Their asked about how their career all started at Pixar.

Katherine Sarafian:

"We all have unusual beginnings but my past started with shorts programming because I was a graphic student at UCLA Film School. I knew I wanted to work in computer filmmaking, I just didn't know what that meant at the time. And we had a guest speaker from Pixar. I remember everything from my career except I don't remember who that speaker was.

They came down and showed Luxo Jr. and a couple of other Pixar short films and one of our little screening rooms and did a talk and I was like, 'Ok! That's where I want to work.' And, as soon as I graduated, I sent a resume to Pixar Shorts. I sent another resume to Pixar Features and I sort of waited and waited and literally waited for them to call. Eventually they did. I was hired as an assistant to the Production Manager for Toy Story."

One can clearly see the love she has for working there. She continues to talk about Pixar's broadness with "Pixar's a place where I've worked almost thirteen years and I think I've had eight careers. It's a place, as a studio, you can move show to show and do different things."

(l-r) Ralph Eggleston (Director of "For the Birds"), Andrew Jimenez (Director of "One Man Band" and animator of "Lifted"), and Katherine Sarafian (Producer of "Lifted"). Image Copyright(C) Movie Jungle International, INC. This image may not be used or duplicated elsewhere without express written permission.

---

Andrew Jimenez talks about Pixar and finding new talent all the time.

"With the technology developing all the time...I remember Ed saying once, and this is such a rate philosophy which I think a lot of studios have the opposite of which is we have to find people who are better than us and get them here, you know. Because people bring so many different things to the table. We might not even know what we need five years from now as far as the technology to solve this story we haven't thought of yet.

To hire people as artists and not hire people as 'you do this one thing, you do this, and that's all we want you for.' Pixar doesn't work like that, they invest in you and your potential talents and your potential."

Ralph Eggleston's asked how Pixar is different.

"I can't, I'll be here all day! It's just a place where we really feel safe and supported, where the company's been run by filmmakers and you know they have your back. The fact that it's been run by filmmakers that are in everything that we're doing not sort of over there and not really paying attention in what we're doing and just check in every six months. It's not like that at all, so we feel very supported. It's different in other places, I mean when we started there was Disney, now there are other studios which is fine. Larger studios that make multiple films, but outside of that, especially during the days of Toy Story, it was Disney. And what I mean by that is the ability to see a story reel, which is like comic books on the screen and project forward to a finished film and trust it, is a very difficult thing to do.

Most studios outside of that little group, want a finished screenplay and that's what you're gonna make. And that is not taking advantage of the medium especially the technique of animation. It needs to grow, it needs to get better....but if you...and I've run into this...I have run into situations where there were executives that didn't understand how to look at a story reel. They didn't literally understand why every few seconds a drawing would change and turn and say 'when is this going to be animated? I don't understand this' but every decision about what that film's become is made while it's in that. They don't know how to look at it and they're the ones saying what we can and can't do.

[At Pixar] you feel supported to go all the way and try something. They trust you, they do believe in it, they want to see you explore that and if it doesn't work, well then you caught it at a time where it's ok; we can go back and try this idea. So by the time it goes into production it's gone through, we've already done the homework and poured the concrete, it's a good foundation to go by."

Andrew Jimenez.

"Our story reels for our films generally go through nine or ten passes. That's a lot of work!"

Katherine Sarafian:

"And you know the fist one is kinda going to suck. John Walker, our Producer from Incredibles would say it's like the first waffle, it always feels blotchy."

(l-r) Andrew Jimenez (Director of "One Man Band" and animator of "Lifted"), Ralph Eggleston (Director of "For the Birds") and Katherine Sarafian (Producer of "Lifted"). Image Copyright(C) Movie Jungle International, INC. This image may not be used or duplicated elsewhere without express written permission.

---

Ralph Eggleston:

Andrew Stanton always likes to think of it as: we have a screenplay but it's a start point. The screenplay is then set aside and then we start boarding...storyboarding and every once in a while you run into a wall and you really need to scroll in and write a little more right? But he likes to rough it out! Just as fast as possible and put it up there and he calls it 'showing his dirty laundy.' It'll stand up in front of an audience of its peers at the studio with its shorts down and it's going to be ugly, it's going to be rough. And everybody knows that that's fine and just let go of it, what's working, what's not working, what are they responding to and move from there. And you couldn't do that anywhere else."

I ask Andrew Jimenez whether he always wanted two street performers against one another and the little girl?

"Well the two musicians competiting with music has been there from day one but the girl was a later addition. One Man Band really started out as a story without even any music in it. Mark [Andrews] andI we're talking kind of...it's the hardest thing to do, come up with stories. We would talk about themes we liked and when we got down to sort of create the story, I had this idea book which I kept which had a hundred ideas in this book. A lot of them had this theme which was whatever the talent is, not even music, just typically writing, sports...whatever the skill is, it had to do with someone pretty good at something. So when they're not challenged they kind of get lazy and that's just a theme...I'm always fascinated by those people.

I think it's something we experienced in L.A. a lot, just this apathy of 'I don't have to try as hard, I have to be good enough to maintain but not to explode' you know. But then somebody else comes along who's faster, quicker, better at that thing, how does the first person respond to that? They can do one of two things: they can say 'Wow! I want to work with you, I can learn from you.' They can do that which is the rare of the two, what most people do is they get threatened by you. They have to either get you out of their scene, never let you make an appearance or compete with you and we had a lot of different ideas that had that theme in it."

Katherine Sarafian:

"Gary Rydstrom, the Director had this idea you know from his Sound Design days. Gary is a seven-time Academy Award® winner for Sound Design and Sound Effects Editing and for all twenty years of his career he worked in front of this huge consol with knobs and not very well labeled...and adjusting little sounds and he did 'Saving Private Ryan' and he did 'Titanic' he did 'Terminator' too. He's a very very highly regarded Sound Designer. He worked on this big board and he always had a Director behind him, you know judging him and he was like, you know, 'change this, change this.' So that combined with his high school drivers ed instructor who would also sit quietly and take down notes, kind of came together for him and he said I've gotta have my...what's the worst...the tough stage to be a sixteen-years-old aged teenager being judged by somebody looking at a big board that makes no sense. To him that's pain and comedy all in one."

Ralph Eggleston:

"'For the Birds' was a school project I had, a design project and someone suggested I make a film out of it and I just couldn't imagine having to draw all the birds. This was before computer animation kind of kicked in so then I set it down. One day I had a call from Short Films at Pixar, I kind of pulled it out of the trunk."