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Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
71–80 of 95 posts
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#72Early in my career I was working for a well-known anti-virus firm. They had a crash of their Perforce servers and it turns out the backups were not good and the most recent good one was several months old. They painstakingly restored it from the good backup and forensic recovery of the drives, but there were several files that were still missing to fully restore the archive. They did know the hashes of the files, so what they did was push out a bunch of custom virus signatures to the dogfooding (internal testing) environment which flagged any files with those hashes as viruses, and then asked anyone who had a hit to send the file into central IT to get it resolved. It was fairly clever I thought!
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we made How to Train Your Dragon three times at DreamWorks. So many rewrites, director changes, character redesign, etc. If you ever wonder why a feature length animated film can cost over $300 million dollars, this is one reason.
Thanks for nothing, you useless reptile. Seriously though, did they have to record the voice acting three times, or partially again several times?
Yes, the recordings get done over many times. Sometimes we lose someone due to story changes or some other circumstance. This is a bummer, as there is more than the voice that is lost. While it is easier for some stars to drive over to Glendale from wherever they live in LA, they still "perform" the part and that performance is recorded. The video of the voice over work is referred to by the animators and influences a lot about the how the animated character behaves. I suppose in less expensive productions, you could just try and plop a voice over in, but all the top studios will use the video reference and ask the talent back for voice fixes.
In general, I found the talent to be really fun to be around and no-one just phoned it in. They really liked to work on the films. I ended up sitting next to Gerard Butler at the employee screening of Dragon at the now non-existent Universal Amphitheater. He stayed for the whole film. Unlike me, he hadn't seen it in thousands of tiny chunks during dailies, and had a blast.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to flag duplicates from the new page, but realized it goes nowhere. Maybe a different flag to downgrade dupes?
Flagging from the new page doesn't go nowhere - it's handled the same way as flagging from any other page.
Of course. But I'm guessing that dupes aren't flagged as heavily as something illegal/inappropriate/ads/etc. So they survive more often, correct?
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
- If you can trust an employee with a $25K ($50K today) computer, trusting them with a complete source tree isn't a stretch. - I'd be more pissed off that somebody didn't have a complete backup somewhere, even if it was a personal laptop they used for work. - Back then, most people didn't have home computers. Hell nowadays a home pc isn't a guarantee, as most of my (non-engineering) coworkers only have cellphones and…
> Back then, most people didn't have home computers. you had a much different perspective of 99 than I did. That factoid might have been true for-the-public-at-large , but certainly not for the offices of large CGI or dev firms.
Animated movies take years to make.
> The story likely takes place in 1998, though Jacob admits he’s foggy on the exact date.
In 1998 we were living in Internet Time. The amount of stuff that changed from '97 to '98 and from '98 to '99 made people's heads spin. Google incorporated in September of 1998. 56K modems were brand new that year. At the end of 1999 when Toy Story 2 came out, Napster had been out for 5 months, and Java 1.2 was just about to exit from beta into general availability.
People were still introducing each other to WinAmp when they started storyboarding this movie.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we made How to Train Your Dragon three times at DreamWorks. So many rewrites, director changes, character redesign, etc. If you ever wonder why a feature length animated film can cost over $300 million dollars, this is one reason.
It is good to hear that big up front design sucks as much for movies as it does for software.
It can be real pressure cooker. Developers who come in not from the game development world are often shocked by the brutal hours. The artists have it the worst however. They tend to get laid off in droves as productions ramps down. Directors and writers also get fired. They seem to be less immune to being punished than other management types in more traditional software companies.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we made How to Train Your Dragon three times at DreamWorks. So many rewrites, director changes, character redesign, etc. If you ever wonder why a feature length animated film can cost over $300 million dollars, this is one reason.
The dragon looks exactly like one of my cats. Thank you for iterating.
The "original" Toothless was not Toothless. There were several other Night Fury designs. One amazing part of working in a studio (please try to tour one if you have any friend or reason to get on campus at Disney/Pixar/DWA) is seeing all of the storyboards and pre-viz art lining the walls. It is quite magical.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems like a huge advantage with mostly-digital movies. I wonder how easily a Marvel or Starwars movie could be re-rendered like this. Technically there are actors of course, but they are usually the main focus of the scene anyway...
For green screen shots this would be fine. For VFX LED wall shots, this wouldn’t work. However, movies and shows today are shot in a high resolution that you can crop/edit into most formats. Green screen shots lend itself to resizing better due to the ability to fill in more of the scene while pulling the subject matter away a bit to fit the format.
Many LED wall shots are completely rotoscoped anyway just to dial it in that much further. But you still get the advantages of environmental lighting and the efficiency of real time decision making.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> for-the-public-at-large True. Most of the people I knew with computers back then had them provided by their work, or bought them for university. But then I lived in a small city in Texas not near a major metro. Most people there didn't buy a home pc until the DotCom boom brought those cheap emachines.
I decided to look it up. In 2000, 51% of households had a computer a 41% had internet. https://www.infoplease.com/math-science/computers-internet/u...
And by the next year that had jumped to 56% and 50% respectively. That's 25 million Americans who got the Internet in a 12 month period. And that 2000 number was up from 36.6% and 18% in 1997.
You can't project backward two years from a 2000 number during that era. You're missing data points during the steepest part of the curve.
Re: Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 (2012)
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is good to hear that big up front design sucks as much for movies as it does for software.
It can be real pressure cooker. Developers who come in not from the game development world are often shocked by the brutal hours. The artists have it the worst however. They tend to get laid off in droves as productions ramps down. Directors and writers also get fired. They seem to be less immune to being punished than other management types in more traditional software companies.
> Developers who come in _not_ from the game development
I've been working on hardware, firmware, backend, frontend, crypto, hft, mobile apps and games. I think that on average you need to rewrite your game 3 times so it feels 'right'.