In 3D, from go, there is a year-long period of building this thing from the inside out, modeling the exterior and figuring out all the controls that work the face and the body — the articulation of the character — and it takes forever before you can start animating. Once you have it built, animation is very iterative. You can have a scene and change a few aspects and do it again. And it’s wonderfully malleable in a way that 2D is not quite. A lot of that depends on how good the animator is and how good the character is articulated. Is it capable of doing the things that the animator wants to do with it? If you decide you want to change the angle, you can do that without having to reanimate too much. You have to change some things so that they read to camera. But it’s marvelously adaptable to reworking, and that part is nicer about CG. But the two mediums are difficult in different ways.

It’s the human qualities that created by joys… and pains of the production.

BD: How is animating in 3D difficult?

BB: It’s a very sophisticated tool, but it’s also not particularly friendly. Once in the computer, I wanted the film to be a certain way, and if we disagreed, I wanted to fight it. It wants things to be small and wants things to be weightless and it wants them to be plastic and hard to the touch. We had a movie where we wanted things to be soft and of varying textures — dirty and heavy and we were fighting it every step of the way.

A number of people didn’t think that the studio was up to it and they were smart people. It certainly was a gulp. But there were other people who were looking for just this kind of challenge. I had the knees of that place trembling under the weight of this thing. But, you know, if they weren’t up to it, I don’t know who would be. I think the film is a testament to what kind of talent is under that roof.

BD: We’ve all been focusing on the challenge of pulling off a movie comprised totally of CG humans — a first for Pixar — but the whole approach was a departure, wasn’t it?

BB: Not only is it doing hard things but also voluminous amounts of those hard things. We had a story that was bigger and more complicated than anything. It was longer [121 minutes], it had four times the number of locations and all of the characters were humans, and that’s considered the hardest thing to do. And they change their costumes and they age and their bodies change. And they have hair and hair under water and hair blowing through the wind… It’s just insanity.

We got it done within the same kinds of parameters of all the other Pixar films, with 10 times the resources. We kept it within the ballpark budget of the others by building stuff specifically to camera. You adhere to a plan so you can stretch every little cent to its furthest. Now, I’m not saying that this is how every film should be made. I think there is a tradeoff to that, which is spontaneity and discovery and that’s what [John] Lasseter thrives on. He loves building sets and finding all these great camera angles and finding ways to do things. With me, maybe it’s not as much fun — I have to give up some of that flexibility to achieve all of the things that I want to do, with a self-imposed restriction.

BD: Rick, what was the hardest thing from a technical standpoint?

Rick Sayre: The hardest thing about The Incredibles was there was no hardest thing. Brad ordered a heaping helping of every expensive item on the menu. We’ve got it all: fire, water, air, smoke, steam, explosions… and, by the way, humans. In terms of humans, the biggest challenge was how do you model them in a way that maintains the corporal reality of skin moving over muscle, moving over bone without having to figure out what Bob’s bones look like. Getting hair to work at all and to move and clothing and then doing it with a big ensemble cast. It’s a Pixar compendium — and then some.

And the expanded number of locations represented a departure for us. On shows with a smaller number of locations, we could simulate the universe. The mantra for this film was do it like live action. So we built the island to stand up from any angle without knowing where the camera was going to go. Some primary locations like the dining room were built as is. The whole house didn’t fit inside itself and the exterior was a different set. Overall, there were more than 200 locations. We had it all mapped out on Monsters, Inc. On The Incredibles, we couldn’t do that. The organizational structure kept changing; in fact, it became a running joke.

BD: What was the ultimate organizational structure?

RS: We had so many locations that there was no way to have a team per location, so we started with the idea that we’d sequence it out. But what happened was the sequence team did most of the work. We were still building sets while still animating so, as in a visual effects live-action film, we would do layout in rough form, animators would go in and start animating it, layout would get props from modeling and lay out what they needed. They would see the dimensions and outline of a set. This would leave it open for the animator to find bits of business to do.

So what we adopted was “Alpha Omega:” where one team was concerned with building everything that would go to animation (modeling, shading and layout) and another that dealt with it after animation (final camera, lighting and effects). Then there was also the character team that digitally sculpted, rigged and shaded the characters. And there was a simulation team that was responsible for developing simulation technology for hair and clothing.