Getting back on track today after time and circumstance prevented postings earlier this week, we now present you with parts three and four of the production notes for Pixar’s The Incredibles. These segments discuss the voice casting and the visual design for the movie. Parts five and six will be presented tomorrow to complete the series.

An Incredible Cast of Characters: Telling the Story of The Incredibles

As he embarked on the intense journey of making The Incredibles, Brad Bird knew that he would need to surround himself with devoted talent to bring his vision to life—not just on the technical side, but also through gifted actors who could give his characters all the depth and dimension they deserved.
  Once an animated film’s screenplay is completed and the storyboards created, the next step is to cast the film. For Bird, who came to know and love the characters of The Incredibles like they were his own family, the casting was extremely close to his heart. He began the process by making sure the storyboards would communicate enough to the actors to elicit multitonal performances. Bird worked with story supervisor Mark Andrews, artist Teddy Newton, and supervising animator Tony Fucile, who each played a major role in designing the characters and bringing them fully to life.
  Explains Teddy Newton, who drew many of the characters in the film for the first time: “Brad would simply describe the characters to me—he wouldn’t use too many adjectives, but he would often do an impression or a voice for them. Sometimes the voice alone would put enough pictures and ideas in my head. It’s like when you listen to the radio and you start to imagine what the person would look like. You get inspired and everything starts to take shape.”
  As the characters took form, Bird began to visualize the film in ever deeper layers. “Brad had a new process for storyboarding the film,” explains Mark Andrews. “He wanted everything to be incredibly detailed and was concerned not only about the character design but even about lighting, backgrounds and camera movement right from the earliest stages. He knew everything had to be perfect to keep the audience completely immersed in the world of The Incredibles. And starting this way really helped the entire production to get a clear vision of the film from the beginning.”
  With the characters well established, casting for The Incredibles could begin at last. The filmmakers began looking for actors capable of bringing out the ordinary, everyday feelings that reside inside these superhero characters. At the center of the film, of course, is Bob Parr, Mr. Incredible himself, the family’s muscular powerhouse of a patriarch who is trying to come to terms with the changes in his life that have taken him from superhero to suburban dad. To play Bob, Brad Bird was soon drawn to the combination of down-to-earth humor and tough-guy charisma represented by Craig T. Nelson (“Coach,” “The District”).
  “Craig has an authoritative voice but also a wonderful, easygoing kind of humor that really lends itself to who Mr. Incredible is,” says Bird. “You can definitely see his voice fitting into this big, strong, hulking body yet there is also a real vulnerability in him—enough so that you really relate to him simply as a man looking for something he has temporarily lost—and when the scene needed to be intense, he was right there.”
  For Nelson, the character—animated or not—proved irresistible. “I really empathized with him as a human being,” notes Nelson. “Here’s a guy who is literally able to leap tall buildings and do all kinds of super-heroic things, but that isn’t what makes him special. It’s his value structure and his moral strength, not his mighty feats that I really responded to. He is one of those people I’d really like to meet and get a chance to shake his hand, because he knows what counts and he has a good sense of himself and his family.”
  Despite his excitement about the role, Nelson faced an unexpectedly daunting task. “The role of Bob was probably one of the more difficult things I’ve ever done,” he says. “I quickly discovered that Brad and his team had an extremely specific idea of what they wanted because they’d lived with this story so closely for such a long time. They perfected the script and knew this family inside and out, and every other which way. So it was up to the actors to bring to life exactly what they had in their mind’s eye.”
  He continues: “This isn’t as easy as it might seem. The delivery has to be correct tonally and the energy has to be at precisely the right place at the right time. You end up doing a lot of experimenting and concentrating on your vocal energy, but at the same time you’re also trying to imagine the situation as if you were involved in it. It was a real challenge as an actor, but it was definitely a fascinating ride.”
