A constant treat to any Pixar film is the short in front of the feature. While some have mixed feelings about the latest feature-length works from the studio, the shorts have been a consistent bright spot. When I was given the opportunity to talk with the team behind the latest Pixar short, The Blue Umbrella, at SXSW I gladly set the time aside. Speaking with director Saschka Unseld (who last worked as a layout artist on Brave) and producer Marc Greenberg, we were able to delve into the color choices they made for the film, whether there is a time-limit given for shorts, how they mine the team from within the company, and even if they’ve ever played with the idea of taking a short from the outside under their umbrella. The short is currently playing in front of Monsters University, which is in wide release this weekend. Read our conversation below.
The Film Stage: One of the most striking things about this short versus a lot of the other shorts is the realism that you’re going for here. The colors and the richness. How much did you work on trying to capture that and did you do motion capture? It almost seems like you took some images and digitized them.
Saschka Unseld: Everything in there is computer generated and painstakingly created by all the amazing people that are on our crew. It was a challenge that everyone was super excited about. Part of the excitement was to do something very different from what Pixar had done before and to push what people perceive as animation and all the textures are hand created. The only thing where we used real elements was at the very end we did a pass of the camera movement itself in order to get this organic feel of when you actually hold the camera there. That’s the only thing that is kind of not hand-generated but taken from the outside world.
I’m curious about the color choice in the short. It’s called The Blue Umbrella, so we know the main person that we’re supposed to be following. Blue is typically a signification of male for kids. And pink is usually a signal of female. Yet, it’s a red umbrella. Talk about the choice to go away from a pink umbrella and go ahead with a red umbrella. Is it just more natural?
Unseld: I’m happy actually that you clearly distinguish between pink being the cliché for female and this is a red one. Often people say, “Oh, it’s such a cliché colors, blue and red.” It was very important to me that it wasn’t the pink pink. I don’t like the extreme gentrification of colors and dress codes. In every step of the way it was important to me to that this wasn’t pink, this was red. It needed to be two clearly distinct colors and they both needed to stick out of the crowd of the black umbrellas. The main umbrella is blue because he loves the rain and blue is kind of the color for that and it fits in so well with the surrounding and then the question was, “Who do we pair him up with?” It could be another blue umbrella. But it’s a love story, so it should feel different. The color that sticks out the most is red. The early inspirations were from a mass of black umbrellas and then one that just sticks out to you. One in a crowd. And for that, red was just the perfect color.
The legacy of the Pixar shorts going into this is very high. When Pixar was pretty young they had a sterling reputation. Lately there has been some criticism aimed at the company for maybe watering down their own product. But the shorts have been separate from that and they’ve continually been a highlight. So can you talk about following that up?
Unseld: The legacy is a fascinating thing because that’s kind of how Pixar started out. That was their first story-telling things. They did commercials before but the real story-telling was short films. I feel super happy. The Pixar short is a short that for free gets the widest distribution of any short that is out there because we basically just piggy-back on the feature. [Laughs]. We take their whole campaign and just spread into cinemas. It’s nice because there’s less weight on it, because it’s short. So we can experiment more with it. And you [looks at Marc Greenberg] can probably talk about how we experiment with the teams as well because one is the story and the look of what animation can mean; technique. We always try to push that. But there’s also the whole team aspect and Mark is the best example for that.
Marc Greenberg: Yeah, we are experimenting with technology. We try and tell a story in a different way. It’s a way for us to iterate much more quickly than you can with a feature film. It’s a little bit more contained. But the other way we experiment is with people. My day job is in the finance department. It’s not necessarily in direct film production. This was an opportunity to make sure that we remind even the other staff that this is how we make movies. This is a front-row seat at exactly how things happen. It was an incredible opportunity. Typically our short films come out of either the story or the animation department, but Saschka is in the camera, staging, and layout department. That was something unique for us.
Does Pixar give a time limit that they’re looking for? Under a certain amount of time? This is a short, but those can range wildly in different runtimes.
Unseld: I don’t think there ever was someone said, “You need to hit this length.” You basically make up the story, and then you storyboard, then it takes a certain length. There was a moment where we cut out a minute, actually. But that was just because it felt like it was stretched out. It just didn’t feel appropriate for the whole thing to be seven and a half minutes long. It felt stretched in the middle. You tell the story and you watch it and you get a feeling that it wants to be this length. The only thing is that you couldn’t do a 20-minute short film because people are there to see the feature, so it’s a small added thing at the beginning of the feature but the genre of short films that we’re in is, I’d say, is four to seven minutes. I’d say that’s the range. That’s the main outlet of them. A short film that was 15 minutes wouldn’t make sense to come in front of a feature. Except for if something felt too slow in the short, there was never any talk of how long the short would be. Though, I bet in the background there was some talk in regards to how much work it is. But I, as a director, never heard about it. [Laughs].
Greenberg: The production folks talked a lot about what do we do if it goes to eight and a half minutes. But the studio was always in support of telling the story and I think four minutes is probably good. Sometimes it’s hard to tell a fully arch of a story in under four minutes. But certainly if someone pitched a story that the team loved and the studio wanted to produce it could be two and a half minutes. But we didn’t have the added pressure of a time constraint. We were trying to make it great.
It appears that you farm these shorts from within the studio itself. Has there ever been discussions of maybe taking a short on? Do you have shorts presented to you? Maybe in the hopes that it gets picked up and played?
Greenberg: We focus on the employees that are there that are pitching the shorts. But same as our feature film ideas, they’re from the hearts and souls of the directors. There isn’t an additional writer with Saschka. That story came from Saschka. It’s his heart and soul and his passion project. And we love that connection between the passion project and something you want to spend years of your life on.
Unseld: It’s very nice, I think, internally to have that mixup of working on something that is quicker and faster and more improvised and organic because it’s a smaller crew and team. Then you go back on a feature and you go back and forth. It adds a lot of vitality to working within Pixar. Because what you meant is an existing short that is out there, I guess. But that wouldn’t give us that. Everything that is done at Pixar… the stories and ideas are all from in-house. There’s no writers hired. No external scripts that get submitted. It’s a bit about whose passion is it. Whose heart and soul is it? You want that to be at the director. You want it to be the director’s baby. The director has this idea of a story or a character and something he wants to tell, and he’s so passionate about it that he just pushes it to the point where it needs to be a film and made. I think you can tell that in all the movies. There’s that at the core.
When you’re working on this short, you’re splitting time with other things, right? Obviously you’re farmed from in-house.
Unseld: Once the short was fully running, it was full-time. There wouldn’t have been any time to do other stuff on the side or be involved with the features. In the beginning there was a ramp-up period. The big thing is the casting. When can we get the people? The features have the main priority. Those are the big things and those are the main priority. Then it becomes a game of musical chairs. Who can we get from the features to start full-on production with the short and there was a period when I got the pitch green-lit to make it as a short film and we didn’t have the people to work on it yet. So for a while, I just worked on it on the side while I was still working on Brave. But once we had the right people in place to actually start production, I just switched full-time onto the short for the whole year of production.
The Blue Umbrella is now screening before Monsters University.