So yesterday, we read this rather amazing admission from writer-director Pete Docter:

“The truth is that every one of our movies is lousy at some point.”

We considered three lessons we could learn from the Pixar creative process. Today we see how much emphasis Pixar puts on character and emotion:

Were there specific things about “Up” that changed because of that process?
There were a lot of things. Like, we knew early on that even though she’s not on screen, Ellie is really a driving character in the film. She’s the thing that propels the whole story. And if you’re not on board with that, the film could meander and fall away. So we got a lot of notes about how to strengthen her presence in the film, sometimes through very simple things: music cues, the house, the badge … That was something we kept coming back to and reinforcing, so that her presence was felt through the second and third acts – particularly in the middle, because the second act is always the tough part.

Speaking of emotion, the film opens with a montage, without dialogue, that’s pretty melancholy and very uncharacteristic for a movie with a big kids’ audience.
It was something we felt pretty strongly about. Early on, [screenwriter] Bob Peterson wrote a series of small scenes, and as we workshopped it and went to the storyboard, I remembered that my own parents, when I was growing up, took Super 8 films.

And there’s something even more emotional about it when you don’t have sound, when all you have is flickering images on the screen. And so we took advantage of that sort of idea by stripping away dialogue and sound effects and letting it be music alone, and visuals.

They faced a challenge: Ellie drives the story, but her character dies by minute 10. How to keep her ‘alive’ through the rest of the story?

(1) “So we got a lot of notes about how to strengthen her presence in the film, sometimes through very simple things: music cues, the house, the badge … That was something we kept coming back to.” Lesson: Use objects with symbolic connection to characters. These talismans can function as projections of absent characters for script readers.

(2) “And there’s something even more emotional about it when you don’t have sound, when all you have is flickering images on the screen.” Lesson: Find key visuals and moments that drive home a point of emotional connection to the script reader.

We’ll look at the last part of the interview with Pete Docter tomorrow.

If you want to read more, go here.