- Okay, so... - Hi, I'm Brenda Chapman.
- And I'm Steve Hickner. - And I'm Simon Wells.
And we've never actually done this before,
but we're just gonna talk our way through what happened on this picture
while we were making it.
Actually, we also wanna mention that one of the big stars of this film
was Hans Zimmer who wrote the score.
And of course, the songs are by Stephen Schwartz.
Absolutely, in fact, Stephen really got the movie going with the first song,
Deliver Us.
Yeah, that, sort of, planted the movie straight off.
We knew, kind of, the flavor and feel of the whole thing.
Yeah, in fact, we were so worried
after we'd gotten the first six or seven minutes of the film done.
Trying to live up to that first six or seven minutes for the rest of the film
was a little intimidating.
These credits and the clouds that are coming up were...
They were done by Conánn Fitzpatrick
and Patrick Witting worked on it.
They're actually... They're paintings
that we then manipulated digitally
and moved around in the scene-planning.
By Robert Crawford, who was working on them with him.
Our art director Richie Chavez designed these incredible sets of clouds
that Bernadette painted and morphed together.
And actually try and deliver it, and make it work was...
I think it was, "Richie, what have you done to it?"
Yeah, I think it was the first thing that was started
and the last shot cut in the movie.
And some of the stuff that you're seeing in the prologue here
came out of the visual development that went on for about six months
before we started production proper on the picture.
- Yeah. - A lot of visuals,
like that first thing with the Seti head
was actually a painting by Paul Lasaine,
who went on to be one of the heads of background,
and he just did this as a...
You know, a development piece, sort of, "Here's an idea."
So, a lot of these things were stuck together from those.
And also, Marcos Mateu, who went on to work in layout,
created a lot of these visuals.
Like, especially, one of these shots coming up. Marcos did that. This one.
- Yeah. - And Richie Chavez did a lot
of incredible stuff in here, too, that the story artists really ran with.
This sequence was the first sequence we went into production with,
and it was really, sort of, a shakedown for the whole studio,
trying to get into the style of the characters
and trying to find out what the, kind of, look of the picture was going to be.
Also, get things like the 3D and 2D stuff working together.
That big statue we just went through was one of the very early 3D pieces
with 2D artwork scanned onto a 3D model and then integrated with a 2D background.
Yeah, this was my training ground as a director, I think,
going through the effects and all of that.
I know Steve Woods, one of the effects artists,
was one of the first scenes I had to approve,
and the incredible patience of the effects department for this sequence was...
- Was amazing. My hat's off to them. - Let's just see here,
- transparent guards that go through there. - Yeah.
It's one of the things we never fixed,
was a couple of the guards' shadows were actually rather too thin
and so it looks like there was a couple of transparent guards.
This is where I'd like to mention Lorna Cook, one of our story artists,
who, in her storyboard, she did this entire section
with Yocheved and the kids all through Goshen
and she gave us a heck of a time
because she drew this beautiful woman that was...
You just felt the pain and the love
and all of that in these simple story sketches.
Trying to find a character design for this...
This particular woman was really difficult,
'cause we're trying to match those story sketches
- as close as we could. - Yeah, match the feel, and yet,
fit it within the style
that Carter Goodrich had created for the characters.
And still look like Moses.
- 'Cause she had to look like his mother. - Yeah.
Yeah, had to be family resemblance running through.
So, it was a tall order,
but I think Rodolphe...
- Rodolphe Guenoden. - Yeah, he pulled it off.
Yeah.
I can never say his last name. I never...
I know what it is, but I'm just never sure how to pronounce it.
There's wonderful subtle things which the animators carried through here,
like the small breeze that's blowing all the way through this sequence...
I remember Serguei just had a baby when he animated this.
Yeah. Yes, he actually had a three-month-old baby, so he was...
- He was literally drawing his own child. - Yeah.
- There are lots of... - But it had be a girl.
There were lots of babies on the movie, including Brenda's soon.
Yes. If Brenda drops out during this commentary,
it's because she had to go to the hospital.
You're about, what, a week away from popping?
Yup.
I didn't think I was gonna make it on the drive over here.
Yeah, Brenda had a baby on the movie, Simon had a baby on the movie,
and I got a cold.
- Good. - Well, I haven't had a baby yet,
so if we can get through this, we'll...
- I'll have it right after it. - Movie ain't over yet.
So you're seeing a 3D basket integrated into 3D water
with 2D ripples and a whole painted background
which, you know, then has 2D animation dropped into it
and some 3D manipulation of the 2D animation
in order to create things like the shadows.
It's immense amounts of layering of different techniques.
- I'm sorry, Brenda, go on. - Yeah, that shot of the Nile
was one of the first shots we had done,
what we could do with just a simple background
and throwing the 3D sort of technique over it
and it was shocking how...
- When we first saw that in color. - How real that was.
Paul Lasaine did that close-up of Yocheved,
- and everybody fell in love with it. - Yes, it's one drawing.
And poor old Rodolphe who animated it must have animated that scene, scene 66...
He must have animated that, what, half a dozen, eight times?
- Yeah. - And then we went back and forth.
Is she gonna have tears? Is she not gonna have tears?
And she finally ended up with...
- With tears. - With tears. And we ended up
doing the most complicated tears that you can imagine, that the...
The tears actually have three or four elements. They have a shadow, a highlight,
there's the hard part of a tear and the soft part of a tear
that's up against the skin that, sort of, run down the cheek.
Coming up, the 3D...
Poor Doug Ikeler. Those curtains...
I gave him such a hard time on those curtains.
But he... He pulled it off.
And then, anytime anybody had to touch the basket, it became a problem.
Because the basket would be animated first and then the 2D animation.
Well, it's... We kind of worked it two different ways.
Sometimes, the 2D animation was done in rough first,
and the basket was then, kind of, fitted in,
but then the cleanup animation, the final line animation
had to be adjusted to fit every movement of the basket.
It's a real headache.
But backing up, just this sequence in general,
we were trying so hard to find the style of the film,
the style of acting, the style of...
You know, how we wanted to animate the reality of the movements or the...
We went back and we reanimated the part of Miriam, didn't we?
Yeah, we had to reanimate...
Actually, Bob Scott ended up reanimating it
because we sort of went over the top with Miriam.
She was a little too cartoony in our first approach.
Beautifully done, but it just didn't fit into the rest of the film very well, so...
Yes, and when we'd done about half of the rest of the film,
it became apparent there were a couple of scenes that just didn't quite...
This massive end shot which is...
Paul Lasaine's...
Yeah, and Harald Kraut's masterwork of3D-2D integration.
All these slaves are actually sprites.
They're 3D images that have then been turned into little 2D cards,
animating away, stuck into a 3D background.
And this shot was always really controversial,
because people didn't understand why we were still looking at Egypt
and the lyrics of the song were singing about the Promised Land,
and the idea was, we had such trouble
with the idea that the Promised Land was so close,
why didn't they just go there to begin with, if we were showing that.
So we showed the palace where the baby Moses was,
the guy who was gonna take them to the Promised Land
- if no one else got there. - Yes.
He was the deliverer who was gonna come.
Anyway, this was actually, strange enough,
also the second sequence that went into production.
We're gonna be doing a more detailed study of this sequence
in one of the pieces of additional material on this DVD, so...
But we knew we wanted to show Moses
in a different way than people would expect.
That's why we chose to show him in a chariot race as a young man.
Yeah, originally, we'd had Moses as sort of the meek follower of Rameses,
the big showoff and arrogant, you know, type guy,
but it just didn't quite work that way.
We were just having...
- The trouble is we liked Rameses too much. - Yeah.
And Moses was kind of this boring, you know, wet end
that was just coming along with him,
- and we didn't like him, so... - So we made Moses the troublemaker
and you know, giving him all the mischievous qualities.
He also, on a deeper level, works as the guy
who has no responsibilities at all.
The prince who has, you know, all of the privileges
- and none of the responsibilities. - Yes, he's got the free ride, basically.
And he's gonna become the man with the greatest responsibilities.
Whereas Rameses, we wanted to play him...
He's got the responsibility of this tradition of thousands of years
of Egyptian pharaohs weighing on his shoulders.
His father is being overbearing to him and really pounding him, so he's,
you know, he wants to have fun, you know, Moses is his...
Is his sort of release valve
and confidante,
but he's a very serious young man.
One of the things going into the film we wanted to really work on
was not having just a straightforward villain
who was just evil.
We wanted to understand the motivations of the villain,
even feel some sympathy for him.
You know, it's too easy just to have that dark character who,
you know, does lousy, evil things.
Yeah. And Ralph Fiennes really helped us with that a lot
because even in his angriest moments,
you can hear the vulnerability in his voice
and he really gave us a lot of cues on how we could play Rameses.
Yeah, actually, I remember the first recording session,
when we started getting that stuff and we started realizing,
"Boy, there are layers to this character."
He raised the bar for us. It's like, "Uh-oh.
- "He's really good." - "We have to dig a little deeper here
"for this character."
You don't think we'll get in trouble for this, do you?
No, not a chance.
Now we get into what Jeffrey Katzenberg described
as the father who's telling his kids off for having wrecked the family car.
He's... He's not actually really angry at them for the things that they've done.
He's more upset because they could have hurt themselves.
And their lack of responsibility.
I mean, just the fact that they weren't thinking about the greater picture.
Kristof really did...
Kristof Serrand really did a terrific job with Seti on this.
He really moves like an older man.
He has real screen presence and charisma, his Seti.
And Kristof went on to supervise the older Moses,
but almost all of Seti is actually his hands-on animation.
This is...
I think you, Simon, and Kelly Asbury worked on this sequence,
- you know, writing it and getting it... - In story. Yeah.
Getting it succinct in how the scene was gonna play.
And it's pretty much verbatim what the boards were.
- Even... - Yup.
