Do your toys have a secretlife when you're not looking? Do some toys feel jealous when you play with your favorite one? That's what happens in Toy Story, the first big movie made completely on computers. It opens next week.
Woody the cowboy is afraid of being stuck in the toy box after a cool new toy arrives: space ranger Buzz Lightyear. Tom Hanks did Woody's voice. Tim Allen is Buzz.
But computers are the real stars of Toy Story. There were no cameras, and no regular movie studio. Every checker, jack and hockey puck on the movie screen came from a computer.
"Computers can do things you can't do in the real world," says animation scientist Eliot Smyrl, who worked on the film. "It's pretty cool."
How Did They Do It?
The animators made clay models of the main characters' shapes. Then they traced each model with a special wand. A 3-D drawing of the model appeared on a computer screen after the wand "felt" its shape.
The models don't look like much. "When we animate Woody, he's made up of cylinders and has no real face," says animator Pete Docter. Faces and clothes were added later.
Once models were drawn, animators had to get them moving. They had a computer command for each movement and facial expression. It was like having a marionette whose hundreds of strings could be controlled only by computer.
Look around the room you're in now. Imagine you had to draw a picture of everything you see. That's just how scenes were created in Toy Story. Everything in the houses, a gas station, a restaurant and a busy street was computer-designed and -painted in three dimensions.
The movie took four years to finish, but its producers ended up inventing a new way to make movies. They say the work was hard but fun. The fun shows in the final movie. "If there's one thing animators know, it's their childhood and their toys," says Toy Story writer Andrew Stanton. "We're all just grownup kids."