Inside Out Story Development with Ronnie del Carmen
Back in 2015 Collider published a great article about the making of Inside Out. Below is an (edited) segment from that article in which Ronnie del Carmen explains the role of the story team on a Pixar feature.
1. This is where it all begins. “When it starts, there’s barely anything.” Del Carmen continued, “What we have is a fantastic concept. Pete Docter says, ‘I want to make a movie about an 11-year-old girl and the featured players are the emotions inside her head.’ ‘Of course! Let’s start!’ You go into a room, sit across from each other and then, ‘What do we do?’ We don’t know! We get to figure what that is. So we start workshopping stories. We tell each other stories. ‘What were you like when you were a kid? What are your kids like?’ And then the first thing that shows up is that the lead emotion should be Joy because kids are always happy. They’re always bouncing around. It always feels like they’re always eternally happy.”
2. The ideas don’t always come easy and when they’re stuck, the filmmakers switch gears and start drawing each other. “There will be whole days, maybe even weeks where everything you try fails and then you’re sitting across from each other kind of out of bullets.” Del Carmen pointed out some sketches of a few very familiar faces hanging on the wall including himself, Jonas Rivera and Pete Docter. “It’s fun. It kind of breaks you out of that problem solving mode.”
3. What does a story artist do? “As a story artist, you get to draw a simple version of the character because you have to draw them hundreds of times a day. Hundreds, about 300, 400 drawings a day, maybe for a sequence, maybe for part of a sequence.” Obviously if you’re doing that many drawings a day, you’ve got to be able to do them fast.
4. How to get a pitch approved. “You would draw the beginning, middle and end of [a scene] and then you, as the story artist, would stand in front of it or in front of a digital screen and pitch it.” As an example, del Carmen stood up and essentially acted out an entire scene, voicing each character himself, while pointing to the appropriate storyboards. (It was insanely entertaining! Honestly, I could have watched him act out the entire movie.) “You pitch something like that, you find out if it works. If it works, it stays. If it doesn’t, you have to do it again.”
5. Writing the script was a very collaborative process. “Pete and I would be talking to each other, pitching stories to each other.” Del Carmen continued, “We write our ideas down and it looks like a script, it behaves like a script, but there was no one who’s in charge of – we don’t write a movie where somebody in some special room, a genius writer room, writes all three acts and it’s perfect and then hands it to, ‘Please illustrate my genius.’ No. That doesn’t happen.” He further explained, “Our writing process is about trying something whether it’s drawn, written or just pitched along the halls. That’s how it’s done. We’re not just waiting for, ‘Ah, I wish some genius would come and write this movie.’ No, that would be us in a room like this.”
