(August 7, 2023)

Join industry insiders Bill Kinder and Bobbie O’Steen as they guide readers on a journey through every stage of production on an animated film, from storyboards to virtual cameras and final animation in their recently published Making the Cut at Pixar: The Art of Editing Animation. We offer an excerpt from the book.

And meet them in person at the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive as they introduce a series of contemporary animated features from Pixar, Hayao Miyazaki, Marjane Satrapi, Wes Anderson, and others throughout August. There will also be free outdoor screenings as part of “The Art of Animation: Storytelling in the Digital Age.” 

Check the complete schedule here. 

With unprecedented access to the Pixar edit suite, this authoritative project highlights the central role film editors play in some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful movies of all time. Exclusive interviews with animation editors and other creative leads are supported by footage from deep inside Pixar’s vault. Nearly 90 minutes of video segments include never-before-seen works in progress, deleted scenes, and demonstrations to shed light on how these beloved stories are crafted. The challenges and essential contributions of editors in animation have never been examined in such depth and detail.

In addition to exploring method and craft, this book provides important context for the editor in film history, the evolution of technology, and Pixar’s uniquely collaborative studio culture. A must-read for students of digital filmmaking methods, filmmakers in all aspects of production, and fans of Pixar movies, this uniquely educational, historical, and entertaining book sheds light on how beloved stories are crafted from the perspective of crucial members of the filmmaking team.

Here is an extended excerpt from the book.

Making the Cut at Pixar: The Art of Editing Animation

Introduction: Reframing the Editor

The advent of computer-generated imagery (CGI) represented a change to narrative cinema as seismic as the introduction of synchronized sound. Toy Story (1995) is widely recognized as a landmark moment in Hollywood history for being the original example of a CGI movie. But what has not been well understood, nor thoughtfully addressed, is the role of the editor in these changes. Making the Cut at Pixar: The Art of Editing Animation places the editor in the center of the frame in its discussion of digital filmmaking for the 21st century.

The animation editor has long been just out of frame––often uncredited, mistaken as a clerk with scissors. Live-action editors have been credited, and some prized, but even they were widely misunderstood. How editors draw an audience into a story and keep them “there” is designed to go unnoticed. Before the paradigm shift traced here, the full potential of what an editor has to offer had been limited by both tradition and technology.

Building on an introductory, contextual history of animation, the book launches into the editor’s dynamic new role, starting at the beginning of pre-production through three novel areas––none traditionally claimed by editors in either animation or live-action: story development, performance, and cinematography. Rejecting the customary, linear “pipeline” of pre-production, production, and post production, Pixar instead conjured a wheel. Spokes include story, acting, layout, sound, animation, and more. As each stage advances, this wheel spins round and round a hub––in the true center of which we find the editor.

While the live-action editor has been described as crafting the “last rewrite,” this book shows how editors can be just as influential at the first draft. Numerous never-before-seen work-in-progress clips from celebrated Pixar films demonstrate how the editors’ cinematic imagination brings to life a series of sketchy storyboards and temporary dialogue. Dramatic and comedic beats land, and the emotional moments play only after many failed attempts––in such close collaboration with story artists, they know this relationship as “Edi-storial.”

Sound is the cornerstone in the editor’s edifice and rare archival examples illustrate the editors’ strategies and techniques. The book delves into the unprecedented freedom and challenges editors face filling the virtual void to construct an entire sonic world. They build performances on a microscopic level, with an unprecedented degree of control over every syllable and breath. In their collaboration with sound designers, editors discuss why they find believability, not to be mistaken for realism, so essential in the otherworldly CGI universe.

Later, as a CGI production (and this book) move to the layout stage, the editor remains central to the planning of character staging and camera composition. Further interviews and video examples illustrate how the editor works with the cinematographer and director to problem-solve for continuity and clarity, as two-dimensional storyboards change to three-dimensional sets, populated with robotic figures before they become fully animated.

Over the course of years-long productions, massive quantities of minute media elements pour in and out of the editor’s room. With endurance and patience, these editors balance the scope of this massive enterprise with the human quality of empathy. For this, they have been called “Warrior People.”

Finally, Making the Cut: The Art of Editing Animation takes measure of the impact cinema’s technical evolution has had on the editor’s creative gains, while inviting the reader to see ongoing technical change through the editor’s perspective, in ways that extend far beyond animated films.

