Tin Toy was made in 1988, for SlGGRAPH once more.
Tin Toy began like this....
I was watching a home video where my sister Joanna had filmed
my nephew Timmy.
He was such a curte baby,
so she put him on a blanket, surrounded him with all his toys
and filmed for half an hour while he was playing.
He took toys and driveled all over them, banged them on the floor,
salivated even more, threw them away... and I thought: "How cute."
But if you were that toy, for you the baby would be a terrifying monster.
That was my idea for this story.
I went into Bill's office.
Bill's daughter Julia had just been born.
Actually, Julia was born in '86, but she was a toddler at just the right age.
She started to crawl, or she could do it already.
It was just the right time.
Bill thought babies were great, so I suggested making this film.
Boy, was he enthusiastic about it,
although there were huge technical problems to be solved.
It was very hard to create a human looking character.
That was something we hadn't tried before.
Nobody had tried to do it with a computer before.
We did a lot of research.
Julia visited us frequently, and we were studying her toes and fingers arduously.
And so we went to creating the model,
and it really was the first time we tried to
build flexible arms and knees.
- Surfaces. - Yes.
We wanted to animate the face as well.
You developed several new algorithms and programs just for the baby.
Yeah.
That was the first real facial animation of all times.
In this film our first "living" toys appeared for the first time.
You can see the roots of Toy Story...
During all the work on these short films we always wanted to--
Gary Rydstrom of Skywalker Sound did the sound.
That was a present for him.
First we were just colleting ideas what kind of tin toy it should be.
I had a collection of toys, and I had recently visited
the tin toy museum in Yokohama, Japan.
I really felt like using an old fashioned tin toy.
Almost everything was possible.
We had the idea of a one man band for Gary,
so that he could--
I reckon he spent more time on sound for Tin Toy
than he did for Cocoon 2.
He created all the sound effects.
Of all our short films this is the scene people find most funny and they are laughing a lot.
When Tinny the tin toy goes under the sofa and looks around,
and you see all the other toys hiding under the sofa.
Everybody in the firm created at least one toy.
Everybody contributed.
Whenever they felt like doing it and had a little spare time,
they created a toy model in half an hour or so.
The story was a huge success,
because in this scene everybody was laughing
when there was the explanation for everybody in the audience,
all the parents that had been wondering why so many toys are always hiding under beds and sofas
and that is why can't find them for months.
They just disappear to a place where they cannot be driveled on by children.
I belive that was the first time the audience understood all that.
It is so funny that Tinny comes back from his safe hiding place
- because he wants.... - That the baby stops crying and is happy again.
Then the situation is changing and the baby is much more interested in the boxes
where the tin toy had been in before
than in the toy itself.
Now the roles are swapped
and Tinny starts running after the baby,
to attract attention.
Can you remember what the baby was looking like in the beginning?
The rendering result of my software?
Yeah. It was terrifying.
John was already considering an idea for another film
after I had shown him the first pictures.
Those were frightening.
One of the main challenges was
to create a cartoon version of a human,
instead of tryong to make it look as real as possible.
because you need to find the right balance between the baby and the animated toys.
In the end it worked well,
because we wanted it to be a baby-monster.
Even today people still enjoy it,
and this film won an Academy Award. We are very proud of that.