Hallo, I am Jan Pinkava, writer and director of Geri's Game.
I'll tell you some things about the film while you are watching it.
Geri's Game was the first short film made by Pixar
after John Lasseters five short films.
We had two goals: First, to make a great short film,
Second, the research and development of human characters.
It's really hard to create to
create humans with computer graphics.
We had to solve a few technical problems
before we we were able to put humans in all the Pixar stories.
This here is Geri the old man, who on a nice day in autumn
unpacks his chess pieces.
On the cigar box he uses to store them it reads:
"Pixar short films, Point Richmond, handmade."
And on the tattered label on the side of the box
you can even see the old Pixar logo.
The old man in the story is losely based on my grandfather
who got very old and who has been playing chess his whole life.
The story is about one character only,
and we needed a plot
with only one character in some sort of conflict.
We needed a strange situation like this one,
where an old man acts as if he were two people.
That's my favorite shot in this film.
You can see that Geri is just an old man
who changes seats.
And then: "Bang!"
On the other side of the table he is a much junger and vivid man.
19 Animators were working on Geri's Game.
For me as the director it was quite a challenge
to fit all the parts made by different animators together
to make the result look seamless.
Everybody did a great job.
The soundtrack was done by Gus Viseur and his orchestra.
Flambée Montalbanaise is one of my favorite pieces of French music
and it is carrying half the storyline. It's fitting in beautifully.
You can hear the awesome sound quality
of Tom Myers from Skywalker Sound.
This here is a shot
where you can see both Geris at the same time.
That's an insider joke
because in reality it's only one person.
In this film the lighting is constantly changing
to make it look as if Geri is playing all day long
against himself and meanwhile the sun is wandering from East to West.
All in all it took one and a half years
to finish this film.
Half of the time was spent on story board and plot development,
to get the story right.
Many still pictures were made before we went into production.
When we came to this part of the story
I wondered whether it was too harsh
that apparently Geri died.
Many times you can hear expressions of relief from the audience at this point
when he gets up again.
When Geri turns the chess board around,
the box with the chess pieces falls to the floor.
In the backward tracking shot at the end of the film you will see
that the box is not there anymore.
I was often asked what happened to it.
The truth is, we simply forgot it.
We sent a tape to the American Chess Association.
They had heard that we were making a film about chess.
We never received an answer what they thought about the chess game itself.
I guess they did not find the game too impressive.
But that's not the important point anyway.
Michael Cass who created the software for the fabric simulation
to enable the computer to calculate how the clothes are moving
is happy that nobody really noticed his work
because the fabric looks so real.
I would like to be like Geri when I am old.