The visionary seed for the first computer-animated film was planted far from the heart of the film industry. Rather, the idea took root in Northern California, where an independent filmmaking culture helped nurture it, free from studio rules and hierarchies. The technical obstacles fell to a mindset cultivated nearby in an emerging computer industry. Founder Steve Jobs, looking back on Pixar’s success, observed, “It blended the creative culture of Hollywood with the high-tech culture of Silicon Valley… The Pixar culture, which respects both, treats both as equals.”^[1] This fusion is exemplified by the editor, who has always been both artist and technician––and whose role here fills the frame from the center out.

Chapter One

The Hub of the Wheel: The Setup

Toy Story came out and it just blew the world wide open. It’s very, very exciting because after seventy or eighty years of making films in largely the same way, suddenly there’s technology existing and people making films that are raising the bar, pushing the boundaries. You feel like you’re living in a pioneering filmmaking time again.^[2]

—Peter Jackson, Director (The Lord of the Rings, King Kong)

Wild, Wild West

After driving through an industrial landscape pocked with oil refining tanks, a fresh-faced Lee Unkrich arrived at a nondescript office park in the so-called “Hidden City” of Point Richmond, in the Northern California Bay Area. It was the spring of 1994.

Soon to be known around the world as Pixar, the enterprise was then comprised of about 150 engineers, artists, and production staff packed into the leased building. Unkrich toured the long hallways, which commonly hosted scooter races, and saw the employees—for many of whom it was a first job––working in a warren of cubicles or playing arcade video games in the animators’ “Bullpen.” “Nobody talked about it. It was literally out of nowhere, and nobody really knew what they were doing. They were all making it up as they went. It was the Wild, Wild West,” remembers Torbin Bullock, an early, local hire in the editorial department.

These recruits had been brought together by the man many consider “the godfather of 3D animation,”^[3] Edwin Catmull, who had a hand in creating one of the earliest filmed examples of computer-generated imagery (CGI), back in 1972. (Literally, he scanned a mold of his own hand and animated it.) He then spent the better part of two decades steering toward his vision for a film rendered entirely with computers.

A Gallery of A Start-Up Studio in “Hidden City” (photos by Bill Kinder unless otherwise noted)

Like almost everyone else in April 1994, Unkrich knew very little about this animation studio by the bay. But as a self-avowed film nerd, he had seen all of its short films—and found them “intoxicating.” He pulled into the unmarked industrial development as a fan, “just hoping to get a little glimpse of what they did because it was so magical to me.” This chance meeting would arguably alter the course of numerous, notable films—and influence the way movies are made.

It may have appeared inauspicious, but Unkrich was merging with an effort founded on the wish to make not only a movie animated with computers, but also to make a movie with a global, cultural impact. Catmull had convinced Apple co-founder Steve Jobs to purchase the computer division from filmmaker George Lucas’s company. Jobs bankrolled seven years of quiet trials to build the tools and confidence of a team of animators and computer scientists. They found customers for medical imaging and other industries before cutting their filmmaking teeth on television commercials and short films. But they had set their sights on making a bigger impression.

“Who do you know that hasn’t seen Snow White [and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)]?,” Jobs asked once. “I don’t think I know one person who hasn’t seen Snow White. So, the ability for these things to live for sixty, or even a hundred years is amazing. And that’s very different than the technology world that I come from. We’re not competing against Microsoft or another company. We’re competing against, ‘can we make a great film that people love.’”^[4]

By the time Unkrich was in his job interview, Pixar had built a relationship with The Walt Disney Studios, the birthplace of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. First it was to render the elder studio’s animation cels for the digital future (via the Computer Animation Production System [CAPS]). Soon after, it was to deliver the first computer-animated feature film: Toy Story.

Though long-held, that “first” was still an audacious vision, and any evidence that it could be realized was not obvious from the outside. Among Disney projects, Toy Story at that point was known as “the fringe of the fringe.”^[5] This also worked to its advantage––Pixar was neither bound by traditional divisions of labor nor deeply rooted Hollywood hierarchies. The privately held amoeba was largely formless, inventing itself in response to the new demands of a feature film. Unkrich was introduced to people with titles such as “Story Lead,” “Devil’s Advocate,” “Music Wrestler,” and “Art Czar.” In that fluid state, gathering the right collection of talent, experience, and energy for making “a great film that people love” was not automatic. “It wasn’t like live-action filmmaking in Hollywood, where you’re just going to hire twenty more people,” explained Toy Story producer Ralph Guggenheim. “You needed to find people who can use Pixar’s proprietary animation software that nobody else in the world uses.”^[6]

