Designing Toy Story
Pixar art director Bob Pauley talks 3D World through his journey with the Toy Story films
Ever since a young Bob Pauley first laid eyes on Pixar’s groundbreaking 1986 short film Luxo Jr. his mind has been made up. “I said, ‘I have to work for those folks’,” he tells 3D World. “You could tell, even way back then, the trajectory of where they were going. In such simple things as a ball and two lamps you felt for those characters.”
After some initial setbacks, Pauley landed his dream job in the art department of Pixar Animation Studios, just in time to work on Toy Story, the film that would change filmmaking forever. However, the eventual impact of Toy Story was the furthest thing from his mind. With a small team and a host of limitations, Pauley and his fellow filmmakers remained laser focused on getting the job done.
“I remember we didn’t even have legitimate art rooms for our reviews,” he reflects. “John Lasseter would come by and just look at the boards we had up on the wall. One review, I’m working on Buzz Lightyear, and he says: ‘This is going to be huge,’ and I go, ‘Yeah, sure’.” It wasn’t until early renders from the film were screened for Pixar employees that the excitement began to take hold.
As part of the art department, Pauley and his teammates are responsible for the design of a film’s characters and sets. “We work really closely with the story department,” he explains, “a lot of the time they come up with the ideas and do preliminary drawings to get the boards down. The art department gets the fun of designing the characters and working with the technical departments to build them.” During production on Toy Story, each of the art department’s designs needed to account for the limitations of early computer animation. Often the artists would collaborate with the technical department to establish what could work in the computer. “It was an education,” Pauley continues, “early on there was a bigger divide between art and technical. We had to collaborate. When solving design problems it’s important to understand the problem, and in this case it was often limitations.”
These limitations meant that it was easier for Pixar’s artists to render plastic and hard surfaces than other materials. “Woody was a soft toy that would have more challenging issues with his bending and creases. We had to be judicious with what we were asking for and when,” admits Pauley. “There are certain scenes where we came up with creative ways of implying effects without actually having to do them. You can only cut away from something so often, the lead characters had to be built in a way that animators could use them and they wouldn’t be breaking down the whole time. We put our efforts into areas the camera would see.”
One of Pauley’s biggest contributions to Toy Story would be the iconic design of Buzz Lightyear. “There was a test with a small version of Buzz, but a different design,” recalls Pauley. “John [Lasseter] thought it needed to be more toy-like, we needed to really connect with the audience in terms
of what a toy really feels like. He also wanted it to be a little more of an astronaut.”
During production, Pauley and Lasseter would drive out to a local toy shop to gather reference materials. “We were just buying toys and looking at how the joints work,” says Pauley. “If it worked in the physical world then it was probably going to work on the computer. You would have the same intersections and so forth.”
“We wanted to make something functional because some of these action figures had limited joints, they couldn’t act, they could barely stand,” he continues. “We found a few that had about 12 points of articulation, so we were looking at how they work and behave.” This reference would eventually lead to the final design of Buzz, and Pauley then worked with technical director Eben Ostby to build the CG model.
Pauley has leant his hand to each Toy Story sequel, taking on the mantle of production designer for Toy Story 3 in 2010 and Toy Story 4 in 2019. This has given him multiple opportunities to revisit his original designs. “Every time we do one it’s like, ‘Let’s just bring Buzz up, oh new software, we can’t just bring Buzz up, we have to rebuild it’.” Rather than altering the beloved designs, the filmmakers get to revamp the characters with more advanced shaders and surface details.
“Woody’s collar was a single surface in the first film,” Pauley continues, “and we got to give it thickness. In Toy Story 3 when Buzz has that switch at the back for the Spanish version, we had to work on and redesign that, giving more depth to who he is. For Toy Story 4 it was more about giving them better points of articulation for expression.” The fourth film also saw Pixar’s artists adding texture details like scratches, alongside the kind of wear and tear that toys naturally acquire.
“The biggest reward on Toy Story 4 was getting to revisit Bo Peep,” adds Pauley. “She was a tertiary character in the first movie and had limitations because we couldn’t put too much energy towards her. In the flashback sequence we could see her in all that we wish we could have done at the time. Then we got to re-envision her as somebody who has evolved and moved on. That’s one of the rare opportunities to revisit a character and push them in a new direction.”
Collaboration and creativity are at the heart of everything at Pixar, and they are what’s kept Pauley there all these years. “We’ve been so lucky to have this group of creative people that challenge each other. We want things to be great visually, but as we always say, story is king. Story is blended with visuals and a design sense that pushes the medium forward.”