  Coming to her husband’s rescue when the chips are down is the family’s lithe matriarch, Helen, who was formerly the ultraflexible Elastigirl. This character was created in part as a celebration of the typical modern-day mom who, says Bird, “has to stretch in hundreds of different ways each day.” To get to the core of Helen’s mix of maternalism and stoic strength, Brad Bird trusted the finely honed instincts of Academy Award® winner Holly Hunter. “Holly struck me as a consummate actress who could portray someone sensitive, yet with a very sturdy center,” observes Bird. “You feel like there’s a part of Holly that would never crack. She has such great resiliency in her and that was something that I needed for Helen because she’s such a very strong woman.”
  Hunter was intrigued by the film because she liked that it was an unconventional story about family and human dynamics—and this was unlike any other she’d ever seen in that department. “What I really liked is that beneath all the superhero adventures, The Incredibles is basically a story celebrating family— real families with all their differences and quirks—and what a family’s individuals can do when they come together,” she says.
  For Hunter, who has never done any animated voice work before, it was also an exciting way to step out of her usual terrain. “It was a really different and exciting experience for me, learning to be expressive through your voice alone,” she says. “From the start, I was pulled into it by Brad, because his imagination is so very alive and he really knows this character.”
  She continues: “Brad thinks musically. For him it’s about finding a rhythm and an intonation that can be really more related to music more than anything else. The back-and-forth exchange is very staccato and very dynamic—and this was very interesting to me as an actress and a lot of fun.”
  Rounding out the family of Bob and Helen Parr are their three children: the reclusive teenage Violet, the speedy ten year-old Dash and little baby Jack-Jack. In developing their individual superpowers, personalities and human foibles, Brad Bird looked at typical American families all around him for inspiration.
  “Violet is a typical teenager, someone who’s not comfortable in her own skin, and is in that rocky place between being a kid and an adult. So invisibility seemed like the right superpower for her,” explains Bird. “Dash moves at lightning speed because the average ten-year-old boy can move twice as fast as anybody else, and something always has to be happening or they just crash and fall asleep. So he goes so fast you can barely see him. Meanwhile, I think babies are unrealized potential, which is why Jack-Jack is the only normal one in the family, and yet…you never know. Maybe he’ll have a combination of his parents’ powers one day.”
  To play Dash, the boy whose parents have to cheer “slow down” when he enters a school race, the filmmakers cast rising eleven-year-old Spencer Fox who makes his feature film debut in The Incredibles. Meanwhile, for the voice of Violet, Bird made a most unusual choice as a result of an epiphany.
  “I’m a big fan of the National Public Radio show, ‘This American Life,’” he notes. “And there’s this wonderful author of books and essays who appears regularly on that show: Sarah Vowell. One day, I was driving in the car one day listening to Sarah’s voice, and I immediately thought, ‘That’s Violet.’ When I called Sarah to ask her if she’d play the part of a teenage girl who just wants to be invisible, she was kind of scratching her head and telling me that she had never done voices before. She turned out to be perfect.”
  With the family cast, the filmmakers set out to find an actor cool enough to portray Frozone, a superhero who can always put his enemies on ice. Bird was thrilled to be able to cast Oscar® nominee Samuel L. Jackson.
  “Nobody sounds cooler than Sam Jackson,” observes Bird. “And he makes it seem so effortless, too. He can be funny, soft, or tough as nails. I think he’s one of the most versatile actors around today. We were blessed to get him for the part of Frozone and he just nailed it right away. The animators had a blast working with his voice because there’s so much happening inside his performance.”
  For the voice of Syndrome, the filmmakers turned to Jason Lee (“Almost Famous”). Bird explains, “I’ve enjoyed Jason’s work in some great independent films and he has a very quirky sensibility. He put his all into creating this unique voice for a villain. You can hear the kid in it, but he’s definitely not a kid.”
