Director Pete Docter Talks Monsters, Up, Inside Out and Filmmaking at Pixar

Have you ever wondered how Pixar makes their films? In this hour-long talk, Director Pete Docter (Inside Out, Up, Monsters, Inc) explains the extraordinary process filmmakers work through to make an idea come to life. Watch below.

Pete Docter is a film director, animator, screenwriter, and voice actor at Pixar Animation Studios. He contributed to the story and characters of Toy Story, Pixar's first full-length animated feature film, and served as the supervising animator for the film.

I Dream of Disney

When I was a young boy my 5th grade teacher had everyone in class write a letter to someone they aspired to be. At the time, I believed that I would grow up to be an animator, so I wrote a letter to the Disney Animation Studio. 

To everyone's surprise, an animator wrote back answering the questions I had asked. It was nice and of course allowed me to write a cute five page research paper. A five pager in 5th grade was a lot of work and certainly stretched my capacity to learn. Looking back, I can recall so many reasons why I was thankful for that reply. First, it gave me hope of what my future could become. And secondly, it was rewarding to see how taking the risk of asking Disney these questions actually paid off. 

Isn't it funny that when we are younger it's easier to take risks? Doesn't it seem like it's easier to dream big? Maybe it's because the stakes aren't as high. And so as we grow older the idea of taking risks seems scary. Big dreams begin to feel impossible. We begin to ignore those dreams. We continue to grow older and along with it the stakes continue to grow higher. But that's good news actually. God designed it this way so that we are more reliant on him to come through for us. 

When we go for the God-sized dream, we are bound to see God-sized results. The results aren't always what we expect, but certainly available to teach us something new.