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Interview: Scott Clark talks Animation & Monsters University

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Disney•Pixar films have been opening at Edinburgh International Film Festival for many years now. From Ratatouille to Wall-E and Toy Story 3 to Brave, Monsters University now continues the tradition of Disney•Pixar’s fondly held place at the EIFF.

“I’m very excited to be representing Pixar and Pixar is excited to be back, of course,” said Clark. “This is my first time in Scotland. I love Edinburgh. It was fun to introduce the film today.”

Clark has been an animator at Disney since shortly after the release of Toy Story in US cinemas. “My favourite Pixar film is Toy Story. It’s the only one where I wasn’t around. It was the film that got me interested in computer animation and Pixar. When I did my internship it was still in [movie] theatres. I have a lot of fond memories, not only of the film. It’s great that it’s the first computer-animated film but it’s also the beginning of my career and I’ve had a lot of fun since then.”

Since much of the film takes place on campus at Monsters University, the animation team worked hard to get back into the mindset of college life. “We did a lot of research,” said Clark. “We went to Harvard, UC Berkeley, and Stanford, and just walked around and pretended we were students. What was funny was that a lot of the people, including the director, we all went to art school… and practically none of us had been in a fraternity or sorority. We also weren’t familiar with certain aspects of the American college culture, and that was part of our story, so we really wanted to invest in it.

“The research is also really fun and, of course, we were also all in college so there were things where we were researching and were like, ‘Ahh, I remember that!’ It was good to go back to that energy and the fun of being in school again.”

Clark also had a lot of fun animating younger, more inventively fictional characters. But is it easier or more difficult than animating humans?

“Well, first of all, animation is hard! Even if you’re animating Cars, which is probably the simplest world we’ve animated, the rules are simpler, but it’s even hard there. But the most difficult challenge is something like Brave, when you have humans. The closer to human it gets, the more naturalistic it needs to be.

“With Mike and Sulley, or a world like Monsters, it’s really fun because they’re caricatures of animals, people, they’re really people through monsters. So we recognise our sister or brother or uncle through these funny characters. But what was challenging in Monsters was the scope. In Monsters University, the scope of characters which we had to animate was just tremendous, every scene, every background. We did not have that scope on the first film, Monsters Inc.”

He also spoke about his favourite scene in the film. I didn’t get to animate much because I was the supervising animator,” said Clark, ”but one of the scenes that I did do was to animate Sulley at the Roar Omega Roar frat party, when he’s not participating then Squishy does the cowboy roping him onto the dance floor move.

“Another animator animated Squishy, then I had Sulley, I animated him getting reeled in onto the dance floor. That was fun for me because I like dancing and I thought it was an interesting challenge to try to, how do I get this character that has long, lanky arms, short, stubby legs, and a neck that sticks out… he’s kind of goofy, he’s not built to dance, so how do I get him to look… he’s confident and cocky in this movie.

“So how do I get that 18 year-old, confident and cocky, but perhaps under the surface insecure and trying to be cool? there’s a complexity to being at a party and trying to fit in and trying to find out who you are and that was pretty fun. As an actor I’m thinking about all that stuff, it’s just a funny scene, but it was fun, and it was fun to get that track and listen to it and animate to it. It’s pantomime, that was all the animator performance.”

Monsters University is released in UK cinemas on 12 July 2013.

Interview: Jennifer Steinman on Desert Runners

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The RacingThePlanet’s 4Desert Ultramarathon Series is an extreme running challenge – the hardest of its kind in the world. It comprises of four 250km races across the Atcama Desert in Chile (the world’s driest), Gobi Desert in China (the most changeable), Sahara in Egypt (the hottest), and the snows of Antarctica (the coldest).

What’s more, Steinman’s first subject, Dave, was 56 when he announced he was going for the Grand Slam: all four titles in one calendar year. The first person to achieve this was professional ultramarathon runner and co-producer Dean Karnazes.

Upon discovering Dave, “I had never heard anything like this before in my life,” Steinman told us by phone ahead of the film’s first screening. “I was looking at this skinny, goofy guy on stage saying he was going to do this, and I was just taken with him. I was looking at him and thinking, this guy is not that much younger than my mother, and my mother thinks she can’t walk around the block, so what makes this guy think he can run 1000km through the desert? “I was really drawn to this idea of why someone would think this thing is possible, that other people think is impossible – what is that all about?”

So does this director still think these runners are crazy? “Well, I get it now, in a way that I didn’t before,” said Steinman. “The first thing people always say when you tell them what these people are doing is, ‘Oh my God, they’re crazy,’ so that was one of my big questions for them when we were out in the desert: why is this not crazy? Why is this not a crazy thing to do? I was constantly asking everyone that because I wanted to see what their response was.”

For the runners it is as much of a mental game as it is a physical one. “For them it’s all about how you approach it. So they never think about 250km – they think about the next 10km to get to the next checkpoint. Almost everybody out there does that. If they stopped and thought about the whole of it, they’d be completely overwhelmed,” said Steinman. “So everybody out there has their own way of breaking it down or making it seem doable or possible. I was really interested in those human coping mechanisms.”

This certainly comes across in the film as inhospitable landscapes and the issue of mind versus body are but two of the runners’ greatest challenges. “I always tell people that the biggest thing I learned out there was this: This has nothing to do with fitness,” said Steinman. “It has absolutely nothing to do with fitness. I saw some of the most fit people with the most insane bodies you’ve ever seen in your entire life, who were in the most amazing shape in the world, not make it – and I saw people who you’d think could never in a million years run 5 miles, much less 155, make it.

“I saw one 50 year-old guy who’d barely ever worked out before wearing Tiva sandals walk the entire course in the Sahara Desert and make it. So what I really learned was that it was entirely a mental game. The thing I noticed is the difference between the people who made it and the people who didn’t make it: the people who made it always believed that they would, and never let doubt enter their mind.”

Doubts and the mental game are also a big part of this dramatic yet intimate film which at once shares the runners’ agony, devastation and triumph. One runner, Tremaine, told Steinman that the filming changed his experience of the races. Steinman said that, “He told me that because I made me talk about it as it was happening and express his feelings, he discovered so much more about himself by having that conversation. He said, ‘If there hadn’t been a film crew there, I don’t think it would’ve been as profound an experience for me.’”

The filmmakers have also created a community around the film, which began with a Kickstarter campaign to raise a small portion of their budget. “I never ever thought I’d say fundraising was fun, but that 30-day Kickstarter campaign was really fun,” said Steinman, “t’s that whole “it takes a village” thing.”

The runners operate under the same notion, creating a tangible sense of camaraderie and mutual support. In fact, Steinman can also be seen on the sidelines, cheering on the runners. The filmmakers became a part of the ultrarunning community at the races, which is evident in the film itself, “There are alot of shots of me in the movie, just like hanging out,” she laughed, adding that there should be a competition for spotting her. “We all became really really close. We, as filmmakers, were definitely part of it.”

The World Premiere of Desert Runners took place at Edinburgh International Film Festival. Keep up to date at http://desertrunnersmovie.com