  Lee empathized with the character, despite his dastardly ways. “It was fun to play a really mean guy who wanted to be something more,” says the actor. The entire experience of The Incredibles was eye-opening for Lee, as for much of the rest of the cast. He summarizes: “This was an amazing experience for an actor, especially to be a part of Pixar, which is one of the most unique and creative studios I’ve ever seen. It’s full of youthfulness and spontaneity and imagination. They are interested in creating true classics—and going way beyond the expected. I look forward to the day when my kid is old enough, and I can say, ‘Let’s watch The Incredibles. I was in that movie.’”
  Finally, one of the great scene-stealing characters in The Incredibles is the deliciously deadpan and truly diminutive fashion diva, Edna Mode, or “E” for short, who specializes in designing costumes for an elite superhero clientele. After several attempts to cast the voice, Bird gave in to popular demand from his colleagues at Pixar and agreed to take on the role he created himself.
  Bird explains, “I wasn’t intending to play Edna, but we had trouble finding any other voice and it just seemed easiest for me to do it. I really like this character because I’ve always been fascinated by the question: who designs superhero costumes? You know, costumes are such a big deal in the superhero world because it gives them their identity and sets them apart from everyone else. Yet nobody ever explained where the costumes came from and who was behind them. The way I saw it, the costumes had to be created by somebody with a scientific and engineering background. So I started thinking of German engineering. And then I got to thinking that the Japanese make all those unbelievable cars and cameras. So I thought about a half German, half Japanese, tiny powerhouse of a character and Edna just emerged.”
  “I really like E,” concludes Bird. “She’s not remotely intimidated by superheroes or anyone at all for that matter. She’s incredibly insistent on her own way of seeing things. The word ‘no’ just doesn’t exist in her vocabulary, especially if it’s in opposition to her. She is incredibly confident and sure of herself. Doubt is not in her—and I suppose you could say I have a side to me like that.”

Creating an Incredible Universe: The Epic Design of The Incredibles

With the characters coming into their own, the filmmakers now set out to build the richly stylized world of The Incredibles around them. The design scope of that world turned out to be entirely unprecedented—unfolding on over 100 carefully created sets that forge a witty, eye-popping
alternate reality.
  From the beginning, Bird envisioned The Incredibles taking place inside a distinctive universe that would be at once futuristic and full of retro nostalgia. “I saw the world of The Incredibles as looking sort of like what we thought the future would turn out like in the 1960s,” explains the director. “During that period, there were all these shows that promised people that, in ten or fifteen years, we would all have jet packs or use hydrofoils to travel across the water and then drive up on land. Today we do have some of those things but they don’t quite work like we thought they would. With this film, we wanted to put our story into that type of skin. For me, it’s the 1960s view of what we believed life was going to be like today.”
  To help capture this very special look—and all its variations as the story unfolds—Bird collaborated closely with production designer Lou Romano and art director Ralph Eggleston (the Oscar® winning director of the Best Animated Short for 2002, “For the Birds,” who previously served as the production designer on “Toy Story” and “Finding Nemo”).
  Romano and Eggleston were faced with an enormous task. Although they weren’t designing “physical” sets, their job was no less creatively challenging—if anything it was even more so, because they weren’t limited by the rules of existing architecture and design!
  Romano explains, “Our work was about creating the entire human gamut of feelings, moods and atmosphere with shapes and colors. We wanted the overall design aesthetic to be retro but with sudden splashes of the modern, so we borrowed lines and forms from contemporary architecture and took them in other directions. As for color, the film starts off very bright and saturated during the golden age of superheroes, but then the color drains out as we find Bob working away at his boring job at Insuricare. As the film progresses, we start to bring in more color until we come full circle to the big confrontation scene at the end.”
  Eggleston has his own description of the film’s design: “I call the look suburban-mid-century-Tiki by way of Lou Romano,” he explains. “Throughout all our work Brad kept encouraging us to keep going to the next extreme—he simply never settled for anything less, which brought out the best in us.”
  While Romano and Eggleston proceeded with their prolific designs, set sequence supervisor Nigel Hardwidge worked side-by-side with them to make sure their vision was clearly communicated to those on the technical side of the film. Much of Hardwidge’s job involved creative problem-solving—assuring that artistic vision and technology would jibe. “My job is to ask a lot of questions about each environment—what does it look like, how much are we going to see of it, what time of day is it, and how are we going to create it in a way that will satisfy these guys who dreamed it up in such wonderful detail,” he explains.