Even those rough story sketches of Kelly's.
It's pretty much the same kind of staging and everything.
Do you remember that horrible sketch that Kelly had done?
- He'd, like, run it off... - Poor Kelly.
...in about 10 seconds to throw it into the reel
and it ended up being in the reel for about three years.
- Yeah, it just stayed there. He would... - And I wanted the one in the...
- The taskmaster thing... - Yeah.
...where Rameses and Moses... That sketch.
Somehow, it's always the horrible story sketches, the really rough ones,
that stay in for the longest.
- But Kelly does do good story sketches. - He can do, yeah.
- But just that wasn't one of them. - This was just a really rough one.
This BG coming up is spectacular there
that Paul did, the Vista Vieja.
- That was so nice. - The long conversation scene.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
And notice the water in the background.
Again, it's one painting with just some 3D effects
thrown on top.
Steve... Stephen Krauth, I believe, did that.
There are a lot of little, subtle things,
like there's a very slight highlight on the edge of the characters
which actually is created by offsetting the animation
and adjusting the color model on that offset.
But just all those kind of little details
which people worked so hard to throw in
and I think, generally, you don't notice as you watch the film,
but they add to the sort of feel...
The animators rarely get a scene this long to animate on.
Usually, we tend to cut quicker.
Yeah, we tried to...
To breathe in the scenes.
This is... This idea for this scene,
the water balloon thing, came from Jeffrey's misspent youth.
Yeah, living on Park Lane, throwing water balloons down on the passers-by.
- Yeah. - It's been great.
This is sort of a...
A pre-sequence to the...
To a later scene in the movie
that Ronnie Del Carmen sort of inspired with...
Yeah, the ultimatum, when Moses goes back to talk to Rameses
after the first nine plagues?
Yeah. And... And it was sort of
setting up where the brothers would go,
that Rameses has his little hiding place where he goes
- to try to sort things out. - Which, ironically, is actually
- in the lap of his father. - In the lap of his father. Yeah.
And so, we wanted to sort out early on
that this was, kind of, a habitual thing as he would do.
Steve Martin and Martin Short gave us priceless dialog in this scene,
of which were only, sadly, able to use a small fraction.
Great sessions with those guys and they're hilarious,
and they would ad-lib and just build on each other,
and you didn't wanna stop them,
but you knew that, you know, they'd go on for about three minutes
and you knew that you were only actually gonna use two lines.
Yeah, they were incredibly funny.
This was Serguei's idea of spinning the wig
as just sort of a little gag that Rameses can do,
because he pointed out that... In the desert montage
we had Moses take off his wig and throw it to one side
and he said, "You know, people are gonna be scared that he just tore his hair off."
- Yeah. - "You've got to show that they're wigs."
Boy, do you remember, Steve, you cut this sequence?
- We had the whole banquet sequence. - Yeah, this was a personal torture.
- Yeah. - This banquet sequence was in the movie
and it used to be, like, six minutes long or seven minutes long or something.
We had all this story material that we felt was really important
and had to be in there
and it would all look good in editorial, looking at the sequence.
And then we'd look at it in the movie as a whole
and it always felt too long and so we ended up just saying,
"It's got to be two-and-a-half minutes long."
And Steve, you took it into editorial and hacked the hell out of it.
Yeah, I said, "What if we just start in the middle of the scene
"so they come right in when everything's already happened?"
And it seemed to work better.
But there were so many other things you cut down as well.
At first, we thought, "No, you've ruined it."
And then we saw it in the movie as a whole.
It works.
I think this is the only scene that we were able to,
with Seti, do the namus.
With the stripes.
That blue and yellow crown.
This whole sequence.
I mean, 'cause with the queen's headdress and everything,
it was all effects, and cleanup really had a...
And it seems like a simpler sequence, but actually, with the lighting,
sort of this dramatic lighting
and the glinting off the medal and...
- All the detail of the costume. - And detail of the costumes.
- Rodolphe did a great job. - It was a tough one.
- On Tzipporah. Yeah. - With Tzipporah.
It's also the immense animated crowds which are actually,
they're groups of repeated cycles...
- Which Steve... - Yup.
- You wanna talk about it? - Well, hats off to Steve.
Well, they're just reused a whole bunch of times.
We made these pods of cycling people so we could keep it busy,
so it wasn't a bunch of held cels.
'Cause there's nothing worse than that in animation.
That whenever you cut to the crowd, nobody's moving.
However, we also had to make sure that nothing happened in the crowd
that was too obvious that you'd see it repeated.
I think Scott Wright did a lot of these.
I also like the subtlety of the color
in this sequence.
The color model group and the background people work so closely
together to get the unified look.
The characters blend into the background as opposed to popping out like...
Like a bright-colored cel of top of something.
And to get a feeling of richness without it becoming gaudy.
I remember, at one time, Samoyed, the helper there, was a big character
and eventually he became, "You there."
His character is just slightly diminished.
- But he was gonna be... Yeah. - Moses' best friend.
And then we said, "Why should there be this character as Moses' best friend?
"That should be Rameses, not...
"Not some guy who works in the palace."
Yes, we also had difficulty of,
"Why wouldn't he go with Moses when Moses left?"
Or at least when Moses came back
and, you know, took the slaves out of slavery,
"Why didn't this guy go with him?"
But we went down that whole track for a little while of that traditional
animation formula of the sidekicks.
You know, Moses had two dogs.
Rameses had his evil cat.
And that's what's left of the two brothers.
There are the two dogs.
And that's it. I think they show up in a scene later, but...
And all of this sort of diminished
when we really wanted to just spend the time with the main characters.
- Yeah, we found, you know, watching it... - We found that we...
We weren't interested unless Moses or Rameses were on screen.
Which actually was kind of a good thing. We were relieved to find that.
I don't know if... A lot of people who watched this may not realize
that the way in which animated films are built, there's an animatic
which is rough story sketches put to temporary sound
and temporary voices and temporary music,
and you watch that whole thing, the whole movie play as...
- It's called the story reel, yeah. - Yeah.
And then it's gradually replaced, first by line test
and then, finally, by color.
So we get to watch the movie hundreds of times during the making of the picture,
which, it gets quite tedious after a while, actually.
But we know it well at the end of four years.
This is one of the few sequences where we actually got the two actors,
Sandra Bullock
- and Jeff Goldblum together. - Jeff Goldblum.
And they were great fun, but they gave us a scene we did not expect.
Yeah, we were expecting this heavy, dramatic piece.
That's how we had originally done it in the scratch recording and conceived it,
and they came in, and they put humor in it.
Well, they're both natural comedians.
So they sort of started throwing in these little extras...
- And we started panicking a little bit. - Yeah.
- It was like, "Oh, no!" - "Tone it down, tone it... Oh, gosh."
And then, we, sort of, let ourselves sit back
and see what they were doing
and realized they were making it so much better.
Yeah, their instincts...
Particularly Jeff Goldblum's instinct of throwing in these little things.
Actually, it raised the...
It raised the drama, if anything, rather than...
Yeah, we still got our straight take of the sequence,
- but we ended up going with theirs. - Yeah.
And Sandra has this great,
great way of going back and forth between being dramatic, but yet...
Then the next line or two she'll deliver it
with a humorous edge to it, but yet you still feel that...
That fear, that...
The need behind what she's saying and it's...
- It was... It was very layered. - I wanna mention Fabio.
Fabio Lignini who animated Aaron,
Bob Scott did Miriam, but the Aaron...
Fabio, actually, came to us and said, you know,
"How much of the Jeff Goldblum stuff do you want in this character?"
Because he'd watched the tapes of Jeff recording the dialog
and wanted to get some of those mannerisms and very peculiar things that he does,
- into the animation. - Remember, he didn't wanna do the job.
Fabio, he didn't think he could head up a character.
Of course, he turned out to be spectacular.
And, as with Miriam, the thing is,
Bob is so much like Miriam. Bob Scott, our lead on Miriam.
- I don't think he'd like you saying that. - No, I mean, in personality and just...
Just the sincerity of the person as well as pulling in Sandra Bullock,
you know, who has a lot of that quality too,
so it's a nice blending of...
Of the pairing of the animator and the actress. It was just...
And James Baxter did a great job on Moses in this sequence.
However, at this point, we're gonna embarrass Brenda
because Brenda was actually the voice, the singing voice of Miriam at this point.
We actually, originally, we did it as scratch.
Brenda was the voice of Miriam in scratch when we were building the story reel
and you know, unsuspectingly, she sang this little piece of the Lullaby.
And we went back and tried to rerecord it with Sally Dworsky
who sings Miriam's part in When You Believe,
and somehow, it just never came over the same.
It didn't have the same emotional content.
And so, we all elected that Brenda was gonna stay in the picture.
- I was outvoted. - Yeah.
Yeah, there was just something about that moment when you did it
that we could never quite recapture.
That's because I had to make everyone leave the room
and I was a nervous wreck just because Nick Fletcher, our editor, was in there
listening to me so...
The shake in my voice is...
Simon's debut is coming up. He'll get his.
So this is actually another subtle 3D background
behind there.
Very often, we'd try to use the 3D stuff
so you really didn't notice it too much. We didn't wanna showcase it,
we just wanted it integrated with the overall look of the picture.
We wanted to use it to be able to move the camera and make it
feel much more dimensional,
and like using live-action camera
as opposed to just the normal flat camera approach to...
- Like this is 2D. - ...animation.
Yeah, it was actually an artistic choice here
which was Darek Gogol's suggestion.
It was that within the Egyptian world,
things fall into a very two-dimensional and very structured design,
whereas outside of the Egyptian world,
in Goshen, where the Hebrews live or out in...
Out in the desert, it all becomes much more organic.
- There's the dogs again. - Yeah.
Don't blink, that's the end of Moses' sidekicks in the picture.
Those two dogs.