Editorial faced the same challenge. The studio had committed to a new, digital editing system, Avid Media Composer, which had recently become common in commercial and short-form television work. When Pixar had initially hired editors to travel up from Hollywood, some of them had a hard time adjusting their craft from trim bins and splicers to a computer interface. “It was a heady time of the intersection between traditional editorial on mag [magnetic sound film stock] and film, and digital editorial tools,” recalls the editorial manager, Julie McDonald—whose own background as both choreographer and NASA scientist embodied the multi-modal mindset cultivated by that time and place.

“There just weren’t a lot of people who knew how to use them,” remembers McDonald. “It was hard to entice people up to Northern California…it was hard to find Avid editors. Very hard.” There were those who claimed to be proficient when they were not, as was the case of one editor who was discovered furtively studying the heavy, bound instruction manual behind closed doors (there was no online search or video tutorial to be found on the internet). “It was not uncommon that you would find people doing that sneaking,” recounts McDonald.

There was some turnover in the position before Unkrich arrived. Perhaps Pixar was not completely sure what it needed in an editor, but it was clear they needed someone who could command the machinery. What are the odds that Pixar’s Avid representative would choose to look at their “expert” list in reverse-alphabetical order—bringing “Unkrich” to the top for this referral? That is how he got the first call for this unpromising, remote assignment—to help out, temporarily. Unkrich fulfilled the requirement for technical expertise––and improbably he also offered a perspective the studio did not know it needed. “I loved filmmaking,” Unkrich says.

“But I also was a huge computer geek, so when the first Avid Media Composer showed up in a lab at USC, I did everything I could to spend every waking moment in that lab learning it. That ended up not only getting me my first few jobs when I left grad school, but it also put me on Avid’s radar.”

Unlike all of the previous editors Pixar had tried out, McDonald recalls that Unkrich was “what we call now digitally native:” he was fluent in digital processes at the start of his career. He was “very, very, very fast” on the system, and could quickly present multiple creative options. But he was more than a proficient operator. “He was up and coming,” reflects McDonald. “He was very, very excited, and he could work those incredibly long hours. He was really young. He was living for it. It was a great fit.” Also, “He was a film aficionado.”

The line of questioning in the interview indicated that, although his technical chops got Unkrich in the door, they were not the priority. “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.” He got the job.

His new collaborators studied––and revered––The Walt Disney Studios’ animation legacy. Many of them also got their first experience and training under its banner. Director John Lasseter had shown early promise at Walt Disney Feature Animation in Burbank, as had lead story artist Joe Ranft. Still others in Pixar’s story and animation departments were graduates of The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), the university established with Walt Disney’s support to develop talent––envisioned by some as a “a feeder school for the industry.”^[7] (Decades later, Lasseter would resign from Pixar amid claims by former and current employees that Pixar’s working environment under his leadership had become toxic.)

Meanwhile, Unkrich had earned his advanced film school degree with an emphasis on editing, filling a gap––at CalArts, in line with standard industry practice of the time, editing was not featured in an animation curriculum. Luckily for him, Toy Story’s creative leadership welcomed collaboration with talent and skill sets different from its own. In this loose, collaborative environment, the editor’s job description was open to possibilities.

Unkrich felt “a rhythm and sense of collaboration that I had never experienced in either film school or professionally,” he remembers. “We would sit around a table and it was like a creative feeding frenzy. Because you’re involved at such an early stage, you help to shape not just the structure of the movie but its tone and pacing.”

An active role in these meetings throughout the remainder of Toy Story’s production earned Unkrich membership in the Braintrust, an informal group that spontaneously melded together while delivering the film from its unpredictable, embryonic state to a commercial and critical landmark. Catmull writes, “The Braintrust developed organically out of the rare working relationship among the five men who led and edited the production of Toy Story—John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter, Lee Unkrich, and Joe Ranft. From Pixar’s earliest days, this quintet gave us a solid model of a highly functional working group. They were funny, focused, smart, and relentlessly candid when arguing with each other.”^[8] While Unkrich was appreciated for his storytelling sensibilities, he quickly discovered there was no roadmap for editing computer-animated films. “We were trying to fuse this world of computers and this world of Disney style of cutting storyboards,” reflects Bullock. “We were very, very much pushing the envelope.”

