WEBVTT 00:17.210 --> 00:21.870 Hi, my name is Ralph Eggleston, and I was the director of the short film for Pixar called For the Birds. 00:22.570 --> 00:26.250 This project began, actually, as a student film a long time ago, 00:26.370 --> 00:30.330 and I could never bring myself to draw all these little birds that are about to pop up on the screen. 00:34.950 --> 00:37.650 Each one of these first four birds has a personality. 00:37.770 --> 00:41.770 The first one that landed is Bully, the second one was Chipper, 00:42.130 --> 00:45.690 the third one that just landed was Snob, and the last one is Neurotic. 00:45.690 --> 00:48.550 And you get a glimpse, a little bit of a glimpse of their personality, 00:48.730 --> 00:51.550 but when all the birds are there, they become one personality. 00:52.350 --> 00:55.070 And then, of course, the Big Bird honks, turns around. 00:56.250 --> 00:57.310 He's just a big dopey guy. 00:58.410 --> 01:00.410 And now all the little birds are kind of one. 01:01.030 --> 01:04.570 And you'll see, the Big Bird just wants to join them, and these guys just want to make fun of them. 01:12.680 --> 01:17.880 The feathers on this project were headed up by our supervising technical director, Bill Wise, 01:17.880 --> 01:22.000 and the wonderful animation was directed by Jim Murphy. 01:22.760 --> 01:24.160 And we had a lot of fun working together. 01:24.300 --> 01:25.760 Karen Duflo produced this project. 01:26.760 --> 01:30.980 It was a small crew over a two-year period that pulled this film together. 01:31.380 --> 01:35.160 It's deceptively simple, because there's a lot of complicated things going on in it. 01:35.680 --> 01:39.880 Some of the Pixar shorts are done for R&D purposes, research and development, 01:40.180 --> 01:41.980 and this one was a little bit more just for fun. 01:41.980 --> 01:48.180 While there were some breakthroughs, most of them were pretty much based on existing technology. 01:48.940 --> 01:51.240 A couple of the things that we did were with the feathers. 01:52.420 --> 01:55.980 Each bird has a gazillion feathers, and they actually do work. 01:56.320 --> 02:00.080 In between each of these birds that squished together, because they don't have volume recognition, 02:00.320 --> 02:04.620 we created kind of their revised version of the contact pads. 02:04.920 --> 02:09.040 We called them Pringles, because they could be shaped and animated to fit around each of the birds. 02:12.140 --> 02:15.000 And here we go. This is where we get to zoom out. 02:15.820 --> 02:19.640 The hill in the background is a painting, but you barely notice it, 02:19.660 --> 02:21.840 but the wheat is actually moving through the whole shot. 02:22.620 --> 02:27.680 One thing that we had originally intended was to get a longer shot and see the wheat kind of rolling in the wind. 02:28.380 --> 02:32.900 This shot was actually the first shot animated, when the birds get shot out of their feathers, 02:33.120 --> 02:36.580 because there were so many technical challenges to get the feathers to kind of remain in place 02:36.580 --> 02:38.500 and then start drifting down in a natural way. 02:39.500 --> 02:42.020 These feathers here were actually animated by hand. 02:43.200 --> 02:46.960 Anyway, the very last bird that you see, the first bird that lands and the bird that gets popped out, 02:47.020 --> 02:48.740 is the very first bird that lands, technically. 02:49.200 --> 02:50.180 You know, his name is Bully. 02:50.720 --> 02:54.320 So he's the one who starts it, he's the one who gets the idea to peck the toe, 02:54.420 --> 02:57.680 and he's the first one to land, so we kind of followed that through. 02:59.680 --> 03:06.580 This film, For the Birds, is actually the last film to be made and released through the Point Richmond facility. 03:06.580 --> 03:11.060 No more annoying air raids from Chevron next door. 03:11.480 --> 03:16.820 No more explosions and no more worrying about sinking into the landfill should we have a major earthquake.