A son of the proud history that's shown
Etched on every wall
The hieroglyphs, we ought to mention Hani.
- Yes. - Who...
Our resident Egyptian,
who had studied hieroglyphs in Egyptian art school for three years
and had been convinced he was never gonna use them for anything
and had complained bitterly the whole time he'd been studying.
And then he found that in fact, yes,
this job did require him to teach us all about
the design and use of hieroglyphs.
- Especially in this nightmare. - At least two years of his life, yeah.
Two years of his life.
In fact, we have to admit that we did...
We did break some of the rules of the hieroglyphs, like for instance,
hieroglyph eyes would never actually touch the edge of the eye surrounding it.
- And hieroglyphs don't point. - Yeah. Like right there.
We're sorry, Hani, we made you do it.
This is also actually the work of Dave Morehead,
one of the scene planners, to build this whole...
Taking 2D animation and placing it into a 3D world.
Susan Zytka did a lot of the character animation.
Yeah. She did a really good job.
They're all deliberately stylized to move in this peculiar and stilted way.
It's hard in animation sometimes
to realize you're in a different, in a dream sequence, you know and...
You know, when you've got one drawing style going to another drawing style,
to make it really clear, so we had to really be specific
in how we wanted to stylize this.
Because even in the "real world" in this movie,
the Egyptians have a hieroglyphic look to them in their design.
So we had to be pretty graphic in this.
Going up onto the ceiling like that
came out of one of those visual development ideas.
- This was a Hani pose. - Yes.
This is a cool scene, the replay of the events of the prologue.
We went through a lot of different versions of this dream sequence,
trying things that were much more abstract and dreamlike,
and eventually tied back into something that was gonna be a very clear reminder
of what we had already witnessed.
So, we could...
In the prologue, we tried to keep it a little vague,
as to what was actually happening to those children,
and this way we could find out with Moses,
you know, the horror of it.
And be reasonably graphic about it whilst not having to actually show real babies
- that were being hacked to pieces. - Yeah.
- I think that... - Wanting to be with the character.
...scene with the torch was one of the first ones
ever animated of the young Moses.
- Yes, running up to camera. Yes. - Yes.
William Salazar did that.
And that beautiful scene going down the hall.
Steve Woods did that whole lighting.
I think Steve Horrocks did the animation on...
We ought to mention the amazing flicker effect.
Which, you don't really understand what's difficult about it,
but the light parts of the picture actually lighten and darken,
and the dark parts of the picture do not.
So, the result is you get a very real sense
of light falling on the background.
- From the fire flicker. - Yeah.
Which was a creation of Steve Krauth, in effects.
- A little bit of Jane Gotts in there too. - Yeah.
Remember, we went back and forth in this sequence, of whether or not...
How sympathetic Seti was going to be
- on this. - That's right, he was...
And we finally decided that we had to make him
a little bit, have more of an edge.
And that's when we added the last lines,
where he says, "They were only slaves."
My son.
They were only slaves.
But I think, wonderful, subtle piece of acting on both characters.
There's another one of those glints on that metal.
I kept asking for that over and over again.
Poor effects department.
"Can I have another glint, please?"
Moses?
And the Queen here, done by Dave Brewster.
- Really nice. - Beautifully done.
And went on to do the older Rameses as well.
Supervise.
Then there are subtle things, I don't know if you've noticed.
But, the lily pads in the background
are actually moving up and down, very slightly on the water.
But the lily flowers are not.
They had to be separated off and the distortion that's applied
to part of the background didn't apply to them.
Why did you choose me?
I think the Queen is really beautiful here.
Dave Brewster did a wonderful job.
I think he really thought about his mother a lot when he was doing it.
And he always wanted the Queen touching Moses
because it's what his mother always did when she was trying to comfort him,
was always constantly touching.
It was a strong emotional connection for Dave.
And Helen Mirren did a beautiful job with the voice.
- But Linda Shayne... - She's the singer.
- She just seamlessly went into the song. - Astonishing match.
Trying to match up voices of the speaking and the singing parts...
Some people can do both,
but usually you're looking for a singer who can match
the actor that you've picked,
and that can be very tricky.
We literally listened to hundreds and hundreds of voices.
Or rather, actually, I guess Mary Locatell listened
- to hundreds and hundreds of voices... - We had to hear five or six.
...and then brought the best to us.
I'm not merely going to restore this temple.
I will make it more grand,
more splendid than any other monument...
Remember when Kelly first pitched this sequence?
We were a bit unsure whether having the nose
be the thing that Rameses was standing on
- was a little bit cartoony. - Was it gonna be too silly?
But, it was subtle enough. I think it worked okay.
A lot of the slaves in the background here are actually 3D slaves.
- 3D. - Yeah.
The foreground ones are 2D and the background ones are 3D. Yeah.
Actually trying to find the technique that would make
the 3D slaves look like
2D painting was quite a tricky thing.
And also trying to get the styling so that they,
just the drawings themselves look like
Carter Goodrich's and Carlos Grangel's designs.
Well, that was... You know, we had animators actually
come in and learn how to use the computer
- to do that. - Yes.
2D-trained animators working and learning the 3D techniques.
Yes, yes, my debut.
- Yes, you're coming up. - Yes, it's coming up.
I am the old slave.
If you remember at one time, Miriam was the one who was hit.
- Yeah. - Not this...
This guy, but we later on changed it to a Hebrew.
That's actually one of those things where we had a large number
of religious consultants involved in the film.
- And one of the few things... - Here's Simon.
- Yeah. - There he goes.
Yeah, we tried recording that with about five different voice artists,
and none of them sounded old enough, even people who actually were
- the right age. - Yeah. Orit sounded too cartoony.
We didn't actually have to hit Simon, though.
Yeah, I just screamed my lungs out for 15 minutes.
But the thing about Miriam,
originally we thought,
"Hey it would be great if it was Miriam being attacked by the slave master,
"and Moses would defend her."
Yeah, as a personal connection, it's like giving him
- a good solid reason. - Yeah, there was a whole group of rabbis,
from the reform right the way through
to the absolute, whatever it is, traditional rabbis,
and they all agreed. The only thing, in fact, they all agreed on
was that it couldn't be Miriam, it had to be some anonymous Hebrew,
because Moses is feeling a connection with his people, not just with his family.
And we realized that that actually led us to thinking differently
about stuff that came before and stuff that came after.
Well, it wasn't also just his people, it was just
seeing a stranger being treated like that,
realizing that all of these were people,
because not all the slaves are Hebrews.
We went to big effort to try and show
that there were a lot different races in there.
And it was just showing his compassion for humankind,
that we realized we'd missed the point
when we tried to use Miriam.
This turned out to be a very emotional sequence.
Yes, Seti used to be in this sequence.
And it would have divided it too much.
We found it had to be about the brothers.
And do you remember, we went back
and rerecorded this sequence several times over
because we'd recorded this initially with Val doing Moses, Val Kilmer.
And then we went and recorded Ralph being Rameses.
And then we realized that there was an emotional context,
that we had to go back and rerecord Val.
- And it went back and forth... - Yeah.
...three or four times and then eventually, actually,
Val wanted to rerecord his stuff, because he realized
- those things that he could do... - Yeah.
...that would sort of amp it up a bit further.
Yeah, the poor actors. I think it was really hard for them to
understand what, you know, how animation is done, because...
You know, they understood they'd done the scene before,
so they were trying to figure out why we kept having to rerecord
and the closest thing I can come to...
Or I could come to explaining was,
that this is more like workshopping a play as opposed to
- recording a script. - Yeah.
It's a constant source of reworking for the four years that this thing is going.
And it's hard because they don't have the other actors there with them.
They don't have their costumes, they don't have the environment
- to put their head into it. - If you remember, that sequence,
Nick Fletcher developed a technique of having
the Rameses lines on his computer
so that he could fire them off at the press of a button
so that Val would actually have someone to respond to.
Yeah, feel the emotion of what was coming from the other actor.
But it was really hard.
This conceit came from Steven.
This idea here in this sequence.
- Yeah. - Of starting Moses
big in the frame in the upper left and getting smaller and smaller
in the environment,
and moving eventually to the bottom right of the screen.
Where he's completely engulfed and dwarfed by the environment.
The land literally swallows him up.
You know, we also talked with him about having these images of Rameses
in the desert.
The pharaoh head and the faces and that kind of thing.
But then we started thinking about what this sequence really is about.
And it's really taking Moses to his lowest depth.
It's not about Rameses, it's about...
It's actually about stripping away everything of Egypt
and everything of being a prince.
We ought to mention Steven Spielberg here.
It's terrible name-dropping
to just use his first name and assume everyone knows.
So here he is, literally stripping away all elements of being a prince.
And that ring gave us a lot of trouble, 'cause for you laser disc owners,
who will go back and make sure in every scene he's wearing it, once he gets it.
- I think he is. - And there's the scene
that would have shocked the world, if he had just ripped his hair off.
But thanks to Serguei...
- This was it. Doug Cooper did this. - Yes.
Amazing sandstorm.
I think we have a few, like most of our jokes coming up.
This is pretty much it for jokes, yeah.
That actually got a laugh. I was amazed when we started screening this
to groups of people that the dissolve to his hair sticking out, we get a laugh.
Then we realized, "Of course, we were
"originally gonna have other tufts of grass."
And it just looked like one of many tufts of grass.
And we somehow forgot to put in the other tufts of grass.
Yeah.
There's things like that sand, pushing away from around him
when he gets out of, digs his way out
which are surprisingly complicated things to do, technically,
and match them into the background,
but they look completely seamless.
That always hurts when he hits that rock.
This scene gave us a lot of trouble trying to register
all the effects to get it just right.
Yeah, being able to see through the water
and get some sort of reflection going.
- Leave us alone! - Get away from me!
- Leave us alone! - Get away!
- Stop it! - Stop it!
