[Genndy Tartakovsky] Hello.
Welcome to Sony Pictures Animation Hotel Transylvania 3.
I am Genndy Tartakovsky, the director and co-writer, and with me...
[Scott Wills] Is Scott Wills, the production designer.
[Michael Ford] And Michael Ford, visual effects supervisor.
[Tartakovsky] Well, I said I would never be back
after the second one and I did return,
and luckily it was an amazing experience, and let's get right into it.
This opening sequence was... Actually at each preview screening that we had,
people wanted to cut it just 'cause it was still a work in progress
and it kinda caught you off-guard.
And I always love to open a movie
with something that gets you a little off-balance,
so it almost makes you wanna pay attention.
And so, plus we have the guys in babushkas, which is really funny.
And so luckily, it survived
and we started to get enough laughs later on that it,
it survived the process.
[groaning]
I'm about to freak out.
[Tartakovsky] This was interesting, too, 'cause after this gag,
we used to have a gag where the Invisible Man goes,
"I love dressing up.
Check out these hoses I scored."
And it was like a gag that we all thought
was really funny, but then nobody laughed.
So, it was just one of those things where sometimes comedy is a mystery
and you kinda just wanna deal with it.
...the Van Helsings.
For centuries, my family has protected humanity from the evils of monsters.
So you can believe...
[Tartakovsky] So, Van Helsing, Jim Gaffigan did the voice,
who is one of my favorite comedians.
Like, my wife and I listen to him all the time.
He's super funny and he really stepped in and did a great job with him.
And one of the really funny stories with him
is we went to record him first in New York,
and I had one day free 'cause I got there a day early.
So I was gonna go play golf and I took a train out to Long Island.
And then he called me just to talk about the recording.
And I was at the train station when I picked up the phone,
and usually when you start working with a new actor,
you're not sure how everything's gonna go and it's a little awkward.
And I picked up the phone and he was like, "Hey, this is Jim."
I'm like, "Oh, hi."
And right on cue...
[hooting]
[Tartakovsky] There was like, a whistle and a steam blast and Jim goes,
"Oh, are you calling from Transylvania?"
And so it was really funny.
Mike and Scott, I don't know if you wanna talk about the environment here
and how it all came together.
[Ford] Sure. I mean, Scott....
We got this sort of initial design, you know,
it was supposed to look like old-school Transylvania on this train.
And a lot of what we were hoping to do
was really give the environment a lot of texture,
a lot more than what we had done in, say, the past two versions of the film.
So, I don't know if you wanna talk a little bit
about the design and the color.
[Wills] I mean, you guys had to do this set mostly on your own.
You didn't get a lot from us.
But we really just wanted it moody and we added a lot of fog to this.
[Ford] Yeah, and the best part, especially coming up, you know,
there's a lot of different environments.
This is one of the shots that I really liked doing
because we got this really textured look for the clouds.
And we had to do all these different set pieces which, you know,
normally in CG, you're like,
"Great, we gotta do a bunch of different set pieces..."
- [Wills] One-offs. - [Ford] One-offs.
These were all one-offs, really funny shots.
And obviously it just shows, like, this character
just getting destroyed multiple times, which is hilarious.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, we used to have
a whole flashback sequence after this in some of our earlier versions,
where it told more of Van Helsing's story,
and it just kinda got shuffled around.
That's the interesting thing about making a movie, is like,
as much as I don't like preview audiences,
at the same time, for features
it's nice to sit with the movie theater for an hour and a half
and really feel the ebbs and flows of the audience
because you really get to feel like,
oh, yeah, people are really shutting down here.
And then you start to analyze it, why, and, you know, am I missing something?
Are the pictures wrong? Is the story wrong?
Whatever it is.
[Ford] It's funny. Every time I go to one of those preview screenings,
all I do is stare at stuff that isn't done yet, of course.
- [all laugh] - [Wills] I have to pay attention.
- [Ford] We still have to work on that. - [Tartakovsky] Yeah.
[Ford] It's like a storyboard of, like, the third act,
and then, oh, we still have to do that.
[Tartakovsky] And the interesting thing is now they're doing the storyboard,
the preview screenings are done at 100% storyboards, which, for me,
you know, the storyboards are the first pass
after the writing of the story.
And, you know, they're really rough drawings
and they've just got scratch voices and stuff.
And it's a very, very rough way to look at your movie
and make all these judgment calls and decisions on.
And it seems like we're doing it more and more now.
And so the boards have to be slicker and better.
And so it's just, you know,
like anything, the process is always changing.
[Ford] Yeah, but you do a lot of your own boarding for all these.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah. Yeah, for this one I did quite a bit.
Yeah, everything is fine.
[Wills] When you have so much visual humor,
the boards have to be well-executed to sell that.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, and that's the thing, is like, we have, you know,
especially with this movie where there's, you know,
a bunch of sequences with no dialog, you're totally right.
We would have these sequences where all the gags are drawn in there,
and then we would show them, and nobody in the audience is laughing.
And obviously, there's no animation and so it's too much to imagine.
And then all of a sudden, you know,
and then you have to fight people wanting to cut the sequences.
And you go, no, no, no, once it's animated, it's gonna be great.
- [Wills] Trust me. - [Tartakovsky] Trust me, right.
And that's the hard ticket sometimes to ride.
And then all of a sudden, you know, we finish the sequence and it's animated.
And it is funny and the next time the audience watches it,
everybody's laughing and you're like, "Whew."
You know, and it's hard to say, like, "See, I told you."
But at the same time, you know, it is...
It's a complex process
'cause there's a lot of pressure and, you know,
and there's a lot of money involved, obviously.
And so everybody wants to make sure it's good.
- [Ford] Trust the process. - [Tartakovsky] Trust the process.
[Wills] There's Genndy. [laughs]
- [Ford] Nice voice, Genndy. - [Tartakovsky] Thank you.
Hi, Mom. Hi, Papa.
- Dennis! - Dennis!
[Tartakovsky] And also, the addition of the puppy
in this part was also, came later where...
You know, we did the Puppy! short which ended up being super successful.
And probably about maybe halfway through the movie,
they're like, "Oh, we should add the puppy."
[Wills] Yeah.
[Tartakovsky] And then we added him to the boat.
We added him in this scene and tried to place Tinkles everywhere.
[Wills] I was wondering watching this, if the audience isn't like, "Who's that?"
'cause I've seen the short, so I know.
- [Tartakovsky] Right. - [Wills] If you haven't seen the short...
- [Tartakovsky] Yeah, if... - [Wills] Surprise.
[Tartakovsky] You kinda have to, you know, we tried to set it up with a story
where she goes, you know,
"Whose idea was it to get the puppy?" And she's like, "Yours."
So then we kinda do it as quickly and efficiently as we can,
so not everybody's, you know,
if you haven't seen the short, is thrown away by it.
[Ford] It's a good addition.
[Tartakovsky laughs] Yes.
[music playing]
[Tartakovsky] And another situation
where everybody was attacking this scene to get out of...
to get the Franken lady out,
which was a really funny gag, but again, in boards...
played well for us, but didn't play great for the audience.
And it wasn't till... until this character was fully realized
that you really appreciate her...
majesty, of course.
[Wills] Just got funnier and funnier as it got made.
[Tartakovsky] Mike, did you guys end up using the dress from Olive?
[Ford] Yeah, so, one of the things
that we talked about originally on the film was that we had, you know,
she was drawn with a sequined dress and back on the Popeye short,
back in the Popeye days when we were working on that,
we actually made a version of this dress for Olive Oyl.
And so a lot of the artists, you know, CFX team actually went back
and sort of pulled it out of the cobwebs and said,
"Okay, hey, we still have this tech."
So each of those individual little sequins
that are on her dress are actually procedurally animated.
So as her dress moves, each of those sequins moves,
nice little piece of tech that the CFX team came up with.
- [Wills] Beautiful. - [Tartakovsky] Amazing.
[Tartakovsky] It is like we do sometimes these really dumb, silly gags.
And there's this complete, incredibly difficult...
[Ford] Yeah, yeah.
[Tartakovsky] ...technical process to execute them.
[Ford] Yeah, it's just a sequined dress
and then you see people in the corner screaming.
[Tartakovsky] Right, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and it was, I never told you, but we did this interview...
I did this interview and the interviewer saw the movie
and he said...
Oh, yeah, Scott, you were with me.
And the interviewer said, like,
"Oh, the animation is so much more, you know,
Tex Avery-ish, or Warner Brother-ish.
You know, did technology change?"
- [Wills] Right. - [Tartakovsky] You know?
And I said, like, "No, you know,
I mean, the technology changes every year, you know, with this type of stuff.
But at the same time, it's just we have...
We've written in more physical humor and more silliness."
- [Ford] Yeah, bring more... - [Wills] Opportunities...
[Tartakovsky] To do funny animation.
[Ford] And then we're breaking rigs,
even more than we used to, which is good.
[Wills] Genndy doesn't care about your rig.
[Ford] Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter.
Are you kidding me right now?
[Ford] You'll make it work.
[Tartakovsky] Michelle Murdocca, the producer of the movie,
is the voice of the phone.
I understand.
You want bologna.
- [Tartakovsky] She did a great job. - [Ford] She did.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, she sounds great.
And I think this was one of the first sequences that we brought into lighting.
[Ford] It is true. Yeah.
- [Wills] First set built. - [Tartakovsky] Yep.
First set built. First lighting.
[Wills] Sylvain Marc drew it.
- [Tartakovsky] That's right, yeah. - [Wills] That guy is awesome.
