Gary Rydstrom came to Pixar to direct a feature, but first tackled a short film, Lifted. The Oscar-winning, 20-year veteran of sound design is now officially a story guy. All Lifted images © 2006 Pixar.

Gary Rydstrom, an Oscar-winning, 20-year veteran of sound design, is now officially a story guy. "I had a well-timed mid-life crisis," he says, "and I just changed jobs. I was very lucky. I wanted to make a movie, and I knew the people here at Pixar so well from years of working with them. The opportunity came up, and I can't imagine a better place to do it. You don't feel alone making anything. You've got this nice support network all around you."

Rydstrom, who came to Pixar to direct a feature whose production is now officially underway (the logline is still secret), started down the traditional Pixar feature path by first tackling a short film. He pitched three ideas and Lifted was the winner. Production started in mid-2005, they took on various crewmembers as they finished their assignments on Cars, and Lifted finally wrapped in summer 2006.

The only technology going for a test-drive in Lifted is probably a new Jiggle program, used here to animate the gelatinous instructor Mr. B. "There's this wonderful program they came up with here where you pick a section of the character, and you tap on it, and it'll resonate," Rydstrom says. "You can decide how much you want it to resonate in the different regions, if you want it to stay away from the face, maybe, or resonate less in the arms, whatever you want.

"Also we had characters you saw into. We wanted to see some bubbles, like they were made of hair gel. We wanted an excuse to pull the expressions for the student character in all sorts of wild ways, and this gelatinous semi-transparent material seemed the perfect excuse for going Chuck Jones or Tex Avery on the facial expressions."

Rydstrom identifies the three main characters in Lifted as Ernie (the abductee), Mr. B (the instructor) and Stu (the student). "We call the instructor Mr. B because I had a teacher I worked with as an assistant for years who gave every student a B no matter what," Rydstrom laughs. "And the student is like a 16 year old. When you're 16, your emotions aren't really that controlled, and you put someone like that through a horrible experience -- when Jeff Pidgeon did the storyboards, I collected 30 or 40 different emotional states that he would draw Stu in. That was one of the threads of the short, to see how many different emotional states we could put the poor guy in."

Rydstrom has logged thousands of hours behind control panels, and the panel in Lifted is a real bastard. "We made the world's worst user interface," he says. "It's a tiny thing, and barely in the movie, but it made me laugh thinking about it -- we have Stu go through a manual to try to get a sense of what toggle to use, but each page is just a range of black dots. There's 10,000 toggles on that thing, and no writing. It's literally an impossible thing to use. For years I would sit behind these big sound mixing consoles that to anyone who didn't know how they worked looked absolutely impossible. And it was surprising to me after it was over how much I had made a movie about wanting to beat up a sound mixing console. So that's eventually what I made."

Rydstrom identifies the three main characters in Lifted as Ernie (the abductee), Mr. B (the instructor, left), and Stu (the student, right). Mr. B was named after one of Rystdrom's instructors who gave every student a B no matter what.

As a sound guy he couldn't resist having some fun recycling a few favorite sound effects -- as Ernie falls out of bed at the end of the short he delivers the classic Wilhelm scream, and the hologram noise is a lift from Star Wars -- but Stu has the best backstory. "Stu's voice is mostly my dog, who's an Irish terrier puppy who hates being petted and touched and loved on," Rydstrom says. "And every time you try to pet him or love on him, he makes this groan. It doesn't sound like a dog at all. It sounds like an upset human. It's perfect. Occasionally when Stu screams, or does something a little more human, then the voice is me, but most of him is my dog. Because my dog asked for no money."

Lifted's score is by prolific Pixar favorite Michael Giacchino, for whom Rydstrom has nothing but praise, although he thinks he may have abused the composer in one regard. "There's something that we call 'Theme from Lifted' that we use whenever Ernie is being lifted successfully into the spaceship, or the ship is flying away, and then something always goes wrong," Rydstrom says. "Michael never got to write the end of this theme. So if we ever feel like it, maybe we can get back on a stage and have Michael write the end of 'Theme from Lifted'. But right now it doesn't exist. It's unwritten and unperformed. Again, think of the money we saved."

Lifted will open in front of Ratatouille this summer -- again, spliced into reel one of the feature so no exhibitor can skip it -- and Rydstrom is thrilled. There's so much eye candy to behold there's no wrong place to focus your attention, but Rydstrom does offer one suggestion. "If anyone wants to watch the movie only looking at the antenna on Stu's helmet, you can learn a lot about his mood," he says. "The shape of his antenna actually mirrors his moods through the whole movie. And at the end when he's going to drive home, and he's doing okay, it's finally straight up. But until then it's either crooked or bent into a question mark or God knows what. So there's a whole level of Lifted, the story as told through Stu's antenna."