A special excerpt from befores & afters magazine’s special issue on the 30th anniversary of Toy Story.
Kevin Bjorke worked at several creative studios that were pioneers in harnessing digital studios for VFX and animation work. On Toy Story, he came on board at Pixar as a technical director. Here’s some of his fun memories working on the film.
b&a: How did you find yourself at Pixar originally?
Kevin Bjorke: I was a RenderMan user. I believe I was offsite RenderMan Beta user number one. I think ILM was technically offsite, but it was nearby. I was in New York. Eventually I was told by one of their salespeople that before I worked at Pixar, I was the largest RenderMan customer. And after I left Pixar, I was the largest RenderMan customer other than ILM for a little while.
I knew Alvy Ray Smith via Ed Emshwiller, who was the dean of the school of CalArts, where I studied. I was then working in television and films and theme park rides. Then I actually moved to France to try to do the world’s first feature CG film called ‘Kazhann’. The financing got off step and I returned to the US and went back into visual effects.
Then I moved my family from Hollywood up to northern California, so I could work at Pixar. I was one of the early people who was explicitly hired for Toy Story. A lot of the people in the animation department were people who had been my classmates at CalArts.
b&a: What were you brought on to do at Pixar, particularly?
Kevin Bjorke: I was brought on to be a technical director. At the time we had about 14 technical people and about as many animators. By the time the show was done, we had something like 300. I had met Ed Catmull because I had built a system at another company that was a RenderMan primitives native modeling system. He thought that was a good indication that I knew how to use RenderMan.
I came in and I started building stuff for Andy’s room. I didn’t know how to use the in-house modeling tools yet, so I just started building on my Amiga, which I set up in my office. I always considered it kind of a private joke, but there was a game system toy in Andy’s room that was then later in the garage sale on a later film. I would say, ‘Oh well, that’s the end of the very brief legacy of using the Amiga on the show.’
I built Rex the dinosaur and a bunch of stuff in Sid’s room. During the course of my work on the show, I switched to helping animators doing clean-up and doing layout again, because the show grew very much faster and larger than anyone anticipated.
I had also done a very early sort of inverse kinematic. I wouldn’t say it was really inverse kinematic, just a lot of simplifying tools for the animators to help them out with hooking up complicated things. Probably the best example is the Barrel of Monkeys toys. We had to make them so they would hang in a chain and all be hooked together in the right way, and yet they’re supposed to be able to walk around. I’d build these little invisible objects, which I think we called widgets, and we would throw these extra little models in to help the process.
I was also doing clean-up. The first clean-up job I had to deal with was Sid’s dog, where Sid’s dog’s eyelids would sometimes pop. The animators were doing a great job with the performances of the characters, and they could have spent an incredible amount of time just doing these little tweaks, but somebody who was very technical could sit down and make the fixes.
b&a: What was your memory of seeing the film finished for the first time?
Kevin Bjorke: Well, here’s the thing. We watched the movie many times. We watched the movie when it was in storyboards. We watched the movie when there were the most crude possible layouts. We watched the movie when there was animation and no lighting. We watched it when there was animation and no sound or animation. We watched it when there were not really actors speaking, as in, when it was just whoever was around doing the audio. I mean, at one point I was even recording audio for Rex the dinosaur, which I thought was fun since I had built him.
‘Toy Story’ is turning 30! Celebrate with a full issue of befores & afters magazine
We watched it so much that it was more like watching your roses grow. It was like, well, they’re growing and they’re looking healthy and they’re growing, they’re going in the right direction, and then eventually they bloom. So when I finally got to see the film, it was in some ways not a surprise, because I had seen every shot in so many different states.
I brought my daughter with me one day and she was four. She ended up being the first kid to see the movie. I didn’t know this. I wasn’t even in the theater. I was just like, ‘Go off with these people and go watch a cartoon.’ And then she was being surrounded by the story department—‘Did you understand this? Do you understand that?’ She was the little guinea pig. She liked it a lot, and she actually was in a print ad for a Pixar RenderMan product later. So as far as she was concerned, daddy worked at the funnest possible place you could ever work, where there were cartoons every day, and if we weren’t watching our own cartoons, we were watching other people’s cartoons.
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