BD: And how large a crew did you have?

RG: It got as big as 60 people. But we lost some and got some new people so...

VN: ... Overall, around 100 people went through the door.

RG: We were kind of the bottom-dwellers of the studio: begging and borrowing and stealing whatever we could from productions.

VN: Anybody who had downtime would come and help us out.

The production time for the three shorts was about eight or nine months. About six months of that was used to find ideas and to figure out the format.

BD: How much of the original assets are you able to use?

RG: Not as much as we were hoping. At first, the idea was to use all existing characters and sets so we didn't have to build anything new. But as the ideas developed, we had to build some new stuff. There are some sets, like the Grand Prix stadium from the movie, and, of course, Mater and McQueen, that are repurposed.

VN: But luckily we had standardized character rigs from the film that applied to any new car that we needed. And a lot of time you just have Mater with a new paint job or a new costume on, so that saves a lot of time.

RG: But then we dressed Mater up for Mater the Greater, where he wears helmets and swimming mask and snorkel, and those are all added on to him. But for El Materdor, we built the bulldozers from scratch, including the stadium. And in Rescue Squad Mater, the streets of San Francisco.

BD: What have been the particular demands of this project?

RG: You don't have to worry about character arcs and story, but one of the challenges I find is that you have to have a really quick intro and you have to tie up the ending in a humorous way. So one of the hardest things is: How do we end these? How do we get out of them?

VN: Without just doing a nod and a wink and that's it. So a really satisfying ending. And then just from a technical side, despite a really compressed schedule and a small team and limited resources, it's great because people get to wear more than one hat and have more creative input.

RG: It has been a good opportunity for a lot of people to step up into new roles. For instance, Victor and I getting to co-direct, and [Effects Supervisor] Apurva Shah is the lead TD. And Tony Christov, who has done a lot of set design, had his first opportunity to do characters.

VN: And Rob learned how to code.

Cars Toons reaped benefits from Ratatouille and WALL•E in terms of lighting, but the original software from Cars is used so that the show can share its assets.

RG: Did I? I come from a story background and just recently learned Photoshop.

VN: Now we make him sit in lighting reviews and give notes on lighting.

RG: Unfortunately, I haven't learned all the technical tricks yet.

VN: But he knows what we didn't like.

BD: Were you able to take advantage of some of the new lighting techniques?

VN: Yes, we've actually reaped some of the benefits of Ratatouille and WALL•E as far as lighting goes, but as far as the rest of the software, we went back to the version we used on Cars to make sure that all of our assets still hold up. The Cars rigs don't work in the most current version of our software.

BD: And it's obviously worked out well so far.

RG: It's a good format and we can get away with a lot.

VN: Yeah, it's so loose because it's all conjecture. It's been a real good formula for us so far. But in the future the Cars Toons could be other characters too.

RG: Maybe "Luigi's Small Stories."

VN: Or "Luigi's Machinations."

Bill Desowitz is editor of VFXWorld.