Hi, I'm Rob Gibbs, director of Mater's Tall Tales.
I'm Kim Adams, producer.
I'm Bob Pauley, production designer.
ADAMS: This is the 10th Cars Toon,
but the first Cars Toon to be produced up at Pixar Canada.
GIBBS: John Lasseter came to me with this idea,
"What can we do with Mater next?"
"Well, let's take him to the sky."
We worked in conjunction with the folks in Canada to make this.
ADAMS: When they started up there, they had 15 crew.
And 10 months later, when we finished, they were up to 60.
The studio was under construction the entire time.
PAULEY: It's kind of a lot like the old Pixar,
it's a very tight-knit, you know, organized studio.
GIBBS: There was so much great work that went into the buildings
in Propwash Junction, and the characters.
PAULEY: Trying to reference older airports
with the different sort of hangars,
and the old towers and the kind of quaintness of it,
but then also, you've got to figure out where do planes live,
what do their houses look like?
Clearly, the driveways are wider, they've got wider garages,
the streets are wider, but they still have picket fences.
This was a chance for us to kind of explore
how airplanes work as characters,
so it was getting this less aggressive
kind of more flight team looking appealing jet.
Skipper's an older Corsair,
and one of the tricky things about this was
it's the first time we're seeing an airplane.
So we have to kind of figure out what is the rule set.
You know, they're a little more chummy,
they're a little squatter,
where do the eyes live, that sort of thing.
GIBBS: And the mouth, making that read.
PAULEY: Exactly.
GIBBS: We needed Skipper to have a little sidekick
in order to suit up Mater,
and, of course, whenever we need a character
to do anything in the Cars world,
we usually throw a forklift in there
because they're the only ones that logically can do anything.
ADAMS: They have arms. PAULEY: It's really, these airplanes...
PAULEY: It's really quite a helpless world.
GIBBS: Another thing that was fun
was to incorporate actual airplane terminology.
It's like, "Okay, it's gotta make some sort of sense... We gotta..."
ADAMS: Yeah, those instruction cards were real, right?
GIBBS: Well, we created them.
PAULEY: Well, they're kind of based on some...
PAULEY: Yaw, pitch, all those things... ADAMS: Real-ish.
GIBBS: And the airplanes have faces on them, so that's...
That's something Bob, I think, insisted on.
So what's fun about Mater in this state of being an airplane
is he doesn't really fly awesomely until he starts going backwards.
So, having that telephone wire gag that propels him backwards,
it's like, of course Mater is the world's best backwards driver,
so why wouldn't he be the best backwards flyer, right?
PAULEY: He's a natural. ADAMS: He's 100% committed.
PAULEY: Yes. GIBBS: Yeah, 110.
PAULEY: You see a lot of these airplane forms
in the environment in the background.
And I know that was a little tricky for a while
'cause it looked like these giant derelict planes resting among...
GIBBS: They looked like dead airplanes.
PAULEY: It looked odd. ADAMS: They looked really dead.
PAULEY: So, it was kind of this integration
of those forms into a landscape that made sense.
GIBBS: Yeah, and coming up with a name for the Falcon Hawks,
pretty much everything was taken that was awesome.
- You know, anything that involved... - ADAMS: Every bird.
GIBBS: Every bird, thunder, lightning, everything cool.
And so, I think John just came in and said "Just make it Falcon Hawks."
It's two birds. Of course, it makes perfect sense.
Then there was a gag I really wanted to get in there
but I kind of waited too late to do it,
when the Falcon Hawks fly over the corn
and you see it blowing in the wind.
I wanted all the corn to pop into popcorn.
PAULEY: Wasn't there a big deal about corn and how much corn,
and tall enough, around the runway and all that?
GIBBS: Yeah, well, we kept asking for more corn.
We referenced a lot of DVDs and videos
that had formation flying from all different flight teams.
ADAMS: Just those angles of being under the wing
and then the split screen.
GIBBS: They do this a lot, where they lock a camera onto one jet
and so you can see part of that jet
and then what's going on around it with the other jets.
GIBBS: I love that stuff. ADAMS: This is my favorite shot.
GIBBS: At one point, we were trying to get the short down to a shorter length,
basically,
and so, I had done this trim pass and I took out some of the gags.
The bowling pin gag, and the tic-tac-toe gag,
and just kept the Mater masterpiece that he painted.
And we showed that to John, and he said,
"You took out everything that was fun about it."
So we showed him the longer version with those gags in
and he goes, "Yes, that's what we have to do!"
PAULEY: Bill Cone, Tony Christov were...
We're all production designers on this one together.
You could just watch this thing and just only watch the skies.
Because it's really just beautiful,
the lighting that Bill set up in terms of the time of day,
and you start earlier in the day,
so it's this constant chase of pushing the time of day later and later
so you get to the point where he's flying up there
and he's in the sun,
and the earth is kind of falling into shadow,
so that you can set up for the fireworks later.
ADAMS: It's beautiful.
GIBBS: We had Mater kind of land and then the fireworks go off,
and John's like, "You know, have Mater push a button.
"Make him active there."
So, he pushes this button and then, yeah,
of course the M at the end.
It was great to watch that company grow from the very beginning
and using Air Mater as the tool to get the studio in Canada going.
To see it go from 15 people up to 60 or 70,
and to really get to know the people individually.
PAULEY: And what's nice is, it's not just a handoff,
we're working together with them.
So, you still do feel like you're a team.
GIBBS: It's a collaboration. Yes. PAULEY: Yes.