[Ford] Well, this is actually, Scott,
this is when I realized that we were gonna have
a much more colorful movie is this first piece of art
that you sent over for this, for this set.
- [Wills] Really? - [Ford] Oh, yeah.
I mean, it sounds crazy, but it's basically, you know,
the way you introduced color into the scene...
it just felt different from the other two movies, at least to me.
And that first... Even just this first shot,
I mean, this is actually, I think, one of the first shots we finaled.
It just had... To me, it just had a different feeling.
[Wills] Well, we were just getting started. This is nothing.
[Tartakovsky] I know. I know. I know, but that's when I knew.
But even the way that the light was coming through behind him and that shot,
that was the shot.
[Wills] Yeah.
And this is kinda my first opportunity to work with you guys and see, you know,
how good you were, really.
'Cause you guys came up with a lot of great lighting ideas
in these shots that weren't keyed.
[Ford] Yeah, it was a good... it was a good partnership, as we say.
- [Wills] Yeah. - I know what it is.
- Really? - You're stressed out...
[Tartakovsky] This sequence was one of those
where it was kind of this right out the gate.
You know, we did a couple of little adjustments story-wise
but generally, it stayed pretty intact and it always got laughs
and so that's kind of one of the things
that makes things survive is laughs, laughter.
So once everybody kinda generally laughs at it, it stays in the movie.
[Wills] This is, right off the bat,
a situation where there's no light in the attic.
It's not really day.
[Tartakovsky] Right.
[Wills] But it needs to be bright and still kinda happy.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah.
[Wills] So it was challenging right off the bat.
This is the first sequence of...
[Tartakovsky] What Scott's talking about is
that we have a rule because we have, you know, whatever, Gothic characters.
We always wanted...
Obviously, because they're vampires, has to be at night,
but we always wanted it to feel like it's bright
and it's not like a moody, dark, you know, horror movie.
But it's a fun kids' comedy.
And so we're always very conscious about our colors and the brightness.
And this movie, color-wise, you know...
is huge.
It's used every... Every color is used.
- [Ford] We use all the colors. - [Tartakovsky] All the colors.
[man on TV] ... .stressed out.
Do you need some family...
[Tartakovsky] These are some of the first dog shots
that we ended up doing in the movie,
resurrecting what we did on the Puppy! short.
[man on TV] A monster vacation....
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, and it took us a while to get the rhythm of the snoring
and the puppy, Tinkles, is snoring right to get that old, you know,
Three Stooges gag to work.
And so now we're heading into the Gremlin Air sequence
and it was, again, one of those things where,
because it's all physical comedy, you know,
we kept trying to push what are the jokes that are the best and to get a rhythm.
You know, and I talk about rhythm a lot 'cause, you know,
from the early days of my career, you...
Like, when I used to hear, in Dexter's Laboratory, Dexter talk,
I realized it's the rhythm of the talking that's sometimes funny.
And so you try to build rhythm into everything...
into the sequence, into people, the way they talk, into the music...
and this is one of those examples where, you know,
rhythmically, it's all really funny and it feels musical,
which is some of those...
That's kinda the best thing about those old, you know,
Warner Brothers, Bugs Bunny or Tex Avery cartoons.
They were all done to music, so the timing's always perfect.
Where here, we do, you know,
the writing, the story, the action, and the music doesn't come in till last.
And we worked on this cue a lot and to have this funny tuba idea.
I've always wanted to do, you know, I want...
I like cartoons and so I want always cartoony music,
and sometimes with features, that's like a bad word.
But with this one, we were able to do that
and to really push Mark Mothersbaugh, who's our composer,
to do funny, unique, goofy, cartoony, silly music.
And this one was a great example.
Arguing who is more attractive.
[Tartakovsky] And this plane is nuts with the detail, you know?
[Wills] Early versions, the plane was moving so much,
you're getting nauseous watching it.
[Ford] Yeah, we did have a lot of shake on it initially, yeah.
[Wills] Too much motion, yeah.
But there's all these great dynamics
and all that stuff moving in the background.
[Tartakovsky] It feels really alive.
[Ford] Yeah, so a lot of that is obviously coming
from our effects department,
the lights that are moving in the background and the cables,
stuff that's sort of like subliminally moving,
that's sort of that little layer of detail
that makes it feel a little bit more real.
And the other thing I like about this set is that we've obviously got
a lot of the detail that's put into the seats.
Almost every single one of those seats is different.
- [Tartakovsky] Right. - [Ford] And they've got duct tape on them
and there's wear and there's dirt, and it just looks very sort of tactile.
And it's really subtle, but it actually,
it adds to a certain level of that realism that we were going for with this.
Cartoony realism, as we say.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah.
[whimpers]
There you are, Tinkles. Don't worry...
[Tartakovsky] And one thing, like I don't know
if probably nobody ever really notices...
But in this whole movie,
we don't have one over-the-shoulder shot.
An over-the-shoulder is when you do, it's kind of like standard,
when two people are talking,
you shoot them over the shoulder and you kinda cut back and forth.
And it's very standard in every movie, every TV show does it.
But for me, it's like...
Because everybody does it, we shouldn't do it. You know? [laughs]
In a weird way, it kinda makes it unique and it feels,
and if you look at some old... in the older movies, you know,
there would be more creative blocking
than just over the shoulder, over the shoulder.
And that's part of the thing that makes it feel cinematic, I always feel like.
And especially in Bugs Bunny cartoons,
you know, when Daffy and Bugs are talking, it's never over the shoulders,
because the animators...
nobody wants to animate the back of somebody's shoulder and hair.
So you have the two characters talking and it's, you know, and it goes.
That's amazing, you know, the effects in this movie
are on the next level of anything that we've ever done in the first two.
- [Ford] I would totally agree. - [all laugh]
Yeah, actually, 75% of the movie actually has effects in it.
So every single one, like it kinda hearkens back
to what we were talking about with the plane,
even just the cables, well, that's the effects department working on it.
[Wills] Mike, you know this is the most annoying set
you guys had to build, right?
[Ford] Yeah, well, it was a labor of love, as they say,
with every rivet on every ship that we had to build.
[Wills] So much work for, like, four shots.
[Ford] Yeah. The Bermuda Triangle set was... It was a massive undertaking.
I mean, every single one of those ships was designed on its own
and then we had...
It was sort of like a big Jenga thing
or a big jigsaw puzzle we had to put together.
So...
- [Wills] Then you had Christian... - [Ford] Yeah.
Christian Schellewald, our art director, who loves boats, planes and ships.
- [Wills] He loves all vehicles. - [Ford] Yes.
A hotel on the water.
[Tartakovsky] And the funny thing on the story with the fish guys...
is we needed a staff for the ship.
And we didn't wanna do zombies and so we want...
It had to be something to do with the story
and kind of the back story on them, that's not in the movie,
but it was kind of in our minds is basically because
Van Helsing was trying to capture Dracula's shapeshifting powers...
he was experimenting on fish.
And so somehow he spliced fish and humans together and created those guys.
And a thousand of those guys.
And so, you know,
we all liked them so much that we kinda just kept them.
[Wills] And they all have the same voice.
[Tartakovsky] They all have the same voice, Chris Parnell.
- [Wills] Great voice. - [Tartakovsky] Yeah.
[Wills] The big shot.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, and I think you guys had to do it twice, right,
'cause once for the trailer, which was early on
and then final, for the final movie.
[Ford] Yeah, I think when we first saw this shot in boards,
'cause you'd boarded the whole thing out,
it was like, oh, this'll be one of the last shots
that we final on the movie just 'cause it was so... And it was true.
[Wills] It was longer than that.
- [Ford] Yeah, it was longer than that. - [Wills] Yeah.
[Tartakovsky] It's interesting 'cause it was one of those things where in boards,
it was okay, right?
And then we got the note to, you know,
make sure it's gonna be, oh, crazy, dramatic.
And then we pushed it and did this big, crazy, 360 spin-around thing.
And then when we got it into production, it just felt gratuitous, you know?
We're all very conscious of cameras
and when they move and when they don't move.
And so we actually ended up making it a lot simpler, still complicated
but just not as gratuitously 360 around, and all this stuff.
[Ford] Yeah, I think you made it more about the character...
[Tartakovsky] Exactly, yeah.
And sometimes when you come up with a gag and it seems silly...
so I came up with this Bob gag.
And I thought it was silly and fun
and the first time I showed it in storyboards,
people kinda giggled and liked it, right?
And it was done exactly like this.
And then we had the preview screening, again, going back to that,
and we showed it in the preview screening,
and no laughter, right?
And it's kind of a big, long gag.
And it just sits there.
And you're like, "Oh, my gosh, what do we do?
Nobody's getting it. Where did I miss it?"
So, you know, we come back and I start reworking it.
Okay, well, maybe I didn't, you know, I didn't set it up correctly.
You start painstakingly try to figure out
where the comedy went wrong, even though I know in my gut it is funny.
And then I go through all these different iterations
and I'm like, "You know what? No, I had it right.
It's just not animated. I have to believe in it."
'Cause even myself, I start to question it
when the audience doesn't laugh.
And then we got it...
On the next screening, it was animated.
And then magically everybody's laughing.
So much so that even the kids behind me were like, "Hi, Bob, hi, Bob," after.
[Ford] That's when you know you got it right.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah.
[Ford] I'm thinking back to these Tinkles shots
that actually got added in.
'Cause that was one that was added in as well, that fireworks shot.
We sort of did it at the last minute.
Your dad is going to love this!
Best summer vacation ever!
Wait till you see the itinerary.
[Ford] Yeah, this is another one of those sets
that was a labor of love in terms of getting all the details right.