- We'll do what we want. - My father's the high priest of Midian...
Got into endless discussions about whether you should
see Moses starting to move towards the camels or not.
But the nature of working on these films takes so long that
every single detail, every frame gets discussed,
- sometimes quite passionately. - Gary Perkovac did a lot of the animation.
Yeah, Gary Perkovac, on like the kids here.
And through the song that follows.
- This was a clever cheat, yeah. - This was a great cheat
that Dave Lyons managed to pull off
in his animation of the rocks breaking into the well.
'Cause there's always that telltale line
that goes around when you know a piece of the background is gonna move.
Yeah, well, you can see that, that's the piece of cel animation
- and the rest is painted background. - Yeah, even kids,
the youngest kids know, "He's gonna pick up that rock."
Yeah, so we tried hard not to have that.
Rodolphe did some nice animation in this scene as well.
Michelle Pfeiffer went back and did some pick-up stuff.
Some extra stuff when she saw the animation.
- There's a little dip right there. - Yeah.
She was great.
That's why Papa says she'll never get married.
This was one of our simplified sequences
that actually turned out better because we did simplify it.
We didn't put as much of the lighting effect
and let them play as silhouettes against
- the lit tent. - The light coming through the tent.
Yeah, it feels like the film is flashed.
That you pre-exposed it before you shot the scene. It's really nice.
There was a great deal of discussion about
just how much Moses should cover himself up
and how big that towel should be.
Danny Glover did a nice job on this, even though it's a small role.
- He was wonderful. - Yeah.
- He really gave a great performance. - Tremendous energy.
This was also a simplified sequence,
which, given that it's a crowd number with a lot of firelight and a lot of...
And the same fire reused a million times.
Who was that, Conánn, who did the fire?
As well as, you know, the shadows, reusing the characters and...
Offsetting them to create the shadows.
Great job.
And Gary Perkovac doing...
- Jethro. - ...Jethro.
Please, sir, I wish you wouldn't.
And again the backgrounds. The background artists were
really conscious of how the characters were going to be played against them.
This sequence was conceived and re-conceived a thousand times
during the movie, what it was going to be.
It was actually, wasn't it, Ron Lukas, the head of background, who did
- the color steadies for this? - The color steadies, yeah.
Thinking of re-conceived. I mean, think about poor old
- Stephen Schwartz writing the song. - Yeah.
How many songs were there?
I think there must have been four or five different songs written before this one.
The guy who saved us was our Steve over here.
It's actually a poem.
Yeah, The Measure of a Man.
Yeah.
- That you just happened to have. - Yeah.
Well, that I happened to have remembered from my school days.
That I had remembered we had learned it.
And I say, "You know what? I'll...
"Let me see if I can find that."
And so I had someone find it from the library
- and it worked quite well. - Yeah.
Stephen Schwartz had been banging his head because,
you know, he had done so many passes, great songs.
But somehow, we weren't getting across what we needed to get across
for the moment, and when Steve handed
Stephen Schwartz the poem, you could just see the light shine.
Light bulb just went on.
Stephen Schwartz gave it that wrinkle of making it about God.
Through Heaven's Eyes and that really helped.
We ought to mention Brian Stokes Mitchell as well,
- who did the singing for Jethro. - Absolutely.
Incredible, energetic performer. Just came in
and set the whole studio on fire. It was incredible.
It was great. I mean, I turned around and looked at everyone in the booth
as he was singing and people had these big grins on their faces because he was...
He was Jethro when he was doing it. He was just...
- Bigger than life, yeah. - Oh, my God, he was wonderful.
Yeah, we didn't mention, sorry, the Teflon sketch.
Yes, Todd Kurosawa's Teflon sketch.
Yeah, that... The two of them sitting on the rock with all the sheep around them
was a concept sketch done by one of the story artists
way back at the beginning of 1995.
And in every single incarnation of the film,
every reiteration...
- It was always there. - ...that sketch was always in.
It was actually a very sad moment when we had to cut
the story sketch out and put the line test in.
Yeah.
- But the animation was great. - Yes.
But now it's immortalized, this Teflon sketch.
And the chances of any sketch,
any idea getting from the very first weeks all the way through,
usually it evolves, the movie, but this stayed in.
We actually had a group of dancers choreograph
the traditional dancing in that area.
And come up with a way in which Moses and Tzipporah could dance together...
- But not touch. - ...but not actually touch.
Because in the period, there's no way that men and women would actually dance
close together in public.
So they're all, you know, authentic dance steps.
- Tom Owens did a lot of the dancing. - Yeah.
Oh, God. Look.
The animation, not the actual dancing.
Yes, they tried to get us to dance with
the group for the EPK crew, and we all just
- refused. - No.
Do remember trying to get Ritchie to do the design of the tapestry
that was going to be the dissolve...
- To this. - ...from that other background?
- "So, Ritchie, is that done yet?" - "Took forever. Thanks, Ritchie."
I think in the end Armen Melkonian actually designed it.
Wasn't it from like his grandmother or father or something?
His grandfather.
- Actually, yeah, there's a rug dealer... - Yeah.
Or he designs rugs, I think, so...
- In Armenia. - Yeah.
And our beautiful Tzipporah.
There's little subtle things like the rays of light
coming through from behind the mountain.
If you look closely, they're actually animating, they move.
Do you remember putting the sheep in, to cover over Moses's feet, because
we accidentally had him barefoot here, and of course, he has to have sandals on?
And Wendy Zeller gave us the note that she had noticed...
- Yeah. - We had to fix it.
James Baxter really did all the animation in this...
You know James Baxter came to DreamWorks to work on El Dorado.
We asked him as a favor, "Would you help out
"and animate a sequence or two for us?"
And, he ended up falling in love with the character
- and sticking with the whole film. - Yeah. Did a wonderful job.
Brenda, are you gonna talk about the voice of God?
- That's coming up? - No, no, no.
That was one of the biggest challenges we had on the movie,
was finding what the voice of God was going to be.
And we didn't wanna do the same thing we've heard many times,
which is the big, booming, you know, deep voice.
- James Earl Jones. - James Earl Jones,
or a slowed down Charlton Heston.
It was... We wanted to make it something that was personal to Moses,
that would affect him, so we thought, "Let's...
"Let's put all the voices in
"of all the people in his life." And so we had all of the actors...
Nick Fletcher did a wonderful job of layering all these actors together,
recorded, doing the same lines, doing even the same readings.
And they were cascading and he threw in some sound effects
and it was just beautiful,
but we found that no one was listening to what was being said,
we were just listening to the sound of what was going on.
There was also that problem that it did sound like a whole pantheon of gods.
And one of the themes of the story is that there is actually only one God.
So we went back and then found ways...
Actually, ultimately, it's Val Kilmer's voice,
but treated somewhat.
And yeah, Hans' music is absolutely a standout in this sequence.
Poor old Hans, he originally wrote something which
was, sort of, you know, bit of choirs and organs and all that kind of stuff.
- And we said, "Hans, this is..." - "What we've been trying
- "to get away from." - "This is the stereotype.
"Yeah, we want something that's completely different and unexpected."
And he went and locked himself away, smoked a lot of cigarettes,
and disappeared for about four or five days.
And then invited us in and said,
"Guys, if this isn't it, you have to get somebody else,
"because this is all I've got."
And then played us this incredible piece of music.
It was an epiphany, it was a fabulous moment.
Jamie Lloyd did a lot of the CGI
- burning-bush effects. - All of it.
Ed Coffey did the hand-drawn stuff.
- In fact, all of the fire effects... - The ripples on the ground.
Yeah, all the fire effects are actually both CG and hand-drawn.
So, you get a texture and a sort of a painterly quality to it.
And Jane Gotts put in the lighting...
- The caustic lighting. - ...the caustic lighting
on the walls and blended in...
She was the one who integrated the 2D into the background
and into the burning bush, the 3D.
What we were after was a sense
that what you were seeing was natural phenomena
but behaving in a supernatural fashion.
So, the fire would have elements of
the way in which water moves and would
project light the way, you know,
light reflects off a swimming pool, something like that.
A whole mixture of different qualities.
So that it was sort of the opposite, you know, that there was fire,
but it seemed like water and the sounds that you're hearing
has sort of an ocean feel to it. It's not the crackling of fire.
Yeah, Lon Bender spent a lot of time on the sound.
In the picture in general. He and his team.
And as well, the color model crew.
And Kathy Altieri, our color goddess, basically,
spent so much time on every sequence,
but this one in particular, where she was really
working hard to make sure that light felt...
Felt like it was really blowing out
and getting subtle
and all the nuances of it without being too
- over the top. - The tendrils that pick him up.
Yeah, the lighting, the colors of the lighting
all the way through the movie, there's actually a lighting script,
in which the palettes being used, sequence by sequence,
have a flow that reflects the emotional journey that we want
to take both Moses and the audience on.
That was something that Kathy did, very early on.
And we stuck pretty closely to it.
Yeah, it's amazing looking back at that stuff, that it really is pretty true.
Yeah, this is so well-acted by James.
And Brian Clift and his team did the cleanup on Moses.
Really did a nice job.
Again trying to get that interaction between 3D and 2D elements.
Remember it kept having to go back.
First, they would do a rough version of Moses, and then it would go to
the burning-bush team for the fire.
And then they have to do the drapery and the clothes.
And then it would go back to the CGI people.
And then there was the hand-drawn stuff that was done afterwards.
Yeah, the sequence went back...
Each scene of the sequence went back and forth
five or six times.
One of the confusions about animation, by the way, is that
individual shots are referred to as scenes,
and overall scenes are referred to as sequences.
I don't know why, it's just the tradition.
So there's a subtle thing which again, probably most people don't notice,
through the sequence that the bush itself
- actually grows and blossoms. - Blossoms,
as it's taken over by God.
Then do you remember this sequence coming up?
