Behind the Scenes at Pixar!
Working at Pixar is not all bean bags and snack-fueled brainstorming sessions (they literally have a whole room dedicated to cereal). It is work, and Sally Garbarini should know. She works as the Sets Department Head. She has played a role in making some of of Pixar's most recognized movies or sequels such as: Toys Story 3, Cars 2, Monsters University, The Good Dinosaur, and the up coming Coco and Cars 3.
Though you might think from looking at the beautiful campus of Pixar located in Emeryville, California that people spend most of their time outside. However, according to Garbarini, you spend most of your days in meetings. She states that “Some meetings are one-on-one talking to Technical Directors in the Sets Department about what film they’d like to work on next.” While she meets with people in her department, she also coordinates with multiple people outside of her department. She meet with her colleagues in “Recruiting and Human Resources, to navigate any future hiring needs for the department, including interns. … Department Heads at the studio to ensure that the employee experience is positive across for all of our teams. And of course, I meet with my boss, the Head of Production, so he knows what Sets is up to.”
Michael Kiernan, another Pixar employee says that on a day to day base, he works mostly on making sure his teams have information and tools that they need. As Senior Manager in the Systems Department, he manages teams that “are responsible for the high performance computing systems [that] the Studio uses to render the images designed and developed by our artists.” He continues to explain that he as a very full, busy schedule. “I meet with groups so we can discuss problems, brainstorm possible solutions, and determine what our next steps are. At other times I meet one-on-one with people if they have an issue they need to talk through with somebody. When I’m not meeting with people directly, I’m often gathering information from a variety of people and places so I can incorporate it into a message or document that I’ll then send out to a group.”
Though the entertainment industry has a tradition of grinding people until they can’t work anymore, Pixar is the opposite. According to Garbarini, the environment at Pixar is “a very family-friendly environment”. Adding on to that Kiernan describes that “the Studio takes the exact opposite approach inside this very industry. The results speak for themselves--the Studio is filled with people who love working here and have been doing so far a long time.” But walking into the office you should not be fooled by the t-shirts and jeans. Garbarnin goes on to say that the people are experts are their craft. “I work with are extraordinarily talented, hard-working, kind and thoughtful people. I feel spoiled to spend my days with them.”
Even though the people at Pixar are extremely talented, they still have to go through all of the basic steps of making a story or movie. It all starts with brainstorming. Garbarini managed the story on The Good Dinosaur movie and watched the movie be created “ I watched a writer and director scribble the very first seed ideas of a story on a white board asking basic questions like, ‘Why should I care about this main character?’ To be there in that moment when an idea is being created is magical.” But one step of making a movie is not less thrilling than another. When she managed lighting on Cars 2, she told us that the most memorable moment was sitting “in the dark theater watching each beautifully lit shot flash on screen during Digital Dailies, the final phase of approval for our shots before it’s sent out into the world.” Taking a more technical approach Kiernan explains that the best part, for him personally, is when there is some new technical challenge. He says that during these moment that “The easy solution would be to leave something out of the movie, reduce the environment so it’s more like our previous work, or make the characters less complicated.” He precede to tell use that a whirlwind of debate usually follows but after enough time has passed these situations become the stories we enjoy reminiscing about.
But with all of this hard work something terrible is bound to happen. It can be something as small as a glitch in the program or something as big as deleting the entire movie, and it has all happened at Pixar. Garbarini explains that since Pixar is dedicated to telling great stories they have to evolve during production. She explains that this means that sometimes a story has to change last minute and that a scene that you have been working on can be cut. “[It] can be very disappointing but in those moments, we remind ourselves that what matters most is putting the best story possible on screen. We all sacrifice a little for the bigger picture.”