I mean, if you look at the floor or you look at the walls,
and I think that was the one thing we were kinda concerned about
with the walls was just making sure that, you know,
it was a white wall but it's not very interesting.
But, you know, Scott, you ended up putting a lot of color on the walls.
[Wills] Right.
[Ford] Which gave it that warmth, sort of made it feel a lot more dynamic.
[Wills] Well, the one good thing about white is it takes all the colors.
[Ford] Exactly. Yeah. That helps.
[Tartakovsky] And so Captain Ericka, Kathryn Hahn,
she is, you know, an amazing actress.
And super funny and dramatic and real.
And one of the things to give, you know, Dracula, Adam Sandler, a love interest,
you needed... We didn't wanna do, like, a standard generic, whatever,
pretty girl or just somebody normal.
We wanted her to be as eccentric and wacky as our Dracula is.
And so to do a female character like that, you know,
and for me, Olive Oyl, you know, is one of the best female characters
'cause she's incredibly wacky and heroic and silly and all of this stuff.
So we wanted to make a comparable female character to Dracula and so we did.
And, you know, especially in the later scenes,
where she goes crazy,
her animation is just as extreme as his and, you know,
probably people don't probably give it a lot of attention,
but to do a female character that's funny and wacky and extreme is difficult
because society wants female characters to be pretty and nice,
and especially as she's the, you know...
For a while, she's the bad guy, too.
[Wills] Yeah, there's a real duality to her,
which makes it even more complicated.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah.
[Wills] She's always appealing, though, even when she's being crazy.
Atlantis!
[Ford] Her hair is actually deceptively tricky as well,
when you think about it.
She's got these little curls
and the way that you tend to push characters, Genndy,
like the hair actually had to sort of stick to her forehead.
And so the first few versions that we did,
her hair would just sort of get scrunched up
and it just got... would get really mangled.
So those little curls were...
Were definitely difficult.
[Tartakovsky] And I love not knowing that it was difficult.
- [laughs] - [Ford] Yes. Yeah.
We keep certain things from you, you know?
- [Tartakovsky] Thank you. - [Ford] It's our little secrets.
Oh, you're speaking Transylvanian.
Always wanted to learn.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, and this was,
you know, again, like, you know, speaking of color,
just how much that night sky feels kinda like day,
just feels colorful and it's...
it's another just night sky.
But it's great, it gave it so much character.
And it gave it this really nice,
cartoony quality to the color, which is amazing.
And we have this champagne shot that gave us a lot of trouble.
And the trouble always comes from surprisingly different scenarios,
ones that I would never guess.
[Ford] We struggled with the champagne shot.
There's actually, most of the time nowadays...
I mean, we used to shoot a lot of stuff, you know, for reference.
And a lot of times nowadays we're looking it up online.
And, you know, we searched and searched and searched...
for "champagne hitting face," or whatever we were searching for.
Couldn't find it,
struggled with the shot,
and then we finally took one of our character TDs, Brian Kohn,
and we went out and we actually shot it ourselves,
high-speed photography.
And I think the next time we showed you the shot, we finaled it.
[Wills] It was done...
[Ford] So, it's the power of reference.
[Tartakovsky] And this is, coming up, the Vlad in Speedos gag.
It's one of those things where you storyboarded it and you conceptualize it
and you go, "Right, this'll never see the light of day."
'Cause nobody's gonna, in their right minds,
approve naked-old-man jokes.
And luckily, it got so many laughs that, again, the power of laughter won over
and as much as lot of people hated it, you could not deny...
its humor.
And, you know, we see these shots hundreds of times through the process.
And I think pretty much every time we would look and review this shot,
there's some giggling somewhere.
- [Wills] Never get used to it. - [Tartakovsky] Yeah.
[Wills] Seeing this animation, I thought for sure
it was never gonna make it in the movie.
- [Ford] Especially the first time. - [Wills] This shot here.
[Ford] Yeah, the little toe twinkles is my favorite.
[Tartakovsky] But yeah, luckily it made it through and....
And they put it in the trailer, too, which was really surprising.
'Cause I thought it was, everybody's gonna be gunning to get rid of it.
[Ford] It sort of set the tone, I think.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah.
Great animation, you know...
I could not say enough about our team.
We had, you know, well over 100 animators
and Alan Hawkings, our animation supervisor,
he was stuck in a room all the time.
You know, with over 100 animators, you have some quality,
some people are just amazing and they get this cartoony thing.
I mean, everybody's talented,
but some people understand the cartooniness more than others.
And I thought for sure we would feel the quality levels between shot to shot,
but he did an amazing job,
and all the animators really brought it together
and they wanted to understand this, 'cause this style sometimes is just taste.
It's just... there's no like rules about it.
It either feels right or it doesn't.
And...
Sometimes you wanna just hold and do nothing
and other times you wanna go full-bore on it.
And so to get the balance where the humor is,
control is really the most important thing.
Like if you think you're an animator and here's your big shot,
and I'm working on Hotel 3 which has this big cartoony style,
and all you're supposed to do is just hold the character.
And 90% of the shots that I would get to see first,
the shot is at, like, a 13.
[Wills] Right.
[Tartakovsky] It's a crazy explosion of everything and you're like,
"Whoa, let's just slow down."
This, they're just held talking.
You don't have to do anything.
It's just quick, easy, get done, and then later on,
you'll have more crazy stuff to do.
[Ford] Yeah, I think that's the big part about our job
is to try and figure out what's in your head.
And sometimes we get it right and a lot of times we don't.
Hello. How are y'all doing?
Good evening, Captain.
[Ford] This for me, from a palette standpoint, too,
I just love the colors in this shot.
I love the framing of the shot, too.
It just has a really nice...
A really nice, appealing look to it.
Thank you so much.
[Ford] Good ol' Harry Three Eyes.
[Wills] With his chest hair. We added that for this movie.
[Tartakovsky] We had a big sequence that got cut,
the hairy-chest contest,
which we all liked,
but it was just, I don't know, just one of those things
that you get stuck in the scene, in the sequence...
Some of the storytelling went away, even though it was really fun.
[Wills] You're passing up all the great lighting. We need to talk about...
[Tartakovsky] I won't talk about how great it looks.
- I'm trying to talk about... - [Wills] Thanks!
[Tartakovsky] ... .the scenes behind it.
So another sequence which went through hell
to try to make it on the air where...
Van Helsing, this cute little guy, was a problem.
Constantly in the preview screenings,
people thought he was creepy and not funny.
Like, they were missing that it's humorous.
And so we kept trying to do everything to make him funny,
and to me, this is so obviously funny that I had a hard time understanding why,
what piece of information am I not telling the audience
that it's okay to laugh at this guy?
'Cause when you look at it, it's ridiculous.
And so maybe it just got to a point that it's too ridiculous.
And it was here, some of Ericka's amazing, more over-the-top type of animation.
Just like you taught me.
It's even worse than I feared.
It was that fateful night...
[Tartakovsky] Again, it's dark and moody but it's still super colorful and fun.
[Ford] Right.
[Wills] We took down the moodiness, it was too dramatic, I think.
I think that's what was killing the humor.
It was so dramatic.
[Van Helsing] And so I began....
[Ford] I just thought the contrast between these two characters, too,
I think that's the fun part about getting to build characters like that,
is just that you have this really big heroic guy
and then he turns into this old, decrepit version,
and to me, that's the funny part about the characters.
[Van Helsing] ....in the rubble it lay, waiting.
Endlessly, I...
[Ford] A lot of close-ups in this movie.
- [Wills] Of him. - [Ford] Of him. Yes.
[Tartakovsky] And this is the last shot
that we finished on the movie, I think.
[Ford] Yes, it is.
The infamous mirror shot.
- [Ford] This is a com... - [Wills] Okay, Mike, start in on it.
[Ford] Oh, boy, this shot. So, basically, this is a combo of two shots.
So, an animator actually animated two versions of Van Helsing
and then we, and the lighting team, we basically had to cobble it together.
But it also means that the effects team,
every department downstream from the animation team
actually has to do two versions of the shot.
Then we have to put it together.
[Van Helsing] And now, after 120 years...
[Tartakovsky] And it was another add to make him more comical,
just that he kind of makes fun of himself a little bit,
talks about his tragedy in a comedic way, just to lighten him.
[Ford] And Genndy, you were talking about the performance aspect of...
- [Wills] Of Ericka? - [Ford] Of Ericka and just, you know,
that sort of really fast motion
as compared to sort of this more elegant motion
that she does in other scenes.
You won't try and kill Dracula.
Fine! I promise.
Promise what?
I promise I won't...
[Tartakovsky] Great rhythm to this dialog, and just add little...
[Ford] I love that little nose thing over the shoulder.
[groans]
Don't worry, Great-Grandfather. I won't try and kill him.
I will kill him!
[Tartakovsky] Kathryn's great. She 'd come into recordings
and she is just so energetic, so funny, so eager and, you know,
we would do the scenes back and forth.
And she was really fun to work with.
And this was so, you know, one of our all...
Pretty much no-dialog sequence and just about being funny dancing.
You know, I'm an animator at heart. That's always what I've wanted to do.
And so for me, when I was writing this, I wanted to write stuff for animation.
So what do I wanna see? What would I wanna animate?
And somebody dancing goofily... And not to do like, you know,
we didn't wanna do... We wanted to do a specific type of dancing.
Kind of our reference was, like, '70s...
[all] Soul Train. [laughing]
[Tartakovsky] We looked at some old videos to see,
'cause their dancing was so funny and amazing.
And in actuality, we made Drac's feet maybe, like, 30, 40% bigger.