Originally, we had the idea that
we would cut straight to the other end of the discussion.
That Moses had said what he was gonna say to Tzipporah,
and Tzipporah was now deeply upset and angry at him.
And Moses was kind of apologizing and saying, "Well, I've got to go."
And eventually she says, "I'm gonna go with you."
And...
Although it was a great sequence, and we even actually got as far as animating,
Rodolphe Guenoden animated a good deal of it,
we realized looking at the movie as a whole,
it produced a sort of kink in the emotional arc.
It became Tzipporah's scene more than it was Moses'.
But also Moses was, you know,
full of life and full of his mission
and so when he comes down from the burning bush,
then he had this dip of terrible regret and sorrow,
and then he had to be back up again in order to go in
to Pharaoh with the news of what he was gonna do.
And, it just became too complicated as a sort of emotional...
Yeah, stopping to have an argument with his wife just wasn't quite...
Yes, we wanted to keep it up all the way, so he'd be full of the mission,
and then the crash would come when he actually confronts Pharaoh.
So, then we went back and had to re-conceive the scene.
And actually, Steve, it was your idea to do that distant shot where...
It's actually Alfred Hitchcock's idea
in Topaz, but...
So, you know, the stuff that we already know
what Moses is going to tell to Tzipporah,
we don't need to actually hear him say it.
But it actually becomes interesting when you are trying to
guess what it is he was saying.
Yeah, 'cause there was no way we could write this scene no matter what we did.
If you try to put into words a personal epiphany,
it's different for everybody, so we thought, "Let's just let the audience
"guess what they're saying."
This is another coup de grâce by Kathy Altieri,
just this transition from background to background.
Keeping the characters still.
She did this beautiful blend of color, getting us back to Egypt
and the colors of Egypt...
It's just incredible.
Immensely complicated
series of dissolves,
always keeping Moses and Tzipporah in the shot.
And this was the real job of layout, trying to design the shot around
- all these elements. - This was Marcos, wasn't it?
Marcos Mateu, yeah.
Yeah, he did a terrific job.
And actually, Cathy Jones, who animated Moses
doing this sort of Harrison Ford intensity.
Yeah, just slowly getting more intense.
This is one long music cue, I think from the beginning from when Moses wakes up,
all the way through to the doors open here,
that Hans did. It's like nine minutes.
It's my favorite cue in the movie.
And do you remember Ofra Haza, who did the singing voice of Yocheved,
came in literally one evening while we were recording in London
- and just ad-libbed the singing track. - Yeah.
- Just dashed it off. - It was great.
For about three-quarters of an hour. She just came in and did a couple of times
and left again. It was just wonderful.
This sequence, Brenda, you worked on a million times...
- Yeah. - ...'cause it kept having permutations.
Just trying to figure out what Rameses' reaction would be
when Moses returned.
Would he be angry, would he be flippant, would he be overjoyed?
Would he be... What would he be? And...
And because we built such a relationship between the brothers before
and they had nothing against each other when Moses left,
you know, other than just love and regret that he was leaving,
it had to be joyful.
- We had a hard time selling that. - But then there was a discussion about
whether a pharaoh would actually behave this way in front of a court.
- And all kinds of stuff. - But,
as far as he was concerned, Moses was still his brother
who he loved and missed, so...
We decided to go with the emotional drive.
We also let Moses have a moment with Rameses.
'Cause originally, remember, he just came back
and went right into his speech and it's like,
"He didn't care anything about that he's missed his brother all these years?"
Also, we wanted to have that sense of conflict that
Moses really didn't, although he believes in the mission
- that he's coming in with... - He still loves his brother.
...he's suddenly faced with the fact that he's going to be doing something awful
to his brother who he loves.
Patrick did the most of Hotep and Huy in this sequence.
Patrick Mate, yeah.
In this and this next song.
This whole sequence was one of the ones that we did so many times
that I think Ralph was beginning to wonder...
- If we knew what we were doing. - Yeah.
And it was really hard because I'd try to explain,
you know, what our thinking was and everything.
And he paid us a really nice compliment after he saw the film for the first time,
saying, "Wow, everything you said you were gonna do, you did."
And, I think he was just not quite believing it
when he was having to record over and over again.
I also remember that we had a whole bunch of these scenes in final
and all the crowd had colors, remember?
And Brenda said, "Wait a minute.
"We were supposed to do this all with them in white.
"And it will look better if they're all in white."
- Yeah, then having to go back... - Go back in.
We said, "You're absolutely right, Brenda," and we had to go back
and redo all those scenes.
And it is better in white.
Thank heaven that Penney Finkelman Cox and Sandra Rabins are our producers.
They were sympathetic to some of the creative concerns.
- Yeah. - Yes.
And Bill Damaschke, who is the production manager.
He had the patience of Job on this one.
Do you remember, actually, this was another of Steven's suggestions,
was that right of the beginning of the sequence you should see
that it's all being done with smoke and mirrors.
You can then go into magic stuff that appears to be supernatural,
as long as you've established at the very beginning that it was fake.
And that was kind of the brief to the effects artists as well.
Steve Woods headed up the 2D animation on this,
and Patrick Witting did the 3D.
And it was to make sure that it felt like smoke and mirrors,
and it wasn't just really supernatural. There's a shot of Hotep at one point
where Steve had animated where the light shines and you can actually see
Hotep's skeleton for a brief flash.
And you said, "No, that's now getting into looking at a supernatural thing.
"It has to be like someone just did a smoke flash in front of them
"instead of being able to actually see through him."
This was the scene here.
Originally, this whole number, was envisioned to be a comic relief
part of the picture, and Siegfried & Roy
were the prototypes for Hotep and Huy.
And we had like Vegas showgirl singers
singing the names of the gods.
And it was clear that it didn't fit in the picture,
especially after what had just come before it.
So, Hans Zimmer
reorchestrated the whole thing and changed into this new darker tone.
Tells you who's the best
This is Patrick doing all these scenes.
With Hotep and Huy.
And Steve Martin and Martin Short actually did their own singing on this.
And this is only one guy rubber-stamped a million times
to make all these guys.
And this was another scene...
I think Kathy Altieri did the color setup for the sequence,
all the color keys going across to get the flow of what colors we were going into,
the dramatic lighting.
There's our homage to Star Wars.
Yeah, Kathy did a great job with the color in this.
Anubis, Anukis, Hemsut Tefnut, Meshkent, Mafdet
You're playing with the big boys now
Again, Patrick Witting for the...
- For the smoke and the lighting. - Yeah.
Subtle texture stuff that's going on in the background.
And Kathy Zielinski did the early snake scenes.
You can be our acolyte
Yes, and actually Kathy Zielinski also came up with the transition of the staff
into the snake.
Moses' staff turning into the snake.
That whole clever transition was her idea.
This was one of these complicated things where the choice of when and how
Moses' snakes eat the magician's snakes.
That the original story has it being a big, dramatic thing
- very visible to everybody. - Public thing.
We wanted to make it something slightly more subtle
so that we didn't feel right off the bat
that, you know, Moses was in control of the whole thing.
All right, Moses.
I know you.
This scene was another really tough one to get.
The scene between Moses and Rameses, how we were gonna play that.
Because we started off a little too nonchalant in some scenes
and others, we were too antagonistic,
and it was a really tough and fine line we walked
through this one acting-wise and how they were relating to each other.
But, it was important to get across what Rameses was feeling,
you know, the tradition of his father and all this weighing on his head
from the early sequence we saw when Seti was balling him out.
We're trying to parallel that scene into this one.
It was...
We counted a lot on the brothers' relationship to pull us through this one.
And also a great deal on the animators to deliver the level of acting.
Yeah, Todd Kurosawa did some fabulous story sketches in this.
- Yeah. - Which Darlie Brewster translated...
Ronnie Del Carmen as well.
Yeah, 'cause this scene in particular where Rameses is realizing,
"You didn't come back to be with me, you came to take the slaves away,"
were just great story sketches and...
Actually, this was one of those things where Ralph
didn't believe we were actually going to be able to deliver the acting.
To pull it off. Didn't think the lines were quite...
'Cause, yeah, the lines on their own, they're just sort of, "I had thought."
- But he does such a good read on it. - It's great.
- He's so good in it. - But it's mostly
the stuff that falls between the lines.
And this is one of the scariest music cues in the movie.
- I love it. - Right there.
That was Harry Gregson-Williams' idea, wasn't it?
- To suddenly have that punch. - Do that sting, so that...
Yeah, you don't... Yeah, I don't think he really has any of those
anywhere else in the picture. It was like the only time you really...
My heart just jumped.
It was not that in the scratch, we'd never done that.
It was just a brilliant idea they came up with.
Here you'll notice a number of parallel similar shots to
scenes that were in that first reprimand when Seti's telling the boys off.
Yeah, the one weak link in the chain.
And this is where, Simon, you always wonder how come he doesn't
catch his nose in the door as they close it.
The Get Smart.
It's Moses.
That's H8, isn't it?
Yeah, all of the slaves had numbers, and...
He is the only one we know.
We actually recognize him.
Yes, we liked H8, he was used a lot.
This was another scene that went through a lot of changes
because trying to get the dramatic sense of what was going on
without overplaying it.
I mean, from here on out, the film, as Steve was saying earlier,
is much more dramatic.
You know, we're getting more and more intense as the rest of the film goes on.
This idea was from Nicholas Meyer, remember?
- To have Aaron... - Aaron question.
Yeah, approach Moses and say, "Hey, when did you start caring about us?"
It's actually one of the trickier things of the film as a whole was how to keep
Moses alive as a developing character after he's met God.
Because, essentially, he becomes a mouthpiece for his God
in the original Bible story.
And how to keep him alive
and have something going on dramatically within him...
- Yeah, keep him human. - ...was a real struggle.
But again, the brothers' relationship, between he and Rameses
really helped us with that.
