Hi, I'm Rob Gibbs, director of Time Travel Mater.
Hi, I'm Torbin Bullock, the picture editor.
Tony Christov, production designer.
GIBBS: Well, welcome to Time Travel Mater.
BULLOCK: So we call this a Pixar Laugh-O-Gram
in honor of Walt Disney's original studio.
GIBBS: So a while back, Scott Morse, one of our story artists,
boarded a little short that never got made
it was really charming, where Mater goes back in time,
and John Lasseter really liked that idea,
that Mater would go back in time and witness the history.
So John wanted to actually tie in Cars Land at Disneyland
and the beginnings of Radiator Springs,
so when he is transported back in time, that's where he ends up.
I think in an earlier version, he gets struck by lightning
- and that sends Mater back in time. - BULLOCK: Right.
GIBBS: One of our story artists, Valerie LaPointe,
came up with the idea that this clock falls on Mater's air filter
and he sneezes and goes back in time.
So whenever Mater tells one of these tall tales,
it's a story that actually happened, but this is his version in the retelling.
BULLOCK: And you know, when Mater thinks about past events,
he thinks about it in the context of the films that he's seen
or the television shows that he's watched.
So when he goes back in time and he arrives in the past
it's in an early, silent cinema,
sepia tone wash.
So when he first goes back in time, we start in 1909,
when Stanley first arrives in Ornament Valley.
In the early days of cinema, all the cameras were cranked by hand,
and it was very difficult to crank them consistently,
so you get this kind of flickering,
'cause there's a little bit more light that's let in
as the crank goes slower or faster.
CHRISTOV: As we were going through our lighting reviews,
my instinct is to perfect the lighting as much as we always do here at Pixar.
But with the sepia tones and with the black and white,
you kind of had to go with
the imperfection of the technology of the time.
I always had to kind of stop myself from making notes that would
make it perfect in a 21 st century kind of way.
GIBBS: I think in the original story, Stanley was a prospector
and he discovered the spring and set up a town.
But I thought it would be much more convenient if he was
a traveling radiator cap salesman,
that way he has his caps with him.
And this is the first time we've actually seen Stanley alive,
he's always been just a bronze statue,
so working with the studio in Vancouver,
we had to figure out how everything works,
his little menu of radiator caps there,
where he keeps his caps.
I love his cap-o-matic.
BULLOCK: It's so cool, the cap-o-matic.
Especially all those different designs
you came up with for all the different radiator caps.
GIBBS: So we didn't have a lot of cars of that era.
CHRISTOV: Oh, yeah. We needed some background characters.
Personally, I love old cars,
so I spent some time just drawing old cars,
and we showed a bunch of different designs to John Lasseter
to see which ones he would respond to.
Of course his answer was yes.
CHRISTOV: So we ended up... GIBBS: All of them.
CHRISTOV: We built about, almost a dozen characters.
I tried to come up with a story for every one of them,
like a backstory, like something.
I mean, there's so much detail in those characters
that you probably would never be able to see,
but hopefully people will get to enjoy them in the form of toys.
GIBBS: Yeah.
It was really fun working with the folks in Canada
creating this time travel effect.
BULLOCK: And then when you get into this 1920s era,
this black and white they've done is amazing.
It's not the film noir of the 1940s,
which is a lot of very sharp edges,
but still a slightly soft, but more consistent image.
For all you film nerds out there,
the adding of silver into nitrate film
is what enables you to get lots of really graduated shadows.
We also get very inspired by the music of different eras.
We thought the music of, like, Keystone Kops,
and Laurel and Hardy and the Hal Roach Studios from the teens
really felt great for this short,
it really inspired us in its small combos.
GIBBS: So also a lot of the dialogue and phrases that we use,
we research and try to make as authentic as possible.
So the banter, the back and forth banter between Stanley and Lizzie,
we tried to keep that, you know, kind of "of the era."
BULLOCK: My favorite was "Oh, applesauce."
Because that's something that my grandfather,
who is, as of this recording, 99 years old,
I've actually heard him say. This is a call out to my grandfather,
Thomas Edward Bullock, of Castro Valley, California.
GIBBS: And I love that this is their...
He takes her in to buy her a wedding ring basically.
They fall in love instantly.
BULLOCK: Yeah, we call this whole drive their date.
GIBBS: So she emerges with this diamond radiator cap,
and without actually saying "Will you marry me,"
you just say "Do you like it?"
(IN A SOFT VOICE) "I do, I really do."
CHRISTOV: I love it when Rob is so romantic.
GIBBS: Yeah, it doesn't happen very often.
CHRISTOV: Yeah.
BULLOCK: And then we move forward into the 1930s,
and something called the two-strip Technicolor process.
They would record separate images
onto a piece of film of the red and blue-green spectrums,
and it gives you this kind of neat pastel-y sort of look.
GIBBS: So much fun. I'm hoping people will get married in Cars Land,
and put Lizzie and Stanley wedding cake toppers on their cake.
CHRISTOV: They're building Cars Land down at Disneyland,
and to see it done in real action, not just in CG, not just in the computer,
with the same degree of attention to detail was very, very inspiring.
GIBBS: Yep.
I love that we were so insistent on being as authentic as we were.
So that when you go to the park and you've seen the short,
you'll remember it looking exactly like it does.
Our version of Stanley's Oasis, however,
is a brand new version of it, 'cause that's when he first built it.
What you'll see at Cars Land
is the charming ghost town version of Stanley's Oasis.
And thus history is made.
BULLOCK: Restored. GIBBS: Restored.
BULLOCK: Of course, the question is if they hadn't gone back in time,
would it have happened at all?
Did they create the history by going back in time?
CHRISTOV: It's really confusing actually.
GIBBS: Don't think about it too much.