We always tried to shoot up on it to try to give it more comical posing.
And this was really hard.
This was pretty much almost every first pass,
the dancing was too much.
And we had to keep backing it down, backing it down,
'cause dancing is really actually repetitive.
But it was, again, one of those scenarios
when you get in there and you're in animating,
you're gonna animate five different dance moves in two seconds
where it should really just be one kind of repeating.
But you make the one the best.
And there was a lot of iterations of this,
but then, you know, it turned out really fun, a really fun scene.
Work it, Dracula.
You know it.
Oh!
[Tartakovsky] Again, you know, you're telling the story through animation...
through movement, so Drac's confident and everything about him is confident.
And he does this male-model thing. That's some of my favorite...
Who do I need to impress?
Hey, isn't that Captain Ericka?
[exclaiming]
Ah, wha... Eh, oh...
[Ford] Yeah, some of the posing coming up
when he's sitting on the deck chair is some of my favorites, too.
- [Ford] Just... - [Wills] Tiny hands.
[Ford] Just that right there, like, just that, those hands down.
- Makes me smile. - [laughter]
[Wills] It's great.... sync.
We've never seen you like this.
I know, I know, it doesn't make any sense.
You can't zing twice, it's impossible.
But I did, so now...
[Ford] And the idea of actually putting the eyes together,
that was something that you wanted to do on this movie, too,
where you don't see the bridge, sort of the bridge in the nose.
You put them together.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, luckily, I think I'd benefited from Smurfs for that, right?
[Ford] We did benefit from Smurfs, yes.
[Tartakovsky] Lots of tech behind that.
[Tartakovsky] But that's our job, or your job,
is to make sure everything looks simple and not too complex
and people just looking at it, look at it and enjoy it.
[Ford] Yeah, animation just does such a great job
of putting those characters
into all these different positions, and it's a lot of work.
Every single pose, we sort of say every pose is sort of sacred.
[Tartakovsky] Right.
[Ford] Especially in lighting when we're trying to preserve those poses
'cause they're so...
You know, you've given a direction on every single one of those.
And so our goal is to sort of say
that one's important, that one's important.
- They're all important. - [Tartakovsky] Right.
For I am king of family fun!
All right, who is ready to get pummeled?
[mumbling nervously]
[Ford] The posing on Murray... Johnny's stuff is great, but...
[Wills] That whole stage behind him is completely left over from a...
- [Ford] Oh, right, yeah, yeah... - [Wills] A whole cut idea.
[Ford] That's that hairy-chest contest, yeah.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, that was gonna be a pretty featured area...
[Wills] Yeah, and then it went away.
[yells]
[screaming]
Not the hair! Not the hair!
[all exclaiming]
No, no, no, no, no!
[Ford] Yeah, that shot took a while.
- [Wills] Wet hair. - [Ford] The wet hair.
Two versions of the hair.
[man over P.A.] Captain Ericka, you are needed on deck.
Next stop... Bye-bye, Dracula.
[Murray laughing and exclaiming]
[roars]
[Tartakovsky] Everything goes by in a blink, which it should.
I mean, even when we do 2D animation, it's the same thing.
You sometimes spend half an hour on a drawing and it's, you know,
a half a second long, if that, sometimes.
[slow-motion scream]
[feedback squeals]
[Wills] Spent a lot of time on that fire.
[Tartakovsky] You sent me reference on it.
[Ford] I did.
- [Wills] Lot of versions. - [Ford] Yeah.
[Tartakovsky] I think through this movie,
I think Bermuda Triangle, as we passed over it,
is one of those things where in 2D, when we draw something,
it looks kinda silly and fun and you get away with it.
When it goes into CG, all of a sudden, everything is real.
And there's a couple instances, a lot of instances
in this movie where we were fighting it, where we have the Bermuda Triangle,
but it's a stack of ships in an actual triangle.
And the really big one, later on, on the deserted island
where it's this giant ship and this tiny little cartoony island.
And when it's all real,
it starts to question, like, is this right?
And something's starting to feel... It's one of those things where, you know,
like, I haven 't seen it a lot in other movies.
And it's... Because everything's kind of based in reality because of the computer.
[Ford] That's something that we talk a lot about in terms of like, you know,
I'm always trying to get scale and make things look big and real,
and you're like, "Nah. Don't worry about it."
[Wills] Just the idea's so cartoony, you struggle.
It's kind of like conflicting ideas.
- [Ford] You just have to let it go. - [Tartakovsky] Yeah.
As long as people are laughing and they're not taken out of...
- If they're not taken out of the movie. - [Ford] Yeah.
[Tartakovsky] Even as simple an idea as this,
where everybody's silhouette, is more of a cartoony thing.
[Wills] I don't mind if it's cartoony. I don't want it to look cheap.
[Ford] Right. Right.
[Tartakovsky] Those are somehow connected in...
- [Wills] It can be. - [Ford] Exactly.
[Ford] Yes, sadly.
[Tartakovsky] Here's another sequence with pretty much no dialog,
which was amazing.
And this, the level of detail and complexity,
and how fast it came together, was incredible.
You know, like, I know other movies, for underwater,
they would take years of research to get it right.
[Wills] And I couldn't picture it in my head,
you know, how it was boarded. I couldn't see how it was gonna look.
So when I finally kinda cracked it as a color, okay, I was relieved.
It's like I don't... Another dark, 'cause it's at night. It's underwater.
You know, any reference for underwater volcanoes is just dark and gray.
[Ford] Yeah. Right.
[Wills] So, when we came up with a colorful, bright solution,
it was... It seemed to work.
- [Ford] Yeah... - [Wills] It was a relief.
- [Ford] Yeah... - [Wills] Thank God this works.
[Ford] Your introduction of actually putting warmth into that particular shot?
Where you've got this warm sort of glowing from beneath from the volcano.
This shot in particular, it's got all that warmth in it.
It's not something you usually attribute to underwater.
And I think that's what makes it unique. That's what makes it different.
Yeah, and just talking about the technology,
as it relates to the corals, so we have this technology called Sprout,
which actually allows us to essentially just paint all these elements on.
So we made these mounds of coral and then we could paint detail, like, you know,
each individual coral head that we put in there.
And then we lay it out.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, and also, you know, for me, it's always,
what's gonna be unique about this?
What's gonna stand out?
If we're doing underwater,
how does it look like our underwater and not like any other movie, you know?
And I think from, you know, from Scott's color keys
to the way it was all executed,
it makes it look special and it's kind of burned in your brain.
And you can't deny it and so... This was another sequence.
Seems like every one,
but it was another sequence where, you know,
the head of the studio was like,
"It's too slow. It's boring. I wanna move on."
Reacting to storyboards.
And then, again, like, I can't say like, "Wait till it's all done," each time.
Like, you have to defend it. And so I defended it, I defended it.
You know, there is some trust, so we kind of continued on making it,
and then when he saw it in its final version, it was great.
And he was just like... You could tell he wanted to make a note on it
and then he couldn't anymore as it looked so good.
So it was like a nice way to win.
Because you can't deny the visuals. That's the thing.
And it's just fun, and that's the thing, sometimes, to understand, too, in a movie
is not everything has to be funny and hilarious.
'Cause it's just impossible to do that.
But sometimes things are just fun and you're just smiling or smirking at it.
[Wills] It's just entertaining.
[Tartakovsky] It's entertaining to look at and it's all kind of silly where....
And that makes it entertaining.
And we did a thing in the mix here where I wanted us to feel underwater
but the whole sequence is driven by music.
And so what we did is we filled the whole audience,
instead of the whole movie theater,
instead of with underwater sounds, we filled it with music.
So it feels like there's music playing all around you,
rather than just from the front.
And it really feels very immersive.
Frank, we just ate...
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, all the water is just....
[Ford] More water. Water everywhere.
[Tartakovsky] It's done so elegantly and nice.
- [Ford] Yeah, we went from water to water. - [Tartakovsky] To more water.
[Ford] To more water, to more water, yeah.
Yeah, big scene here for Ericka acting.
Yeah, and we just kind of, you know,
the style of the show, the movie, is to really, like,
feature the great animation and so there's not, no cuts around her.
You know, you just set up the camera and let the person act,
both the animator and Kathryn Hahn.
Boy, that underwater volcano looked hot!
[Wills] This is such a weird Genndy shot.
To flat-pan.
[Tartakovsky] Flat-side pan.
Definitely, definitely challenging in CG.
Well, and it's, you know, it's normal storytelling.
You know, it's like, it's just pan over the gags.
Hi, Bob.
Okay, time to go play Ping-Pong.
[Ford] I remember when you first pitched
that the dog was gonna be wearing a trench coat,
we sort of had that collective, "Really?"
It happened in our... It was a production meeting.
We're like, yeah, so he wants a dog in a trench coat.
- [Ford] And we're like, "Great...." - [Tartakovsky] Collective groan?
"Great. Oh, no."
[Ford] No, but it was, you know, I mean, that's the best part about it,
is when you finally see it on the screen, like, "Yeah, no problem."
[Ford] Right.
[Tartakovsky] In hindsight.
And so Keegan-Michael Key,
who does the voice of Murray, here, just, you know,
I wrote this little song and I didn't know what it was gonna be.
And he just ad-libbed the music and the tune, and he was so funny,
and then the animator added the butt slap, which brought it all home.
And it was one of those things where, like, where I questioned it,
when I first saw it, the butt slap, I'm like, "Oh, is it too much?"
You know, like, it's already funny as singing.
It's already funny dancing,
and now he sticks his butt out and slaps it?