This adventurous endeavor drew courage from its deep knowledge of animation traditions, and now combined in this environment with a faith in its new technology. This optimism contributed to early, unrealistic assessments of the challenge at hand. The enthusiastic group severely underestimated the resources demanded by the large-scale effort––in several key areas. Making a feature was not simply multiplying the length of a short or a commercial to equal 75 or 80 minutes of running time. It was going to be much more complicated than that.

An early Toy Story production planning meeting contemplated: about a dozen animators (34 were credited on the final film), and one layout artist (11 were credited). No editorial department. (Fifteen were eventually credited there.) Between a historical model of cel animation that minimized editing and all that new digital image-making ability, there were many reasons to overlook the upside of adding a film editor to their production planning, since everyone knew they would only assemble what was animated. The animation was not done in multiple takes, with coverage––what would an editor cut? Also, none of Pixar’s short films had needed an editor––and they did pretty well.

How did this discipline, editing––considered by so many live-action filmmakers to be the essential aspect of the medium––go from irrelevant to the center of Pixar’s process? Before jumping to the artistic, social, and technical conditions that had so ripened by the day of Unkrich’s job interview, it will be helpful to survey the way animation editing had, and had not, evolved since the earliest days.

Excerpted from: Making the Cut at Pixar: The Art of Editing Animation by Bill Kinder & Bobbie O’Steen (copyright 2022)

The book is available in hardcover, paperback and as an ebook. All editions have extensive photos and illustrations, exclusive interviews with animation editors and other creative leads, supported by footage from deep inside Pixar’s vault. Nearly 90 minutes of links to video segments include never-before-seen works in progress, deleted scenes, and demonstrations to shed light on how these beloved stories are crafted. The challenges and essential contributions of editors in animation have never been examined in such depth and detail.

---

^[1] Paik, K. 2007. To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios. Chronicle Books. p. 295.

^[2] Paik, K. 2007. To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios. Chronicle Books. p. 101.

^[3] Reilly, C. October 23, 2018, Pixar Co-Founder and Godfather of 3D Animation Ed Catmull to Retire. CNET.

^[4] PBS, The Charlie Rose Show, 1998.

^[5] Spark Animation. 2020. The Women of Disney/Pixar’s Toy Story: Defining Digital Her-izons. https://sparkanimation.eventive.org/films/ . Accessed 2020-10-26.

^[6]  Paik, K. 2007. To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios. Chronicle Books. p. 93.

^[7] “Interview with Tom Lawson, Dean of CalArts School of Art, January 2007.” clancco.com/wp/2007/01/intervview_sergio-muoz-sarmiento_cal-arts_law/. Archived from the original on 2013-05-10. Accessed 2012-03-19.

^[8] Catmull, E. 2014. Chapter 6. Creativity, Inc. Random House.

Bill Kinder is the co-author of Making the Cut at Pixar: The Art of Editing Animation. He founded the Editorial & Post Production department at the renowned Pixar studio––which became known as the “hub of the wheel” for an unprecedented string of critically acclaimed box office winners.

Kinder began his career producing an Emmy^®-nominated documentary, news, and sports; editing commercials; and creating experimental non-fiction films. He was then the Director of Post Production Facilities at Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope in San Francisco.

Today he leads creative talent in various producing assignments which have included: animated series in Paris and Vietnam; a “must-see” independent feature film, White Rabbit; and essay films exploring cinema culture. More info at www.boxpix.co

Bobbie O’Steen is a New York-based film historian and author of Cut to the Chase, based on interviews with her late husband and colleague, legendary editor Sam O’Steen and The Invisible Cut, which deconstructs the editing process and classic movie scenes through a cut-by-cut analysis.

She is co-author of Making the Cut at Pixar: The Art of Editing Animation, the first book about the pioneering work of the animation editor. Bobbie hosts an ongoing event series, “Inside the Cutting Room” where she has interviewed over eighty editors. She has taught at the American Film Institute, Emerson College, John Hopkins University, The New School, and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.  Bobbie also provides commentary and discussion for The Criterion Collection releases. She has written for numerous publications, including Cinema Editor Magazine, which named her “Film Editing’s Greatest Champion.” More info at bobbieosteen.com 

Trailers for the films showing as part of “The Art of Animation: Storytelling in the Digital Age” at BAMPFA.