As well as his relationship with Aaron and Miriam.
You know, with him doubting himself and not...
'Cause, he can't read God's mind at this point.
He's still trying to figure out why things aren't going right,
and what's happening. He doesn't realize in the beginning
that there has to be a build to make Pharaoh understand what...
What's happening.
Sandra Bullock did such a nice job acting that.
Yeah.
That was Emanuela's scene, wasn't it?
- Yeah, Emanuela Cozzi. - Cozzi did it.
Now, you can't see on DVD but actually on the boat there,
there are little figures pulling the boat along
because we have the same animation that shows up
in the closer-up shots later, and it's just pasted back in there.
Unfortunately, the resolution just isn't there.
Someday, maybe.
I love the subtle things like, as we do that little crane down, the foreground
ground tilts.
Doesn't just move as a flat object.
A lot of the stuff that scene-planning put in.
Yeah, and young Rameses,
the boy is played by Bobby Motown,
which is certainly a name that's easy to remember.
Still gnawing away at that bone, are we?
Carry on.
You cannot keep ignoring us.
- Yes, another of those shots where we... - A simplification shot.
Which ended up being just a real pain to do.
Trying not to show his feet so we wouldn't have to animate
a drop shadow under Moses.
And we ended up having to do all these complicated things with the water
and the reeds and so on to cover it over.
Doesn't look too much like that's exactly what we were trying to do.
Things like the clouds in the background are actually again a 2D painting
which is being manipulated and twisted.
In scene plan, I think.
And sometimes it's just a simple move. We didn't even have to morph
or manipulate it in 3D.
It would just be a simple move.
This was Doug Ikeler's amazing blood in water.
- Doug Ikeler and his plagues. - It really looks good.
I was so glad when he came back on our project.
Yeah.
Rosanna Lyons, yeah.
Yeah, particularly that shot where
that guard coming up here in this one,
falls into the water and comes out completely covered in blood.
She had so much fun doing this.
This was her last scene on the movie, maybe.
- Yeah. - One of them, yeah.
And we made sure there was no blood on the namus.
Yeah, that's, to me, sort of the tragedy sometimes of animation,
is the opportunities, and you know you just physically can't do it.
Because you'd end up having to animate it in four or five shots afterwards
and trying to keep it stuck on and so on would be very difficult.
This was another area where we had to simplify.
We had the... In one version of this,
we had the magicians really looking like they were trying to outdo
Moses once again with this. We had them changing
the color of the water to all different colors.
Blue, yellow, pink and yellow.
- A fabulous water show. - Yeah, that whole thing.
But it just made them look a little too powerful.
And this is where we wanted to show that they were...
Just starting to be outmatched.
They might have been able to do that snake bit,
but this, you could see the trick, you know.
Seeing the powder and everything. Where with Moses'
attempt at it, you knew it wasn't...
Well, the sequence coming up,
sort of Moses inspiring his people,
that went through a number of different versions. I remember...
I was one of the people who boarded it half a dozen times.
At one point we had it getting progressively bigger
and bigger in scale and going to huge crowds.
And it just ended up looking like some sort of political rally.
It became a sort of "man running for president" movie.
And this, keeping it so confined, you know,
getting the character so big on screen, a lot of close-ups
even on the incidentals,
- just kept it very personal and very... - Intimate.
...human.
And here again, we were trying to recall the prologue.
In fact, reusing some of the animation from the prologue.
Doug Ikeler did these frogs here.
I could have used more frogs and bugs in the...
Yeah, actually, they came out so well, we could have quite easily done more shots.
Not in this shot, but just more shots because they're so much fun.
Into your drink, into your bread
These bugs...
Kathy Zielinski had a great time with that one.
And the seven million locusts, is that what it...
Yeah, one of the shots actually has seven million rendered locusts in it.
Once I called you brother
Once I thought the chance to make you laugh
This was another sort of brainstorming thing.
We were having trouble with the plagues.
We hadn't had it originally as a song.
We had it as just score and we were having trouble getting across
the relationship between the two brothers.
What Moses was feeling when this was happening,
what Rameses was feeling... It was just sort of anger on both sides.
And it sort of came out of nowhere.
Like, why all of a sudden were both of them so angry at each other?
And Stephen Schwartz wrote a song which had the content,
but didn't sort of resonate with the rest of the movie.
It was Hans' idea to use All I Ever Wanted
as if it had been a sort of brother's song.
And bring that back as the theme that runs through the verse.
And it really just brought it all together.
I send my scourge
I send my sword
I remember Jeffrey was concerned that we were...
It was all spectacle, and we were losing the personal story.
Which he was absolutely right about.
So we had to go back and add more shots of Rameses and Moses.
You who I called brother
How could you have come to hate me so
Could have done with a lot more fireballs as well, burning hail was great.
These were Doug Ikeler as well.
He did all of the 3D.
On this.
This is a suitably grim scene.
Sean McLaughlin did a lot of work on it as well, though.
This was another of Steven's suggestions.
Yeah, Spielberg.
The, sort of, interrelation of the two characters.
This is another tricky one to get through, do the scene-planning.
And that little gesture on Rameses was sort of mimicking
sort of his petulance as a teenager back in
the early sequence where he has been reprimanded by his father.
- I think Kent Culotta did that scene. - Yeah.
- Originally, the small scene, yeah. - Yeah.
Lynette Charters did the plague of darkness on this,
the 2D stuff and...
There's a layering of sort of multiple exposure to get that.
- Leon Green figured that one out. - Yeah.
Yeah, to sort of have that liquid feel.
Here again, we're deliberately trying to
echo a whole series of the shots that happened
during All I Ever Wanted when he first, when he went back into the palace.
But now he's going through seeing the same things but in a different,
a different light, a different way of looking at them.
And whereas before the other sequence was fun and lighthearted
with the water balloon,
this one is more serious.
This is the thing that Ronnie created.
He was originally briefed to do the scene.
We had it written rather differently.
And Ronnie called us in and said,
"Look, I've had a strange idea. I hope it's not going too far off the wall."
And showed us. The first thing that we saw was this one long sketch with the...
- The silhouette of the statue. - The statue. Yeah.
Rameses sitting up there.
- We just thought, "Yeah, that's it." - "That's it."
And then we realized that's what this whole movie has to be,
you know.
It was one of those things where it was pivotal for the entire film.
- It became like a template... - Trying to reach for those depths, yeah.
...of what we had to do in the whole movie.
It's great when those things happen. It's so inspiring and then...
And then you go back into the film with more insight.
And just being able to put those extra few layers on
makes such a difference.
But we went around and around in this sequence
because at one time it felt like Moses was too manipulative
going in with some agenda to get him to concede.
And Rameses was too drunk and too goodhearted
and you felt sorry for Rameses and you felt angry at Moses
for taking advantage of him.
So, we wanted it to actually be a sincere remembering
by Moses, and Rameses not to come around too easily.
Father was furious.
That was a big problem for quite a while
on a couple of the screenings we had,
was that you'd come out feeling so sorry for Rameses that
you felt like Moses was a bully.
- And he didn't deserve to win. - And it was like, "Wait a minute,
"we've got to switch the..."
It's fine to have sympathy and a little empathy for our villain...
The villain. But you've got to feel a lot more for the hero.
But I know you have to be there for the hero, so it was a little hard.
That's partly Ralph's fault, I think.
- He's too good. - For being so likable?
Yeah, well, just that vulnerable quality in his voice.
The great thing about Val and Ralph,
they were able to play a teenager and an adult,
mature man convincingly.
- That was a tricky thing casting them. - Yeah.
Trying to find voices that could actually do that range
and were also good actors. Very hard.
But, they were great.
I mean, Val did such an incredible job coming in so many times.
I mean, he was right there with us wanting to rework and rework the character.
I think he probably has the world record for
recording sessions, about 18 sessions or something,
which for an animated film is amazingly high.
But also just his dedication to the... Wanting to see the movie again.
Knowing that he wanted to try something different
and keep expanding on it.
It wasn't just us saying, "Hey, we need to do it again."
It was him saying, "I wanna do it again."
Made a huge difference.
Yeah, it really works when you...
Your young Moses at the beginning of the picture,
it plays as an 18-year-old.
This is where we really turned Rameses into the baddie.
Let him get the full grip of his psychosis.
His dad really screwed him up in this one.
And one of the things I really like about what we managed to get in here
is the number of places where there are things which were set up
kind of as incidentals or background things or even like that wall
which you think the whole point of the wall is
that scene between Seti and Moses,
and then it actually comes back and is used again.
Very happy about those things.
We tried to make this hyssop.
- We went... - The research.
Yes, apparently, the marks were painted over the door lintels
and doorjambs with hyssop.
- And we researched what hyssop was. - Yeah.
Which, of course, none of us knew or even what it looked like.
This is another of these very subtle 3D backgrounds.
Yeah, so we can just shift the camera slightly.
There's the old well from the other sequence.
I don't know if anybody actually recognizes
that we're in the same location but from the other side of the archway.
But it is.
"...and the plague shall not enter."
And there actually was stuff on that table as well
but you don't get to see it because Moses stands in the way.
Well, originally, Harald put like a...
You know, just cut-out things there just as a placeholder.
We were gonna try to make it like the Passover meal,
but you can't really see it.
And this is the beginning of Jamie Lloyd's
brilliance of trying to find the look of the death,
plague of death, still keeping
elements of what we've been using for the look of God basically.
- The burning bush. - In the burning bush.
As well as when we get into the Red Sea and everything.
All the elements of these miracles, plagues, whatever you wanna call...
It's a natural phenomenon.
But this had to feel like...
This had to feel sentient. It had to feel like the...
This mist was making conscious choices, checking out the doors,
seeing the ones that are marked and turning away from them.
And in every... Visually and sound-wise and everything,
we were trying to figure out what would a gust of wind
look like if you could see it.