So for me, it was too much,
but then everybody laughed so much that I'm like,
"All right, I gotta get over my own issues, and it is really funny,"
and so we kept it.
It's been a while. I don't even know where to start.
[Tartakovsky] It's hard staging where you're, who are you looking at?
[Tartakovsky] Another color for the night, different.
[Wills] It's purple. It's different.
We ran out of colors for this movie.
For night, night-time skies.
[Invisible Man] Here she comes. Okay, Drac, hit it.
[Ford] But that's a good use of that white-wall thing,
where we have that warm color on the left,
because white obviously receives the colors so well,
so we have that cool on the right, warm on the left.
[Ford] Makes it feel happy and not dark, even in a night-time scene.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, and even like Drac's little curly mouth was a complex...
- [Wills] A big deal. - [Tartakovsky] Big deal to do.
[Ford] Yeah, we had one of our artists work
a long time on that one shot when he's first meeting Ericka.
- [Tartakovsky] The big curl, yeah, yeah. - [Ford] Actually articulating every frame.
- [Dennis] Tinkles, stop! - Wait!
No, no, no!
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, and I think the speed
that we go through these things is...
It's astounding, I think, sometimes.
[growls, then barks]
- [Tartakovsky] Spit. - [Ford] Ah, Tinkles' spit.
[Ford] We never knew how much to give him.
Every time we gave him too much, you said no.
Every time we didn't give him enough, you said more.
[Tartakovsky] It's just a balance.
[barking continues]
He's so cute.
That's probably my favorite spit shot in the movie.
[Tartakovsky] This is what we were kind of talking about a little earlier,
the complexity of something so real
and then something so cartoony and stupid.
[Wills] This is the flattest, most cut-out-looking shot.
[Tartakovsky] And even just the ladder, clonk, coming out,
is a very cartoony thing.
But it feels great, and this is one of those things
where rhythmically also, everything came together.
So, because the music is so kind of fun and repetitive and very unique
and, you know, Mark did a great job on it...
it ties everything together,
so the sequences feel like everything's structured around the music,
which makes the dialog and the joke and everything flow really nicely.
It just makes it entertaining again
'cause you feel like it's one thought, one idea,
and, you know, we pushed the music like crazy,
the visuals are really fun.
And then we just do gag, gag, gag through it to tell the story.
You know, a fun day at the beach.
[Wills] And the same thing, again, it's night.
[Tartakovsky] Right.
[Wills] They're somehow laying out in the sun, moon.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, but it's super bright.
[Wills] Yeah, bright night,
moonlight instead of sunlight.
[Ford] Yeah, we almost went almost like bioluminescent with the water
just because we wanted to add so much color to it.
- What was that? - It sounds like our...
[Tartakovsky] That was another hugely complex shot.
Again, no cuts.
Just two characters acting throughout.
- [Ford] With water. - [Tartakovsky] With water.
[Wills] I was amazed at that little group of wolf pups is....
How they did that.
- [Tartakovsky] Little Tornado, yeah. - [Ford] Pupnado.
[Wills] Pupnado.
You guys did amazing sand for this.
[Ford] Yeah, the sand, especially on that close-up of....
You can actually see the little pebbles coming down.
Yeah, when we got the turnover for this set as well,
I was super excited, especially, you know,
the modeling team getting in there and creating all these little details down
to, like, the little umbrellas in the cups and the forks in the bamboo cup,
and there's a lot of...
I mean, we built the entire bar and it's out of focus.
- [Tartakovsky] Yeah. - [Ford] Thanks, Genndy.
- [Tartakovsky] You're welcome. - [Wills] It's very charming-looking.
[Ford] Yeah.
No way. He's, he's... my dad.
I know, right? It's weird. When my parents kiss...
[Wills] These simple table shots were tricky to light, it seemed like.
[Ford] Yeah, we just have that, you know,
you have that main source which you would think is the candlelight,
but they move around so much and they just got ugly really quick.
Lighting team just did a great job on that.
This guy.
[Tartakovsky] So, Chupacabra, as he's known to you,
actually started as El Cucuy, which is kind of like the Latin bogeyman.
Yeah, and so the joke was good with him, but kind of didn't last.
And so... 'Cause he just wasn't well-known enough,
so we ended up with Chupacabra, which then got a good laugh and...
[Ford] And he used to be red.
- [Tartakovsky] And he used to be red. - [Wills] Right.
[music playing]
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, here's another sequence of comedic acting
that's incredibly difficult to do,
just the idea of Drac sitting down confidently right here.
Ooh!
[Tartakovsky] You know, to get that,
we worked a long time to get that to feel right.
And it's something, for me, you know, being a fan of physical comedy, you know,
of course, Charlie Chaplin stuff,
but even as contemporary as Jim Carrey or Steve Martin,
those people do physical comedy so well that
for us to mimic it, to do it in animation, is hard
'cause it takes inventiveness and, you know,
like one of my favorites is Mr. Bean,
what he can do with his body and everything,
and, you know, of course, Peter Sellers.
So...
[Ford] Well, he also has the opportunity to do...
He'll do ten takes of that and maybe he'll get that one that he's improvising.
- [Tartakovsky] Totally. - [Ford] And this is like...
you got a 600-frame shot that an animator's doing,
there's not a lot of... improvisation,
but there's also, like, you have to execute the entire thing.
- [Tartakovsky] You can't go... - [Wills] Frame by frame.
[Tartakovsky] "That was a fun try. Now try it again."
[Ford] Yeah.
It actually takes a lot of effort and time to do that.
[Tartakovsky] And, of course, you know, setting up this fart gag.
And what was great was, actually, this was Adam's ad-lib at the very end.
"Was that you?"
And he did it on the stage just kind of goofing around.
We'll just bypass this easy shot.
Forget about this one.
[Ford] "We're just gonna have Mavis surfing a dolphin on a wave. No big deal."
- [Wills] "Can you guys do that?" - [Tartakovsky] Super late add.
[Ford] "You have two weeks."
[Tartakovsky] But I knew that because Mike worked on Surf's Up, I was very confident.
[Ford] Yes, yes.
[Tartakovsky] It would be an easy shot for him to do.
[Wills] To nail it.
[Tartakovsky] Piece of cake.
You're putting Dad in there, too?
[gasps]
Don't worry, I'm over here. Blah, blah, blah.
No, Papa Drac's not here, he's on his date.
Date?
Please, forgive me...
[Tartakovsky] The juggling... we just came off a fart joke
and now we're coming back and we're supposed to have
this kind of more sincere real moment with him.
And it's hard.
I think it's one of the things that people like about Hotel,
because there is some heart
and, you know, obviously we're not gonna make anybody cry or anything.
But at the same time, we tried to get it to feel kind of real.
You know, even though these characters are super cartoony,
and it's something that I've struggled with along the way,
making a transition to features
where "cartoony" used to be a real bad word in features.
Because people would feel that it's unbelievable.
And the example that I always give is Snow White.
You know, when Snow White dies,
and the little goofy, giant-nosed dwarfs all cried,
the audience really feels it.
And I would say it's irrelevant how a character looks
as long as what you're doing is accessible and believable and sincere.
And so I think in these moments,
we really kind of feel them, which is nice.
Even though it's sandwiched between two fart jokes.
[all laughing]
[Ford] That's the beauty of it.
[Tartakovsky] That is the beauty of it.
- Dad? - Mavis.
[Tartakovsky] Screw the kids. They always laugh at the fart jokes, so you gotta....
You know, you do one or two and then you're done.
- [Ford] Give them... - [Wills] That was a good fart joke.
[Ford] It's character-motivated.
[Wills] Right. It's motivated. It's not for no reason.
You know, just work stuff.
You're working now? This is supposed to be a vacation.
A family vacation.
I should really go... do... captainy... things.
Dad, you said you were gonna spend time with Dennis.
Dennis. Dennis? Dennis? Dennis.
Oh. Yeah, you're right. Where is that kid?
Dennis...
[Tartakovsky] Nice to see Drac out of his costume for a change.
[Wills] Right.
[Ford] Oh, yeah, remember that we made a last-second change
to that costume as well?
- [Tartakovsky] On the shirt. - [Wills] On the shirt.
- Your dad's date. - It wasn't a date.
It was work stuff.
Uh-huh.
I'm telling you, Johnny, there is...
[Tartakovsky] What's great is, I love it,
is we have so many scenes that are just long.
And you still know where to look,
it still all feels very comfortable, and it's great.
It showcases the staging, the composition, the animation, the color,
kind of everything, which is great.
- [Mavis farts] - Aw.
That was a cute toot, honey.
[Ford] That's a great read.
[Wills] Pretty shot.
Hey, it's not night.
[Ford] Hey, we got sunlight.
[Tartakovsky] This is our only day shot, right? Our day sequence?
[Ford] I think this is it.
So, I think we reveled in it in lighting,
where it's like, "Oh, yeah, turn on the sun."
Can actually use a warm light for once.
[Tartakovsky] This was nice. Very simple, but just the shadows gave it
its awesome complexity and interest.
- Ericka! - What?
[Tartakovsky] Whenever we go extreme with her, it's great.
And then we bring her down, which is really nice.
[Wills] These are the first shots where we were trying to get Van Helsing's look
'cause it was tricky.
We didn't want him to look too hideous.
- [Ford] The shot coming up was the... - [Wills] Balance.
[Ford] ...was one of the first ones we did.
He's just, he's just a complicated...
I mean, we had a version of him that was really, really nasty...
[Tartakovsky] More liver spots, that's right, yeah.
[Ford] He was really old before.
But then we kind of cleaned him up a little bit.
I know, I know, I wasn't thinking. There's just something...
