Hi, my name is Ralph Eggleston, and I was the director of the short film for Pixar called For the Birds.
This project began, actually, as a student film a long time ago,
and I could never bring myself to draw all these little birds that are about to pop up on the screen.
Each one of these first four birds has a personality.
The first one that landed is Bully, the second one was Chipper,
the third one that just landed was Snob, and the last one is Neurotic.
And you get a glimpse, a little bit of a glimpse of their personality,
but when all the birds are there, they become one personality.
And then, of course, the Big Bird honks, turns around.
He's just a big dopey guy.
And now all the little birds are kind of one.
And you'll see, the Big Bird just wants to join them, and these guys just want to make fun of them.
The feathers on this project were headed up by our supervising technical director, Bill Wise,
and the wonderful animation was directed by Jim Murphy.
And we had a lot of fun working together.
Karen Duflo produced this project.
It was a small crew over a two-year period that pulled this film together.
It's deceptively simple, because there's a lot of complicated things going on in it.
Some of the Pixar shorts are done for R&D purposes, research and development,
and this one was a little bit more just for fun.
While there were some breakthroughs, most of them were pretty much based on existing technology.
A couple of the things that we did were with the feathers.
Each bird has a gazillion feathers, and they actually do work.
In between each of these birds that squished together, because they don't have volume recognition,
we created kind of their revised version of the contact pads.
We called them Pringles, because they could be shaped and animated to fit around each of the birds.
And here we go. This is where we get to zoom out.
The hill in the background is a painting, but you barely notice it,
but the wheat is actually moving through the whole shot.
One thing that we had originally intended was to get a longer shot and see the wheat kind of rolling in the wind.
This shot was actually the first shot animated, when the birds get shot out of their feathers,
because there were so many technical challenges to get the feathers to kind of remain in place
and then start drifting down in a natural way.
These feathers here were actually animated by hand.
Anyway, the very last bird that you see, the first bird that lands and the bird that gets popped out,
is the very first bird that lands, technically.
You know, his name is Bully.
So he's the one who starts it, he's the one who gets the idea to peck the toe,
and he's the first one to land, so we kind of followed that through.
This film, For the Birds, is actually the last film to be made and released through the Point Richmond facility.
No more annoying air raids from Chevron next door.
No more explosions and no more worrying about sinking into the landfill should we have a major earthquake.