- And... - And it sounds a lot like Brenda actually.
Well, strangely enough, it actually is Brenda's voice.
Yeah, Sim Evan-Jones, when he was working on the film earlier on,
we cut together this...
Lorna Cook boarded the scene and she was the one who actually did
this wispy-looking stuff in her story sketches.
And so when we put it up on the story reel we were trying to find the sound to it
and Sam had this little breath go through
just sort of randomly, and then we decided, you know, that's what we need
when it actually takes a life, and so we went through
and he recorded me doing that.
So it's another one of those things where it just stuck as opposed to going away.
- It just stayed. - It sounded so perfect.
And this is of course Orion.
This is my little nod to the sort of crazier theories of Egyptology,
of course, Orion's Belt as the three pyramids on
the Giza Plateau and all that stuff.
But moving aside...
- This is our homage to Citizen Kane. - Citizen Kane, yeah.
- The law library. - Steve's.
And another whole thing of Patrick Witting and Jane Gotts
and the 3D elements, getting the light rays,
- with the shadow falling off of... - Yeah, trying to get all of that stuff
and the sense of the light really blowing out
where it's the highlight on the bodies...
And feeling the dust within the light.
A number of these scenes actually went through final color stage
many times to get them right.
Leave me!
- Funny, it looks effortless now, actually. - Yeah, but...
- It was really hard to get that, yeah. - That was pretty straightforward.
And trying to get the acting because it was so subtle in the sequence.
And Ralph did an incredible performance in that.
- That "Leave me." Still gives me chills. - Yeah, just...
In this, we're always trying to get the sense that...
- It's not over. - ...the movie isn't over yet.
That Rameses still has an issue to deal with.
Yeah, without being blatant. I think at one point
we had him reach for his knife or his sword or something.
It was just like, "Yeah, that's a little too cliché."
There were scenes where we wanted to cut back and see him preparing his army.
- Our favorite scene in the film. - Yes.
Bruce Ferriz did this.
Yeah, actually, this was a thing where we wanted Kristof to animate it
and Kristof advocated Bruce and Bruce begged to do the scene
and we eventually said, "Okay, you can have a go at it."
Then he produced this piece of animation which just dropped us...
It was like, "Oh, Lord." This is, you know...
- It's everything we had hoped for. Yeah. - Yeah, and more.
And Val's performance on that just was so...
Do you remember recording Val, he...
Val just sits in a chair and, you know, smokes cigarettes
and was very, very quiet and he doesn't do any of
the, sort of, physicalization of what he's acting.
But then, you know, he literally just broke down
and cried in front of the microphone.
- It was amazing. - Yeah, it's gut-wrenching when you...
Yeah, and to be able to do that in an animated film was such a wonderful...
To actually have a character you can take to that place
where he's actually crying out to sympathy
for something that he has been instrumental
in causing to happen to the villain.
Just the pain, you know, the love of his brother, the love of his people,
the sorrow for these children, it was just wonderful
to be able to go there with his character.
Yeah. I remember when we first heard this song from Stephen Schwartz,
it's like, "Boy, this is a beautiful song!"
- I was in tears. - Definitely a hit straight off.
Yeah. I don't think it surprised us that it would later win the Oscar.
This is actually a lovely sequence
because there's a progressive change in the lighting
from that, sort of, predawn light where it's all reflected light
through to actually getting the sun reflecting off the clouds
- and seeping down into the town. - Bringing the color in.
And then ultimately, you get into this full, rich color
as they start to leave Egypt.
Yeah, that was sort of a blending of Ron Lukas
and Kathy Altieri working really hard together to get that.
Ron and Paul who ended up being our heads of background,
neither of them had actually worked in animation before.
Ron was actually an easel painter, you know, just a fine artist.
- And I say "just" but... - "Just," yeah.
- You should see his stuff. - And Paul had done
matte paintings for features,
but neither of them knew anything about, sort of, the animation process.
And I think they brought a very special kind of quality
and a way of looking at a painting.
A fresh approach to it.
This occupied Cathy Feraday for a little while, this scene.
You know, you always feel guilty when you
actually give a scene like that to an animator,
just, "Okay, you got about 100 birds you're gonna have to animate.
"This is probably your life for the next three months just to get this one shot."
And she's so nice.
"But there it is. There's your life, Cathy, for a few months, right there."
- This scene we've done so many times. - For color palette.
This was actually one of the first crowd scenes that proved
that the whole 3D-crowd thing would actually work.
There was another one where we'd gone back
in the Egyptian sequence and made everybody white,
we went through a lot of these Hebrew sequences
because they had such bright, Midian colors.
Lots of pinks and reds and...
- We had to drab them down a bit. - Blues, we had to really brown them up.
Costume-wise.
Yeah, conscious attempt to have a wide range of ethnic types
or in skin tones and so on through this.
But also, it was part of the whole theory of this whole sequence.
This song is, as you were saying earlier, bringing the color in gradually
and we got too bright too early with a lot of the characters.
So that it's later in the desert that we brought up...
Do you remember this shot?
It was one of the first uses... We've had this exposure tool,
that was, sort of, integrating 3D and 2D material together
and there were some real teething problems.
It actually turned out great in the end
but getting the first couple of shots through was so tough.
Lorenzo Martinez really...
- He was a real advocate of it. - Worked really hard.
And Harald Kraut and David Morehead
were, sort of, the people who got the thing to work.
Yeah, Lorenzo is our head of layout and, you know,
worked really hard on this whole film, just...
- Pushing the boundaries. Yeah. - ...getting these ideas...
Yeah. Always trying to stretch the limits.
Kept us on our toes.
This made Craig Simpson's life troublesome
- for a while. - In the scene-planning.
Zhaoping Wei, our background painter from China,
just did these amazing backgrounds throughout the film.
- Gorgeous. - Fabulous lighting. Yeah.
A lot of this stuff up through here...
This scene just
blew us away.
And Richie birds.
Richie always had to have little birds flying through the scenes.
We've got it in a few scenes.
That was another moment that we
were really glad to get in there.
A little moment between the true brothers, the blood brothers.
Yeah. Again, we had, kind of, lost the personal story in the sequence
in favor of gross numbers of people
and so we put back shots like that.
- That's such a nice shot. - Yeah.
We kind of have to mention...
Every time I see one of these water shots, I think of Don Paul and Dan Philips,
our two heads of effects, because they, very, very early on,
were trying to find that...
That way to integrate the 2D.
Don Paul was more head of the 2D effects
and Dan Philips was head of the 3D effects
and just working really hard with the artists and trying to find that...
Well, there's so much water through this movie
and it appears in so many places and different qualities
and trying to actually get the sense of scale in something like this.
But they kept their team together so well,
working so everybody was on the same focus.
It was pretty incredible what they pulled off.
It was a vast effects team on this movie. Really huge.
Especially these last 10 minutes of the movie...
- Yeah. - ...were incredible.
And also, considering the 3D people working...
You know, they weren't just technicians, they were artists as well,
giving them that artistic freedom
to come up with these things like the pillar of fire...
Which Bud Myrick had done, worked on these scenes.
Ed Coffey did a lot of the 2D on it.
Yeah, the sort of2D touches that make it actually look like a hand-painted thing.
This was a story moment we had to go back into and try to work.
We had to lengthen this scene...
Yeah, to get what it is that Moses is feeling at this point,
really milk that moment.
Yeah, we just originally had him turning around
and we were like, "What is going through his head at this point?
"Why is he looking so sad?"
But just to assess the situation, just that enough of him looking around
seeing that there was no other way out.
Things like that shot, that down shot where you actually see Moses' robes
being pushed back by the waves that are coming through,
really tricky to do, because waves, of course, are 3D.
The interaction is drawn 2D.
The robes were done by character so that the order in which the seams
actually flow through the pipeline, the production pipeline,
had to be messed around a great deal to get some of this stuff to work.
That's the Paul Shardlow image, isn't it?
Yeah. Paul Shardlow, one of the development artists,
painted this one little shot.
We had like three months where we had a bunch of
development artists just paint all kinds of crazy ideas for the Red Sea parting.
And one of them was this little tiny sketch, color sketch,
of the water pulling away in a circle away from Moses' staff,
and we all looked at that and said,
"That's it. That's a thing we've never seen before."
"We haven't seen that before."
And Henry LaBounta worked with this, the Red Sea team.
Just come off Twister,
and we threw an even bigger problem to him.
Yeah. He'd been working in live action, you know, his entire career
and so this animation thing was a bit new to him.
And we did all these paintings, these great paintings of...
In development, of what the Red Sea could look like
and he came back with this stuff that was incredible
- but he took... But real. - But real.
He took those paintings to be paintings of what it would look like
as opposed to, "No, we want it to look like the paintings."
So he went back in and...
It was actually... It was, sort of, two problems for him.
One was kind of getting his brain around the idea of making it look like a painting
instead of making it look like reality.
And then the technical task of using these tools
which are, for the most part, developed in order to create photorealism
and try and pull them back and force them to render
things which looked more painterly and looked more hand-done.
This shot was one of those ones that was one of Steven's favorites as well.
- I think everyone's favorite, actually. - A lot of people's favorite.
It's such a great idea.
Those are whale sharks, by the way.
Yeah, not a whale. Those are whale sharks in the Red Sea.
Just to clarify.
Mark Mulgrew did a lot of...
- Yeah, yes. - A lot of the layouts throughout here.
Worked very hard. He was, sort of, Lorenzo Martinez's right-hand man.
- Yeah, deputy head of the department. - As well.
We put that shot of the camel in because we had lost him.
And we had another shot at the end of the movie because,
"Oh, wait a minute. What happened to the camel?"
"Did he make it?"
Do you remember one time, there was this thing
where the camel actually came back and rescued Moses?
- Yeah. - Back in the old cartoony days.