[Wills] She had a whole different costume.
[Tartakovsky] That's right.
[Wills] We probably shouldn't talk about.
- [Tartakovsky] It's all right. Yeah. - [Wills] It was amazing.
I guess.
I can't wait to get this over with.
Don't worry, it won't be long now.
Once you recover the Instrument of Destruction,
no one can stop us.
Not even Dracula!
[Wills] You're always so close up on Van Helsing.
[Ford] He's sort of... He's definitely an unforgiving character.
I mean, he's got, you know, his mustache, 'cause it's, you know,
it's obviously hair that's being simulated in the computer,
just it doesn't like some of the poses that the animators had put him in.
So, the CFX team really had to push it hard.
[Wills] Oh, this is some of my favorite-looking stuff.
[Ford] Yeah, it's just got a real nice sense of atmosphere.
I love the lights that illuminate the fog.
It's kind of one of the beauties of the render that we used is that
it gives you a lot of that atmospheric quality,
just by how it lights.
...the mighty city has risen once again.
[Tartakovsky] This was, I think, another scene that kind of survived
through the process of being pretty much kind of the same,
this idea of Atlantis,
it's one of the first things we started kind of exploring and drawing,
is Atlantis as a Las Vegas type of idea.
And it actually used to be just part of the middle of the movie,
'cause we were actually heading to Machu Picchu as the final stop.
But then Atlantis, I think, is just a very powerful and iconic idea
and so we ended up making it the final destination.
The scale on this is great.
[Ford] Yeah.
[Tartakovsky] Doing this movie just makes you really wanna be like,
"Oh, yeah, we should do a big action movie and really take advantage of everything."
When I first started, my boss was this guy Bob Osher, who ran the animation studio.
And Bob always used to say about Sony Pictures Imageworks,
he goes, "It's a Ferrari, Genndy. You gotta drive the Ferrari."
'Cause we were doing, when I came in, I was doing, you know,
flat staging, very... everything's very much more controlled.
And he just wanted me to always be at 11.
[Ford] Yeah.
[Tartakovsky] In this movie, we are definitely driving
the Ferrari, as we always joke around.
This set came together great, like it was...
on the outside, it all seemed very simple.
You guys didn't struggle...
[Wills] Originally it was supposed to have laser beams.
We kinda simplified it a little.
[Ford] Speaking of somewhat complicated sets.
A giant Vegas style casino...
- [Tartakovsky] Underwater casino. - [Ford] Underwater casino.
[Tartakovsky] It's something a Bond villain would appreciate.
[Wills] You just kept asking for more glass.
The way this set started was kind of a dome aquarium but then...
It's not the floor is glass, everything is glass.
I was like, how's that gonna look? That's crazy.
[Ford] One thing to note about this set,
every single one of those slot machines and all the things,
it all has motion graphics that was designed, and they all move,
and they were all done by our matte-painting motion-graphics team.
So it's all the stuff in the background that's out of focus, but it's all...
[Wills] You see it, you see it in focus.
[Tartakovsky] You feel it, that's the thing.
It feels real, which is amazing.
- Tinkles, stop! - Wait!
Stop it, Tinkles.
[Tartakovsky] You see it there.
- [Ford] Yeah. - [Wills] Yeah.
Have you guys seen Mavis? I have to find her.
Why, what's going on?
[Tartakovsky] There's details,
if you watch the movie, like Frank's little hands,
there's all the specialness that we put in
that makes it very... More unique, and it kind of stands out.
Right after I talk to Ericka.
[Tartakovsky] And it is a very drawing,
2D, personalized, animator esthetic.
As a kid, I used to love noticing differences from animator to animator.
And I know that's a specific thing.
But, you know, I could always tell a Chuck Jones cartoon
from a Bob Clampett cartoon.
You know, I knew there was something different and, you know,
later I started to realize I would be like, "Oh, yeah, these, you know...
these Tom and Jerrys are animated better than these Tom and Jerrys."
And so you started to figure that out.
And I thought that was the whole fun of the animation,
is to have it have character, and in CG, because you have these puppets...
it sometimes takes the character out of it.
So...
[Wills] It's funny, too, in animation, even though it's CG,
we're calling them drawings.
That's a good drawing.
And I'm looking, going, it's a CG pose.
[Tartakovsky] But it is, 'cause we treat them like drawings.
[Wills] Yeah.
[Tartakovsky] I would always ask the animators, I'd go, like,
whoever is very good and you could tell,
there's draftsmanship in a funny way, the way they pose it.
And I would ask, "Do you draw?"
And sometimes... Like, some people definitely do.
But then this one guy, he goes, "No, not really."
But his poses were the best, so there's some, like...
Like maybe he would be an amazing 3D sculpturist.
You know what I mean? Like, there's something there that's...
[Wills] Sensibility.
[Tartakovsky] The sensibility, the eye.
[Wills] Yeah, he can see it.
[Tartakovsky] He can see it and it's an amazing...
It's very interesting.
[Ford] This is probably one of my favorite parts about this movie,
is that we get to go to so many different places within the movie.
I mean, this is like just another set that we got to build,
that is totally different from the one we were just in.
I mean, it's radically different.
And that's what makes it, that's what makes it exciting,
from a sort of a world-building standpoint.
[Wills] Yeah, I think it's.... This bat animation.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, it was really nice.
And I think it's also one of those things that, you know,
that makes it a better third movie is that it's so different from the first two.
The core of it is the same but it's ten times more locations,
bigger story, bigger adventure.
And not just for, to do it bigger, but it actually is character-driven.
[hissing]
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, this model did not exist of the rat.
- I think it was just a very realistic rat. - [Wills] Yes.
[Tartakovsky] The animators put somebody else's teeth on it.
[Wills] Eye.
[Tartakovsky] And an eye and again, the kind of...
Makeshifted for the gag.
[Ford] Very cobbled together but it ended up being really successful.
[Tartakovsky] This was probably one of Christian's best sets, I think,
that he did, just the nose and all the details of the rocks.
[Ford] Yeah, it's beautifully designed.
And, again, it's unique.
You know, it's not something that you've seen in,
you know, especially in the Hotel Transylvania world.
There it is.
[Wills] That changed. The MacGuffin.
[Tartakovsky] That's a good thing to talk about. Yeah.
So we had the Instrument of Destruction
was always a MacGuffin.
Right, it never really... didn't have to make sense.
But we were getting notes to make it make sense.
So it used to be an orb, just a glowing orb, magical orb.
Then it was like a gem.
And then there was one of my favorites that I thought could be really good,
was the mouth of chaos,
that it was actually a little totem statue that talked.
And it would proclaim the coming of the doom.
That was funny but then it just...
sometimes it just kinda goes off the rails
and you're trying to make something, something that it's not supposed to be.
And then we ended up making it this very simplistic thing
that's tied into music.
Yeah, it was lost at... sea...
[Tartakovsky] And again, but from my perspective, it wasn't...
it really wasn't important, like it could have been anything.
So, anyhoo...
Thanks for saving my life, but I can take it from...
[Tartakovsky] And, you know, coming up from one sequence of them
following each other with no dialog
to a little bit of dialog and then going into this kind of dance of death,
which is another great venue for animators.
Like, yeah, I wanna see dance avoiding giant traps.
And, yeah, all the effects and the... Everything turned out really good.
It's hard 'cause there's...
Because we have cartoony timing,
but then the effects are based from real-world timing.
[Ford] Yeah, it's really based on math
that's based on real-world physics.
Real-world physics does not really work that well with Genndy's animation style.
[Tartakovsky] Yes.
[Ford] We have effects artists slowing things down,
speeding things up, cutting things in half,
same with cloth, cloth and hair.
It's basically just using the pieces you can
and then sort of putting those pieces back together in a really artistic way,
and I think that's kind of the beauty of it.
[Tartakovsky] And it's one of those things where, yeah,
there's a big dust explosion but we time it to be really quick
but in nature, it's just gonna take its time,
where it's supposed to be done in real math.
And so those two worlds, it's kind of a funny thing
that I never expected would be such a big problem,
'cause I thought you could just manipulate it pretty easily, but it's not.
[Ford] Yeah, math is math.
[Tartakovsky] Math is math. That's right.
[Ford] But yeah, you're always saying, like,
I mean, especially with things like this where, you know,
we're gonna get into this really big destruction set piece,
where things start to fall apart, it's like, no, I want it to just...
This part to break apart but I don't want it...
I don't wanna be in front of the characters.
I don't want it to do this.
[all laughing]
I mean, this, this actually came together great.
There's a lot of effects that happened in that one shot where it's falling down.
And it's gone in an instant, but you definitely feel it.
Like, every single thing in that set was destroyed.
Even something as subtle as that little kind of a joke
that you have where they're coming out of the...
The snot joke is funny
and it's done in a way to sort of make it feel like snot, but...
Dad!
Mavis!
What are you doing to my father?
Mavis, stop!
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, and just always trying to look for opportunities to do
dramatic lighting with moody scenes and...
Because I... Because...
[Ford] Yeah, a real subtle thing about that is that we have that light
that's coming from the effects
and it goes on left side of Mavis and in that shot.
No, that can't be true.
You only zing once.
That's what I thought, too.
Zing?
[Tartakovsky] And it's nice. It's one of these....
The balance is now, it gets a little real.
You know, after all this craziness, you kinda wanna feel the real emotions.
You feel her confliction with everything.
You feel Drac's kind of tormented and saddened.
I can't be with you. I could never be with someone like you.
I could never be with...
[Tartakovsky] So a lot of times like I won't even play music.
I'll just kinda let them talk through it 'cause they are all really good actors.
