Hello, my name is Ronnie Del Carmen.
I'm the director and writer of Dug's Special Mission.
Hi, I'm Brad Winemiller. I was the supervising technical director.
DEL CARMEN: We wanted to extend the stories of the main movie,
so I thought of this short because I wanted to find out
what Dug was doing there in the fog when Carl and Russell meet Dug.
He has such a great heart. I love watching Dug.
He's easily the most loveable character in the movie,
so I wanted to kind of explore that as much as I can.
WINEMILLER: The other thing about Dug, actually from the film itself,
was he was one of the last characters that we worked on.
We were still working out all the kinks all the way till the end of the film.
Trying to get his fur to look right, to get his animation to look right,
so it was kind of neat that once we figured it out at the end,
you wrote another story to push it just a little bit farther.
DEL CARMEN: I actually wanted to give Dug more adventures.
I put him on a biplane,
he almost destroyed a dirigible.
There were all sorts of stories that I wanted to put in there,
but due to the constraints
of making this short,
the producer told me that, "You should be able to use 90%,
"if not 100%, only the things that we used in the movie."
And it actually ended up being quite an asset.
It helped me focus on the one story I wanted to tell.
WINEMILLER: My job is to figure out how to reuse all these props,
and then what ones I have to modify to make work.
DEL CARMEN: Yeah. WINEMILLER: Such as the rolling rock.
We didn't have any large boulders in Up,
we had a lot of flat rocks,
so what we did is we took two rocks, merged them together to make one.
DEL CARMEN: And it looked perfectly okay, until I looked at it and said,
"Hey, that kind of looks like a monkey."
And it's one of those things that, once you see it, you can't unsee it.
WINEMILLER: Every time I see it, it's the monkey rock.
DEL CARMEN: I loved doing the art direction for this short.
I am my one-man band there, at the beginning, figuring out,
"Oh, what colors do I want here? What kind of lighting do I want here?"
Because I wanted it to kind of feel different from the movie,
so it was fun to actually exercise that kind of detail.
WINEMILLER: And then the lighting in this was more Dug-friendly.
It really showed his features.
DEL CARMEN: The hair actually gave us a lot of problems.
We had teams of people actually making sure
that all those stray hairs that were just sticking out all over the place,
that somebody, please, take some clippers to that.
- It's very distracting. - WINEMILLER: And we do.
And in the computer, we actually go in and we shave,
what we say, some of the hairs, we cut them.
And then there is the sand.
We did not have any sand in Up.
We didn't have the technology, even at the time, to do a sand simulation.
None of our other films had done that, and so there was nothing to reuse.
So we just put a guy back in the back room,
and gave him six weeks to build it and figure this out.
And it worked out.
DEL CARMEN: Actually, it didn't turn out to be quite the horror story
- you thought it was going to be, eh? - WINEMILLER: No.
DEL CARMEN: No, actually,
something else turned out to be the horror story.
WINEMILLER: Yes. DEL CARMEN: A simple net.
WINEMILLER: Yes. The net, originally in the film, was seen at night
and didn't catch any characters.
Here, we see it in daylight, and catch three dogs.
So there was a lot of hand tweaking to get this net to look right.
DEL CARMEN: Dug is so sweet, you really can't be mean to him, you know?
So when you meet him, you instantly love him,
and he instantly loves you.
But, in the end, also, it's like all of the things
that we did in the short, actually, was about being mean to Alpha.
Which tended to be okay, because he was trying to be mean to Dug.
WINEMILLER: What I really liked about these shots
was that we pushed his character even more.
Even on a technical level, his animation is so much more alive.
You know, his facial expressions were pushed farther in the short
than it was in the film.
DEL CARMEN: Yeah, he's a little more cartoonier here.
So during the making of the short, we were all talking in meetings like this,
(IMITATING DUG) "I do not like going over budget."
The producer, the editor...
(IMITATING DUG) "Hi, what problems do we have to solve today?"
- I actually miss talking like that now. - (BOTH CHUCKLING)
I learned a lot from making this short.
How to motivate people, how to talk about certain things.
What to say, and what is meaningful.
WINEMILLER: What I liked is, in my role,
I got to learn more about story.
Because it was such a small team.
DEL CARMEN: There's no compartmentalization.
People talked to each other about the problems
and brought all of their skills,
regardless of what they were slated to do on this.
They actually came together and tried to solve the problems,
whether it's in story or technical, lighting or whatever.
WINEMILLER: And the entire crew had a blast. Afterwards, they were all like,
- "Let's do this again." - DEL CARMEN: Yeah, it was fun.
Yes.
(IMITATING DUG) It has been a good short to make.