  “Right off the bat, we knew this film was going to be an unprecedented undertaking because The Incredibles has nearly three times as many sets as we’ve dealt with on any previous film,” continues Hardwidge. “Adding to the complication, a lot of the film takes place outdoors on a huge tropical island that is a couple of square miles in size. One of the first big challenges for me was the scene on the island where Dash races through the dense jungle to escape from the Velocipods. Dash ended up running at about 200 mph, which meant we needed literally to create twice as much ground as originally planned. This required investing enough time and energy to get the desired results to satisfy Brad—but also spending our money wisely to find an efficient way to deal with it. It was just one sequence, but we quickly realized how massive this project was going to become.”
  With the dozens upon dozens of sets completed, the next task was for the layout team to establish the staging, blocking and timing of each scene—and start transforming ordinary 2-D drawings into the fantasia of a 3-D world. To allow for maximum creative flexibility with the camera and the character action, Pixar changed their typical layout process for The Incredibles.
  Patrick Lin, one of the film’s three directors of photography and a layout expert, explains: “In the past, Pixar would first build detailed models of the sets, and then we would go in and figure out our camera positions just like on a live-action film. With this film, we did things in reverse. On some of the big scenes, we actually filmed using a very simple, low geometry model. After the director approved the shot, more complete models were then built out to the camera. This allowed a great deal more flexibility. A good example of this is the final battle scene in the city. The battle is so big and complex that it wouldn’t have made sense to build a city and then figure out how to try and film it. So we pre-visualized the scene and then filmed the action. Only then did we build a final model based on all that work to add deeper detail.”
  One of the seemingly simplest scenes in the film—the Parr family gathered around the family dinner table—proved to be one of the most complex from a layout and set dressing point of view.
  “The dinner table scene was one of the trickiest to stage,” comments Lin. “It starts out as a typical family meal but gradually escalates into complete chaos. Staging things around a table is always hard because you need to keep the camera moving and you don’t want to confuse the audience as to where
the characters are sitting. As chaos erupts, with Dash and Violet fighting and Jack-Jack shrieking, Helen stretches to grab the clashing siblings and keep them apart. Bob gets everyone’s attention by lifting the whole table just as his pal Frozone arrives. None of the set could be dressed in advance because
everything was driven by the animation. Food on the table gets thrown around, so you have to keep track of every item on each plate, including the gravy. The entire sequence was a continuity and dressing nightmare.”
  Meanwhile, director of photography Janet Lucroy, who specialized in lighting The Incredibles, was facing her own unique challenges. “From a lighting perspective, this film had an enormous magnitude to it because of the large number of sets and shots,” says Lucroy. “In fact, it had about 600 more shots than, say, Monsters, Inc.”
  In addition to the magnitude of the job, Lucroy was challenged by trying to create richly cinematographic, carefully plotted lighting schemes that match the unique look of the film. “We decided to try out a darker, more constrasty look to the film—something different than people are used to in an animated world and more akin to a contemporary thriller or adventure story,” says Lucroy. “We also wanted there to be an intriguing mix of theatrical and naturalistic lighting. So, there are times in the film where we push the theatricality, like in the glory days of the superhero prologue when everything is very contrasty and visually strong. But there’s a huge part of the film where the family is at home or in the office, and for those scenes we used very natural photographic lighting.”
  Lucroy was also thrilled to have a chance to create more delicate lighting effects that add to the overall photo-realism and impact of the film. “I really love some of the quieter, more subtle moments,” she says. “There’s a little sequence where Dash and Mom are in the car, and you get the window shadow across her face, but there’s still enough fill light to read her eyes. And then you get the bar across her face. The feel of the sunlight and the bounce coming from the seat onto them is so believable and makes for a very nice moment.”