And so it's kind of fun to let them go sometimes in all the drama.
Dad, I'm so sorry.
- I... - It doesn't matter.
You heard what she said.
[Tartakovsky] Drac always had a... Always has nice silhouettes.
But a zing never lies.
[Tartakovsky] Speaking of silhouettes.
The amount of texture and paint on this scene was really...
It's really great.
Mike, do you think, has technology changed that much from the first movie?
[Ford] Yeah, I would say so.
I mean, we, we're still using the same renderer
but I think our ability to get better shaders and better materials,
things look more like what they look like, has definitely improved.
I mean, the render has improved... and it's also just...
you just have a better understanding of how to make it work.
And I think you can just get there faster,
which gives you the ability to make just better-looking art.
I mean, you just get better at it.
So, technology definitely improves
but also the people that are using it, you know, they just get...
Claws!
- [Ford] That was a late add, too. - [Tartakovsky] Yeah.
I lost my hands... gambling, but...
No big deal! Look, I got these from the seafood buffet.
Look at this.
- [Ford] Yeah, Kevin... - [Wills] A funny read.
[Tartakovsky] Kevin James did such a good job.
And I think even asked him, like, what would the claws sound like?
And then he just kind of did it and ad-libbed it
and it was really, really great.
[exclaims]
And if Baby Blobby wasn't enough, brought in Puppy Blobby.
[Wills] And kids everywhere were overjoyed.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, for the Atlantians, they had a lot more to do
in kind of the first couple of versions and then slowly weeded out.
Yeah, so coming up on this big dance set,
you know, yeah, as I was saying earlier, it used to be first conceived
that they would be traveling to Machu Picchu,
and it was just on top of the big mountain.
But then we made it part of Atlantis and so the challenge was,
well, where is this gonna all take place, all this destruction, the whole finale?
And so we're like, yeah, the dance floor is gonna rise out of the water.
Of course.
[Ford] Why wouldn't it?
I mean, no big deal.
[Tartakovsky] But yeah, just the effects job
is just spectacular on this.
[Ford] Yeah, so, not a lot of reference
for giant islands coming out of the sea, either.
So we just sort of... we looked at a lot of like, you know,
either ships being sort of berthed out of harbors,
big waves crashing, to really, really try and get that aerated look for water.
I think that was the one thing we knew we had to do a lot of water on this movie.
We didn't even know we had to do this when it was first conceived.
But I mean, just that shot alone of all those pillars coming up is...
I just think the effects department just did just an amazing job
at just making it look real,
but also it fits into this cartoony landscape.
[EDM playing]
[Ford] This kind of shows off a lot of our lighting tools as well,
being able to do all these cool, realistic lights
that we can put into a set.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, we had, we had a lot more big plans for the dancing,
with all the secondary characters.
'Cause I wanted to do all this EDM shuffle-step type dances.
Then, as the story got weeded down and we were running out of time,
we kinda had to... Just feel like background dancing.
But if you look at some of the background people,
it's actually some pretty cool, inventive shuffle-step type, shuffle dances.
But what if she and he...
[Ford] I remember Scott, we worked a lot on this palette of this...
[Wills] Hard to get.
[Ford] This sort of zen-like state that Johnny goes into,
putting him in this beam and projecting light onto him.
Looked at a lot of like old '70s reference, you know, of,
sort of those lava lamp projections
that would go onto a wall, stuff like that.
[Wills] Yeah, at first I didn't know what you were talking about getting.
I think you were saying "lava lamp."
Then I found out online what you were thinking of.
Which is like oil projections, light projections.
[Tartakovsky] It's like this, yeah, the '70s, you know,
like you think of The Doors or something, where they'd be dancing...
- [Wills] Use it in a concert. - [Ford] Yeah.
...thought of losing you.
What? What are you talking about, losing me?
Well, obviously, after you get married,
you'll live on the ship and travel around the world.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down.
[Ford] A lot of what we do on lighting on shots like this is....
We've done it a lot. We've had a few dance party sequences in...
[Tartakovsky] We have.
[Ford] But we borrowed a lot of that idea of pushing things back
and making sure that the characters in the foreground read
over really complex backgrounds.
So using a lot of atmosphere and value to kind of make it work.
Now, seriously, go talk to her.
I can't. You heard what she said.
She could never be with someone like me.
[Ford] It's nice that they're both in black.
It kind of helped us out. For sure.
Destiny to find it. Infinite whole.
You sound like Johnny.
The point is, you can't deny a zing.
Monster, human...
[Ford] Another thing that you obviously made
more complicated for us, Genndy,
was, "Hey, we're just gonna put these sort of necklaces and bracelets
all over every single character. Oh, and by the way, they glow."
[Tartakovsky] Right.
You're not allowed up here. The DJ booth is a sacred space!
- [thuds] - Oh!
[Tartakovsky] And the lighting,
I think in here came together real nicely.
All the shots of Van Helsing up in his perch feel really great.
Just this weird blue-gold color combination turned out really neat.
No, it is I, Abraham...
[Ford] Yeah, I think when we first saw it,
it just sort of clicked and it just felt like the right palette.
It wasn't overbearing, it wasn't sort of like that standard, you know,
where we're just gonna go with the evil... We're gonna turn on the evil color.
Like the evil green, or something like that.
It just had this real subtle, different look to it,
which I think we all responded well to.
I think this was like, this shot was like one of the first ones we just said,
oh, yeah, that's got the right up-lighting on it,
it just feels menacing but not overpowering it.
- [Wills] And it's cold. - [Ford] Yep.
You'll tell him...
[Ford] Plus the acting is just so good.
It's just, you know, both from a performance standpoint
and from an animation standpoint.
I'm Ericka Van Helsing.
[gasps] I knew there was something wrong with her.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, and all those....
You know, always thinking about rhythm and going from something slow to fast...
I know where we're heading into insanity and so all this conversation,
and it's really just minimalizing it.
Not everybody needs to have gestures.
When Ericka's talking, she's basically held.
[screams]
Ah, let's see, right...
[Tartakovsky] This always was in the conception
in the very beginning of when we were writing.
I love EDM music,
I've loved techno since the old days.
And I've always wanted... I think it's always a fun add for animation
'cause it's so... It's just fun music in my mind.
And so we were real fortunate to get Tiësto to do the music
so it sounds like authentic DJ music.
And this was a very simple idea.
[Ford] Gonna put a bed underwater.
[Wills] With a thousand-foot Kraken.
[rumbling]
[Ford] Yes, now we're getting to the point
where everyone in the third act was,
everyone in the film was looking at this going, okay, how are we gonna do all this?
[Wills] But also seeing it, Genndy.
We did such a, you know, bold idea, it was so pushed.
[Tartakovsky] Right, right, yeah.
[Wills] I think we felt... This was the one I keyed
and I think we felt like we had maybe...
[Ford] Went too far.
[Wills] Gone too dramatic and it was too scary.
We got a little worried.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, 'cause it is....
Scott and I have worked in television together a lot,
and so when you do something really intense,
the TV instantly brings the intensity of it down.
When you do it on a three or four, whatever, story movie screen,
and I'm sitting in the audience with children,
and this red shot comes up with this, you know,
giant Kraken and he's roaring and the whole theater's shaking,
you're like, "Oh, maybe we went too far."
And so we started to definitely tweak it a little bit.
And one of the things we actually did with the sound
is we gave the Kraken a ridiculous roar.
It's like a roar and a yodel. So it's... [warbles]
And it just kind of eased it off a little bit,
not that anybody's gonna be laughing,
but it just makes it so over-the-top that it's silly.
[Ford] Add a little bit of silliness to it.
[Tartakovsky] There's probably an hour we could talk about each shot.
Here.
[Ford] This was an homage, definite homage,
to some filmmaker out there.
You can guess who it is.
[Tartakovsky] This is all about read
and the complexity and this is...
Like, I think this is us firing, when we were at its best,
is really fun unique animation, great sound, great read, you know,
the lighting, the effects, everything, has come together so well.
[Ford] Yeah, you can go back and look at that tentacle shot with Drac
and you can watch it 100 times and you'll see something new.
It's really that technical and sophisticated.
[Tartakovsky] And I think that's something really valuable to say about this movie,
is there is so much care and little nuances and little details
that I think it is...
It'll hold up to the repetitiveness of these movies to watch.
Ericka!
[Ford] In the back of a minivan.
[Tartakovsky] That's right, yeah. When you won't see anything.
It's gonna be one big red-purple blur.
[Ford] I hope not.
[Tartakovsky] No. The minivan TVs have come a long way.
[Ford] Yeah, it's great.
No. Bob is Tinkles? How did he get here?
But thank goodness he did, 'cause look.
[Tartakovsky] And this was kind of a late add, also,
to have Tinkles help.
And, like, I think,
'cause initially, we had Drac being taken into the Kraken's mouth.
And then I redid it to be her saving him.
And this, you know, like I think I boarded it in a few hours
and gave it to you guys and we went right into layout,
and it was just like one of these quick things that turned out so good.
So fun to watch.
[Ford] It's just very cinematic, that shot when he's coming up.
All these shots are really cinematic. That's what I like about them.
[Tartakovsky] And as a whole, this whole sequence
was also just under the gun,
constantly being ripped apart, constantly wanting it to be shorter.
And I've done a lot of action in my career,
that's always the first note you get,
especially early on when things are just starting to get worked out is,
there's too much action. You wanna cut, cut, cut.
There's too much, make it shorter, it's too long.
But then knowing that once it's all executed,
there's gonna be so much to look at, it just fills up the time.
