Breckin Meyer Quotes

CGI is done after the film is done. It's through the computer. Most of the film is not computer-generated special effects. Most of it is that creature that is in the room with you.

When we did 'Toy Story,' that was an all-hands-on-deck situation that really was time-intensive.

Actually, no, but I am close to the people who are working on Chicken Little, and I'm very close to the people over at Pixar. I mean, as far as stories are concerned, almost everything we have could be told that way.

The idea of an animated film is you always kind of get a little bit daunted by it as a filmmaker because it feels like a lot of your communication is going to be with computer artists, and you're going to have to kind of channel the movie through extra pairs of hands.

When you take something that's inert, and through motion, give it life, make it appear to be alive, living, breathing thinking and having emotions, that's animation. But when you take something that's live-action, and move a part of it, that's a special effect.

Now, I just made an animated movie a few years ago, 'The Tale of Desperaux', and that had twelve hundred shots in it. Twelve hundred CG shots is a pretty big plan.

A live action movie is work, and an animated movie is you showing up in your pajamas once every three months, or in my case, just a splash of baby powder. It's not any kind of heavy lifting.

With 'Toy Story,' which is a fantastic film but is essentially animation, you get to make all your decisions beforehand. 'Jumanji' is shot much like any other action film.

If you imagine yourself as a craftsman at ILM, you spend your days tumbling buses and animating shards of glass. You're doing a lot of visual effects work.

I feel I'm just meant to do stop-motion. Live-action is much more glamorous to some, but it's basically a whole army of people focused on one thing.

You have to understand that when you're a voice actor on an animated film, you're really just a tiny little piece of this huge process. And when you finally get to see the finished product and see all of the wonderful work that the animators & the designers & the writers did to make your character stand out, it's just so touching, so humbling.

All movies are inherently collaborative, and animation even more so. There are hundreds and hundreds of people involved with an animated movie.

In 'The Smurfs,' I was actually a live action character. So, I was a real person in that movie. But I was working with animated characters, which is very strange because they're off recording their work, and we're kind of reacting to nothing when we're doing the film.

If people want to watch a CG movie, there's plenty out there.

We're always striving to make Avatar look like a cinematic, live-action movie.

'Avatar' means so many things to so many different people. When I think of the creation of it, I think of me and Mike at the computer in a little apartment in Burbank.

The animators working with these 3D models, they're artists, right? They're great at what they do. They're artful in how they move characters about.

In the earliest days of Pixar, when we were making 'Toy Story' and 'A Bug's Life,' we all came together as a group.

What you do in film and television is really different than what you do in video games.

As I look back on my career, I had a goal, which was to build the first feature computer-animated film.

I liked the whole process of creating on set. It's almost like creating magic. The work that the camera guys are doing at the same time, the lighting... all of the people working in their departments to make one thing.

I began as a graphic designer. As part of my work, I created film symbols for ad campaigns. I happened to be working on the symbols for Otto Preminger's 'Carmen Jones' and 'The Man With The Golden Arm' and at some point, Otto and I just looked at each other and said, 'Why not make it move?' It was as simple as that.

In my life, it's always been about who I'm going to collaborate with. Less important to me is what the subject is.

What happened in the early days of Disney is that Walt Disney used all of the new technologies as they came out. When matting came out, they adopted it. They adopted sound and color and xerography. Walt did that. And then, when he died, people began to think that this is just about making films, so they stopped bringing in new technologies.

When I was a kid, I wanted to make movies. In particular, I loved animation and would love to have been an animator.