But I don't know if you'd noticed the sky earlier,
way back when Moses was making the decision to go into the sea
and then going back after the pillar goes out.
We went through this whole technical thing
of planning out what part of the sky was moving,
- constantly moving. - Constantly moving, yeah. Twisting.
When it's lit, when it's not, which way the lighting's coming from.
We got a couple of real scene-planning tour de forces where they...
These shots of Egyptians running through...
There's only about six Egyptians that were animated.
And they're just cycles.
And you'll notice also, a number of them have motion blur on them,
which was a really useful little piece of software
that we only got right towards the end of production.
We went back and picked about 20 shots that we used it on.
We also went through this... This was a...
- This was... Yeah. - This was Walter Parkes' idea.
Yeah, but Hans Zimmer's music cue there just,
I remember, instantly brought tears to my eyes
when you heard the God theme coming through
when that water was coming down.
Yeah. It was breathtaking.
That water looks so good.
Now's one of these complicated things
where some of the spray is actually 2D animation
that's been taken in and manipulated in the 3D tool
and then added to the 3D rendered stuff
and then there's 2D drawn back on top of it
in a just incredibly complicated process.
This was another moment where we had to go in and rework the story many times
because what would the reaction of these people be
when they saw the sea closing?
They couldn't just go straight into celebrating,
because it would seem really heartless.
- Which we had at one point. - Yeah.
And it did seem really heartless, but in a...
And they couldn't be too sad because, you know,
that there is the sense of freedom going on.
So it's just this stunned silence, realizing the horror of what's happened,
but yet they slowly go into
realizing that they're gonna have a life now.
Bill Damaschke gave us the shortcut when he said, "It should feel like V-J Day."
Where some people are, you know, sobbing because they're overcome,
- and other people are happy. - Yeah, rejoicing.
You'll notice we also kept in just a couple of those Egyptian guards
who we'd seen leaving with the exodus,
just to see that, you know, some of them made it as well.
Yeah. Well, some of the Egyptians were realizing,
you know, that it wasn't the right...
Right thing to be doing, so they left with the Hebrews.
And then to get closure, we still had to have that sort of final moment
when Moses acknowledges that
his relationship with his brother is over forever.
And Ralph gives a gut-wrenching performance cry at the end.
It's so nice.
That's one of those things that you hold for the end of the recording session
because the actor can only do it about three times
and then he doesn't have a voice for the rest of the day.
It's like when he's screaming, "Charge."
Yeah. It was really hard because
two of the times when we really needed to get that yelling,
he was, one... He was in a play in London in one,
so we couldn't blow out his voice because he had to go perform the night...
That same night.
And another one, he was doing Oscar and Lucinda, I believe
- when I did my little day trip to... - You traveled all the way to Australia
for one day.
Actually, for a four-hour recording session.
I got dinner with Ralph out of it.
- Yeah. - That's okay.
Yeah, this is Miriam playing her tambourine, which was important.
Actually, this is one of your points, Steve.
I remember we got the whole picture together
and we're quite a long way down the line and you actually said, "Wait a minute.
"We haven't acknowledged the completion of the task
"that Moses was given halfway through the picture."
And we were like, "Oh, aren't we done yet?"
- Yeah. - Yeah.
"Okay, you're right."
Well, we went back in and created this heroic final moment for Moses.
Then early on, Steven had said, "Yeah, we got to have that shot
"where Moses comes down with the 10 Commandments..."
- In many ways, the story kind of... - And you sketched it out!
"I know what you mean, you mean this...
Yeah. Actually right there in front of him, yeah.
"...shot where he dollies around him, yeah. Like this?"
- And that was pretty much it. - And that just stayed it.
And Kristof animated this scene.
An immense amount of work in just like,
researching what the writing on the tablets might have, you know, looked like
- and... - And styling of the letter.
Yeah, but what sort of alphabet there would be.
This is probably one of the biggest scenes in animation
where every single character is alive.
Look closely. They're all animated, they're all moving around.
All the way to the very back.
Which is one of the wonders of DVD
that they have a resolution to actually see this.
I think actually some of those people right up at the top of the screen
are actually stationary.
I don't think so.
- I don't know who these guys did. - There we are. Yeah.
The Three Stooges.
Kudos to Penney and Sandy. They were fabulous to work with.
Immense job to wrangle that one through.
Jeffrey, who was very much a creative partner in making this picture.
He was hands-on all the way through.
And Ron, who is now heading up the whole animation division.
And Stephen, who hung in there with us for so long.
Yeah. Storytelling through the songs.
- Hans Zimmer... - Our musical god here.
Yeah. We revere.
- And Kathy Altieri... Thank you. - And the other gods.
It's like, just keep bowing.
Darek, who gave the incredible scale to the movie.
He just came in and made the buildings skyscrapers.
And Nick. What can we say about Nick? He's...
- Tireless worker. - And never ties his shoelaces.
I think we ought to mention that, too.
- And he never went home. - Ken and Ben,
who dealt with a lot of difficult issues.
And Kelly and Lorna.
Lorna gave so much sensitivity to the film.
- Absolutely. - She just boarded a huge amount.
All those things like the death of the firstborn
that really needed a very fine touch.
Then you get into stuff like scanning and digital...
You know, the checking departments...
And, boy, they put a lot of work to get those...
No one ever, sort of, thinks about these guys.
But, yeah, they're the people who make sure that,
you know, colors don't flash on and off and, you know, there's a continuity
and, you know, things don't suddenly freeze.
Yeah, how do you thank those people enough, the voices?
- It's a totally invisible job. - All the people on the picture.
Philip hung in and rewrote and rewrote and retyped scenes.
And then our story artists.
A lot of stuff actually gets created in the storyboards as well.
A lot of writing done within the storyboards as well, yeah.
Nicolas, we didn't mention earlier,
had designed a lot of the animals that we used.
Like the sheep and the camels.
I wish we could have persuaded him to animate on the show as well.
So, yeah. End of the day, there are something like 800 people
who are in this list of credits,
with probably about 400 who were really,
you know, on the movie for about a year-and-a-half to two years.
Which is, when you actually add it up,
it represents maybe a thousand years of effort to make one of these things,
which is terrifying.
Which is why it's not good to work on one alone.
Yes.
The layout department really...
- Fifty generations. - Extraordinary layout work.
Yeah.
Lorenzo headed up a really great team.
The background artists, fabulous.
The scene-planning are the people who actually pulled together all the elements
and actually, you know, integrated all
and made sure it actually worked on-screen...
All the final line artists, they really did a great job
in pulling those characters so that it looks like only one guy.
Yeah, because there are maybe half a dozen animators.
In the case of, I think Moses, there was maybe 12 animators or something
who worked on that character.
Now they get the performance to match but there's no way that they can actually
all learn to draw exactly the same way.
And so you have the final line department who then make it
look like a single person's hand drew the whole picture.
Especially in a movie like this where so many characters...
I mean, the last 20 minutes of the movie are nothing but crowd scenes.
This is a nice thing that actually Don and Dan wanted to do
which was to break out the individual sequences
in effects and credit people for those sequences that they worked on.
Because they may have spent a year of their lives working on one sequence.
And AI Holter was, sort of, the Mark Mulgrew of effects.
I mean, he was the right-hand man of Don,
going through and being there
and helping it all look stylistically together
and helping people to get the effects, the right style for each scene.
He was very instrumental in that.
Digital paint. God...
The editorial crew was so terrific.
Sound design, Lon and Wylie.
And of course, we had a lot of rerecording.
I mean, even though you record all the voices in advance,
there's then a great deal of recording
that happens at the end of a show
where you go in and do a lot of the crowd work
and also sometimes rerecord parts of the original characters...
- Yeah. They did a fantastic job. - ...main characters.
Then there are the people who are truly invisible,
the management crew who actually help organize these,
you know, maybe 1, 100 shots or something that go through,
and each one of these shots may have a couple of thousand drawings
and a whole lot of digital elements and tracking all that stuff,
just kind of keeping it organized, knowing...
I think in the whole show, we maybe lost three or four shots
that just kind of disappeared somewhere.
But they were just as dedicated as the artists.
I mean, it was like they were right there with us.
Well, more so sometimes. They're the people...
- You know, wanting to make it... - ...who put in the 16-hour days.
Yeah. But they were there.
They understood that, you know, when we needed to make a change
or wanted to plus something, it was...
You know, usually, it's pulling teeth but in the end,
they were right there wanting to make it the best it could be.
Yeah, supporting the creative choices.
- It wasn't just about the numbers to them. - Yeah.
Which actually was a nice feeling that the whole movie really had
and it's a credit to the crew that the sense of ownership,
that everybody who worked on the picture had a feeling that
they really had a contribution and, kind of, the picture was their picture...
- All across the board. - ...which I'm really glad about.
Getting into the amazing voices who sang...
Sang these very tough songs.
One of the downsides of Stephen Schwartz's songs is that
he writes very difficult songs to actually perform.
Very rangy.
Yeah, it was really...
Steven's having a small fit right now.
Poor Steven's having a little episode over here. I hope he's okay.
- It's very emotional for him. - Sorry.
And because of this being the first film
out of DreamWorks animated film, we, you know, put it all the people who...
- Help set up the studio actually. - Yeah, basically.
Help really keep the whole studio running.
The movie was setting up the studio.
We were building the studio as we were building the movie.
So everything, everyone was, sort of, involved in how the movie came to be.
I always like the way the last thing you ever see in a movie is
criminal prosecution.
Always a great, great thing.
- Especially in a Bible movie. - Yeah.
But Sandy Ravens really worked hard at putting that...
That crew list together for the credits.
It's amazing how difficult it is to actually make sure that everybody
gets mentioned in the right place
and also checking with every single member of the crew
to make sure that the spelling of their names is correct.
- Yeah. That in itself, is weeks of work. - Yeah.