And so all of a sudden,
we actually made it probably 20% longer than we've ever had it.
Just to make sure that everything can read
and you have enough to give it the feeling.
...start a new legacy.
A monster...
[Tartakovsky] And now when you look at it, it goes by,
it still goes by too fast for me
'cause I just wanna enjoy more and more of it.
But, you know, it facilitates the story.
[Wills] And you can watch it again.
[Tartakovsky] And you can watch it again.
Hopefully pay for a ticket.
If there's one thing I hate, it's an evil DJ.
We need positive energy.
[Ford] Good ol' zolly right there, I like that.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, and same thing here,
a lot of questioning whether this idea was gonna work.
Before, we used to have the evil music versus the good music
was reflected with energy
so the good music had its own energy animation,
and the bad music had its own energy animation.
And it started to get real complicated
and so I think where we ended up with was in a good simple, simple way.
["Good Vibrations" by the Beach Boys playing]
[Ford] To me, it just makes the music funnier,
because that's what it's all about.
Instead of this other thing.
Plus you get a giant dancing Kraken.
[Tartakovsky] That's right.
[song continues]
What is that noise?
Whoa! I like this one. This feels good.
[Tartakovsky] Really controlling the color from the big, intense red
to then them making up and then to still have action but then have comedy...
It was, I think, very challenging.
[Ford] Definite balancing act. I know, Scott, we went back and forth
in terms of the way that the palette sort of transitioned,
especially from the skies throughout these sequences
where it is very dramatic and then it, it's sort of,
we have to ease into these sort of hero moments and...
Even just the screen direction in terms of knowing
where most of the time behind the Kraken,
it was mostly red and then he would go more cool.
[Wills] It was easily too hellish.
- [Ford] Yes. - [Wills] Too red everywhere.
'Cause then he shifts into this.
[Ford] To make it funny, to make it.... just worked all together.
We actually ended up brightening up this shot at the last minute, too,
just because we thought it was too dark.
I've had enough of this nonsense!
[Tartakovsky] And it was great 'cause Tiësto really....
He kind of understood what we were doing after a couple of iterations
and then really just made it fun.
[Ford] This shot, no small, no small feat,
especially when you change the camera at the last minute.
- [Ford] No big deal. - [Wills] The cut-through.
[Ford] All those shots, effects artists worked for months on.
And they go by really, really quick.
[Tartakovsky] And so where we're heading to is the "Macarena."
You know, writing this DJ battle, you know,
and I went through different songs, and stuff, and ended up where we are.
What's gonna be the final song?
And then the "Macarena" came to mind.
I was like, "Oh, my God, this is something that's either gonna be
really funny or a complete groaner.
And that people are really gonna hate me for it."
It's just one of those songs, right?
It was such a big fad when it came out.
And then I'm like, "Wow, I'm just gonna go for it."
And then at the first preview screening...
everybody starts laughing, right?
And then all the kids start doing the dance.
And then you start to realize... And because we made it,
we make fun of it, and we acknowledge that it's bad,
it gave us the license to then kind of use it,
and then, yeah, it's like one of those rare feats
where from start to finish, people are laughing, right,
from the beginning of "Good Vibrations" all the way through the end.
And it's like a filmmaking miracle.
Where sometimes you just dial in and the idea is strong
and then all the animation is strong and the color, everything,
is additive to it and so it's a success.
And it succeeds.
And then, when it works, actually in storyboards, that well,
then the big struggle becomes, well, I hope I don't break it.
Right, 'cause it still has to go through color and animation
and everything, and luckily,
and this was, like, a late add, of course, to give Tinkles his big moment.
[Wills] And all the color's gotten all cheery and...
[Tartakovsky] Yeah.
["Macarena" playing]
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, this movie's really ridiculous.
[Ford] We had to listen to that song quite a bit, too.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, sorry.
This was a big discussion, too, surprisingly,
is that people in the audience...
A lot of them were okay with us killing him.
[Wills] Oh!
[Tartakovsky] And it was kind of weird and it was funny.
That's like one of the interesting things where in television,
we'd have no interaction with the audience.
We just kind of make it and if we all believe in it,
it is what it is.
In film, you have these preview audiences
that you could listen to them, and sometimes we do.
But you have to really be careful
because then you kind of start to make filmmaking by committee,
which isn't always right.
You know, like, I believe filmmaking is an instinctual storytelling,
an instinctual sort of thing.
And sometimes, yeah, it becomes complicated.
It's hard to...
You're sometimes in your own head so much and then you hear all these opinions.
- [Ford] You gotta trust your gut. - [Tartakovsky] Yeah.
[Ford] More slobber.
[Tartakovsky] More slobber.
Amazing.
[Tartakovsky] A lot of the Dennis scenes were....
We added later on, just 'cause, you know, they were so successful with the kids.
Come on, you can't deny it.
[Tartakovsky] I mean, we have so many main characters,
it's hard to sometimes balance everybody.
And so through the whole process of the movie,
"We want more Drac Pack,
we want more Dennis, we want more Tinkles."
"We need more Drac. We need more this."
[Ford] In a two-and-a-half-hour movie.
...to make it up to you is...
give you...
[Ford] Jim's read on this stuff is just so great.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah.
All right. Full refunds.
[all cheering]
[Tartakovsky] Yeah, like, that water is just ridiculous.
It's just a goofy guy coming up and waving,
but all the water is like, is real and is just great.
It's funny. A big part of me
just wanted to end the movie right at the end there,
not wrap everything... up.
And then, but sure enough,
that's one of the things where we really...
from preview audience to preview audience, everybody wanted to be back at the hotel.
Annoyingly so. I'm like, "Why do we have to bookend it?
We don't have to do anything."
You could just end it there. The movie's done.
How can you do anything after the "Macarena "?
- [Ford] "Aren't you satisfied?" - [Tartakovsky] That's right. Yeah.
And sure enough, we put this in and it played really well.
- Hey, buddy, would you mind? - Sure thing, pal.
[Wills] Plus we could go back to the hotel.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah.
And this little animated walk, we had Drac do...
It was really hard 'cause I wanted this very cartoony thing
and it was hard to get it right.
It's something that I could draw real easily but, again, one of those,
just like a little moment, but it just adds to the overall cartooniness
and the way we do the animation that really helps it out.
Really identifies us more uniquely than other movies,
gives us our own language, our own signature.
- [Tartakovsky] You know? - [Ford] Absolutely.
[Ford] Yeah, I think we see a lot more of that in this movie of,
you're pushing animation styles and pushing the boundaries a little bit.
[Tartakovsky] And it's having the situations to do it in.
You know, that's when people ask me that question, I go, "Nothing's changed,
except that we facilitated the animation with more opportunities
to be cartoony and physical and goofy."
Huh?
[Ford] Back to the mouth thing again.
[Tartakovsky] She's doing it now.
[all] What did she say?
I'm not sure.
Yes!
[Tartakovsky] And as far as the animated end titles,
each one, every one was done differently.
The first movie was Steven DeStefano and myself.
The second one was Craig Kellman.
And this third one we gave the responsibility to Chris Reccardi
who's someone that we've worked with for a while.
He's a storyboard artist on the movie.
But he's also an amazing director and designer, and everything.
And so he just kind of, just did everything, which was great.
And then Rough Draft animated it.
So it was nice. So it was overall, you know,
making a movie is sometimes a long, difficult process,
just because there's a lot of, you're constantly under the microscope.
But I think with this one, it was
one of the better, I think, experiences and very smooth and...
Luckily, it's the third one so it was pretty much
we had the dream team of everybody back together.
You know, I mean, I had to settle for Mike, but otherwise...
[Ford] I have to settle with myself every day.
[Tartakovsky] But it is. And I always,
Michelle and I always try to foster a family environment,
that it's a partnership, that we're all on the same boat.
We all work for each other, trying to make the best possible product we can.
'Cause sometimes it gets super stressful and it's extremely complicated.
But I think everybody had a good time.
- [Wills] I didn't. - [Tartakovsky] Except for Scott.
- [Tartakovsky] What can make you happy? - [Wills] Always miserable.
There's at least 399 people that had fun on the movie.
[Wills] I had a great time. First feature I got to do with you.
[Tartakovsky] Right, yeah.
[Wills] I mean, we've done so much work, it was all television.
And a lot of feature development.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah.
[Wills] Finally...
[Tartakovsky] Actually put one in the...
- [Wills] One in the can. - [Tartakovsky] Yep.
[Ford] Yeah, I think that's what a lot of people don't realize
is that there are over 400 people that work on these things.
So, it's like when you talk about an animation team that's over 100 people,
that means that there's lighting teams
that are almost approaching about the same thing,
you know, almost 100 people.
And so that's a lot of people that have to work towards
the same goal and, you know, part of that concept of partnership
and working together and making sure that it is fun...
And we do get to make a movie, so it's...
[Tartakovsky] Yep.
[Ford] I think everybody appreciated that in this one.
Plus the movie's just kind of... it's just awesome and silly,
so... that makes everybody happy.
[Tartakovsky] Yeah. I think that's the one thing, like,
whenever I do press for the movie,
I try to say, "It's not gonna change the world, or anything.
It's a fun, silly movie that you can escape to for an hour and a half.
You know, it doesn't take itself too seriously.
At the same time, it's got some heart in it and it's just fun.
And I think it'll take you by surprise for a third movie.
You know, part of a franchise."
Yeah, so, well, thanks for joining us.
Thanks for sitting through this nonsense.
And maybe something interesting came out of it
and we'll see you on whatever's next.
So, that's it.
- [Wills] Bye, now. - [Ford] Bye-bye.
[song playing]