had to get creative with props.
The tree planter in the corner of the sushi restaurant in Monster’s Inc. is actually a Japanese teacup scaled up eight times its original size. I needed a planter and didn’t have one, and the Asian motif on the cup worked great. So I scaled up the teacup, scaled down some rocks from the sushi pond, removed the leaves off a tree from the city street and—voila!—I had created an ikebana-type arrangement.

What happens to a set after it’s dressed and approved?
The layout department comes in and does the camera work, or blocking. We work with layout to make sure the props are in the right places to work within the composition. Then layout hands it to animation and we follow the animation. It’s really cool because we get to work with all the different departments from beginning to end, when we make sure everything is locked down for lighting. (They don’t want props moving around because the shadows will change.)

What are you doing in the animation phase?
We’re overseeing how the props are moved around and looking for continuity. For example, when a character picks up a glass and puts it down in a different place, we have to make sure that it’s in the correct place from that shot forward for the entire sequence.

For continuity, we watch for how something sits shot after shot. We need to be really sensitive to all of those very simple things that are usually taken for granted. Ironically, many times you don’t even clearly see the props after the scene is animated, due to depth of field, but the human eye can pick up the subtleties of things in the foreground and background. The presence of these shapes helps create a more believable world.

Are there any rules for decorating a character’s room?
Working with the production designer, it’s up to our discretion as to what best tells the personality of the character. The props—or information—you place on a set should say a lot about the character. For example, a neat and tidy character may have nothing on his shelves.

Sounds like you must do a lot of people watching.
Yeah, I notice people’s offices around here. I watch children, noting how they throw their stuff around the room. I’m constantly noticing people’s living spaces.

Did you always know you wanted to be a set dresser?
Actually, I’ve been interested in set dressing since I was a very little kid. I was constantly moving furniture around in my Barbie™ townhouse, but I never played with the dolls. I would create different scenarios within the environments and would photograph the different ways I dressed the rooms. I’d also take photos of things in disarray around my house (like a messy room). I was studying the way people interact with their environments without even knowing it.

Another thing I did as a kid was make drawings of the sets for movies and TV shows I liked. I redesigned the sets on Diff’rent Strokes and The Brady Bunch a few times. You know how it was never really clear where the father’s office was in The Brady Brunch? I’d always figure out when the sets weren’t set up right because I figured out which door was not matching up. Same thing with Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. I was looking for continuity even then.

Did you explore that interest in a formal education?
I studied industrial design at the Rhode Island School of Design. I worked in the metal, wood and plastic shop, where I learned how things are constructed, and how shapes should work together. My knowledge of how shapes interact and my extreme attention to detail translate well in the work I do at Pixar.

So you graduated from college and went straight to Pixar?
Yes, I did. And it’s perfect—I always wanted to live and work in a beautiful environment.

Is a design background necessary to become a set dresser?
Not necessarily. Our department has architects, designers and CG modelers and lighters with strong technical backgrounds. It’s important to have a good balance, because we have different strengths, and together we can solve both creative and technical problems.

What’s the most challenging aspect of your job?
Keeping on top of all the props throughout the entire movie. I’m constantly making sure props have correct placement, colors and textures, and looking out for composition changes in shots due to prop or camera moves. It’s also a challenge to figure out when moving or moved props break shots.

Things can happen on a production when you have two hundred people working around the same sequence day after day. Things are constantly changing. Keeping an eye on all of that is very difficult.

So what’s an example of a broken shot?
Sometimes you’ll have a floating prop that you can’t identify right away. Or a character will be naked or have no eyes—that’s something you don’t get in 2-D animation!

There was a shot in the sushi restaurant in Monsters, Inc. that took us a while to figure out. It was the scene where a monster picks up a table and throws it over to get out of the restaurant quickly. Well, whenever the monster did that action, the entire restaurant was flipping over and backward! Somebody had attached the whole set to the hand instead of just the table.

What are your favorite set props?
There were some pipes we used a lot in Monsters, Inc. They could be shrunk down and created with different fittings. You can make anything out of them. I made a standing theater light using all those components together. That was really cool. We make due with what we have—it’s always a challenge, always a lot of fun.

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