Visiting the Pixar Campus! Come along for The Good Dinosaur fun and some Pixar secrets! #GoodDinoEvent

I have to stop and just absorb and realize how lucky I am sometimes, I just love my job. From getting to visit Google Headquarters, to getting to visit a place that brought us such classics as Toy Story, and Finding Nemo, Monsters Inc. (I could go on and on) Pixar Studios! I could not tell you how much my daughter just loved these movies as a child, they were such a big part of our lives. 

We had to have watched Toy Story hundreds of times, as my daughter would yell out to watch “Woodee, and Buuuzz again again!” These are memories that I hold dear.  I was going to get to visit the place where the magic started, where these characters came to life, it was like am I dreaming?  No, it was here, and I was a guest from the outside world, while I was out of this world excited.

Being on the Pixar campus, it was all I ever dreamed of and more. The landscape was breathtaking and the size was massive! What an amazing place to work. Does your work space have a soccer field? Or a pool? Or a case filled with Oscars and other awards?!

I know my little office does not have any cool amenities like that. How about a cereal bar?? Yup, it is just as you would have thought a cereal bar would be, cereal, cereal and cereal and a fridge full of any kind of milk you could imagine all for you to eat just for being an employee. 

The halls were filled with some of your favorite characters, in life sized versions, that just called out to have their picture taken with you. Here I am with one of my favorite Car's characters, Guido and Luigi, Guido was the little Isetta forklift, that could do anything and do it extremely fast! 

In the atrium we were greeted by three large The Good Dinosaur artwork pieces, these pieces switch around and reflect the new Pixar show that is coming out, the Pixar movies are referred to as “Shows”.

I could spend all day just checking out every nook and cranny of this wondrous place on my own. But I did not have to do it on my own, we were fortunate to have an amazing tour guide Danielle Levin who was there to show us around and share some Pixar stories and secrets with us. 

                                             Photo courtesy of Di from www.fsm-blogs.com

The atrium was built for Pixar almost 15 years ago, and designated to be a meeting space to draw people to come in. When the atrium was built Steve Jobs, was still the CEO, and he wanted the space to fit what Pixar was. He wanted the space to be a place that forced people to it, so you would end up running into each other, and get the creative juices flowing. 

The café, the mail room, the store and bathrooms are all located in one place. Steve Jobs even wanted to have this building home the only bathrooms on the Pixar campus, but that did not fly with zoning… But that sure would have forced everyone to populate that building that is for sure.  Pixar films take 4-5 years to make, and so did the Pixar campus. The campus was built by hand, with bolts and was not soldered. The building is built on rollers in case of an earthquake, the building can move more than three feet in any direction.
I found it fascinating that the Pixar campus was once the sight of an abandoned Del Monte canning factory! Steve Jobs wanted to keep the look of a factory, the attention to detail is fantastic. The girders are painted to look older than they are, the bricks were modeled after a building in San Francisco, in the Embarcadero area that Steve Jobs loved. 

Steve Jobs wanted the exact bricks but the manufacture of these bricks was closed, but he wanted this look so badly that he got the brick company to open to get the bricks kilned to match. I guess when Steve Jobs really wanted something he got it.

The banners hanging in the atrium lobby of the Pixar campus  feature characters from The Good Dinosaur, the Arlo banner is made to be the size the actual Arlo dinosaur would be. The other friends and family dinosaurs had to be made smaller because in real life they would have been taller than the building! 

The upper floors contain galleries of current Pixar films, (sorry no pictures were allowed) we were treated to a tour of The Good Dinosaur gallery, and the Inside Out gallery. These galleries are closed studios where official business guests, and press junkets can come to a perspective of how Pixar works, from idea to screen. 

We toured through the animation processes and the scenes of what each look like, from brainstorming the idea with simple drawings to the use of clay sculptures and models to the script, to the research and eventual work on the computer. Did you know that The Good Dinosaur was shot with a frame 1/24 of a second? You can understand why it takes 4-5 years to complete a Pixar film, Even though Pixar is mostly digital, the original artwork is done by hand for the first two years in 2d.

              

Also Arlo, the Apatosaurus, was designed to be more dramatic and appeal to an audience and his friends and family are deigned to look more like authentic dinosaurs, well authentic but still cartoon like. Another cool fact from The Good Dinosaur is, Originally “Spot” the little boy in the film was to be the size of a bug compared to the main dinosaur Arlo. But this idea changed, when they went further in the animation process, and writing.

I have so much more to share with you all,  I will have a step by step look at the making of The Good Dinosaur in some upcoming posts, so be sure to be on the lookout for those.  The Good Dinosaur Is coming to theaters on November 25^th, 2015. 

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The Good Dinosaur is in Theaters on 11/25/15

 ****Disney provided me with an all-expense paid trip for me to cover this great event ****  

 


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