For story artist Rebecca McVeigh and lead editor Maurissa Horwitz, staying focused on the film’s emotional rhythm and character arcs means countless iterations, tough choices, and frequent cuts that are essential to getting the best version of the director’s vision up on screen.
For Inside Out 2 story artist Rebecca McVeigh, her earliest memory of wanting to be a storyteller was a camping trip with her family when she was just five years old.
“I was writing and illustrating, as much as a kid that age can, my own books,” she shares. “On that trip, I remember just sitting with a pencil and crayons and writing a story about a princess who gets turned into a horse. So perhaps I was a writer before I was an artist. But writing and drawing were always intertwined because every time I wrote anything as a child, I also drew it in pictures.”
McVeigh, who is also known for her work on Netflix’s Annie Award-winning film Nimona, says being a story artist on a film as emotionally driven as Pixar’s latest hit film, which follows the complicated and often destructive dynamic of the emotions inside a teenage girl’s head, is not for those without tough skin. In addition to the sheer drafting mileage, creating an incalculable number of story sequences, McVeigh says one of the biggest challenges of the process is accepting the fact that 99 percent of it ends up on the cutting room floor.
“Over the course of the whole film, I couldn't even begin to guess how many sequences I have done in total,” says McVeigh. “I'll work on a sequence for two weeks or however long they'll give me to do something. And then I'll deliver it to editorial and they do what they need to do. I may not see it again for six months, or ever again if it gets cut. I've had scenes where I will do a version of it and then it's a year before I see it again. Either way, you need to have the humility to let your work go.”
Inside Out 2’s lead editor Maurissa Horwitz, who has been editing films since the early 2000s, working on films like Monsters vs. Aliens and How to Train Your Dragon, knows all too well the power she wields to build crew members up or cut them down and says she always aims to glean the best out of both the people she works with and the story they are all working on creating together.
“The storyboard team and I were all super close on this movie and it was wonderful to get to work hand-in-hand with them,” she says. “Looking at those sequences, you can feel when either the energy's not right, if a joke is better places somewhere else, or if we’re not spending enough time in a space. If the scene is focused on a particular character, then we need to pull out pieces that are getting in the way of that character's arc in the scene. You need to be able to craft the story, whether it's in still images or you start getting layout, and not lose track of the rhythms and the emotion.”
Not only are story artists and editors – and the numerous other departments from animation to layout – working on multiple sequences at a time, but they are often being created out of order rather than chronologically. So losing track of the story’s core and keeping it focused is easy to do. When edits are made, they are not made lightly for fear of deleting something useful or pivotal.
According to Horwitz, the collaborative nature of animation projects tends to make the editing process less solitary and, therefore, makes editors and directors feel less like overlords casting judgement on everyone else’s work.
“There's a little more balance in editorial on an animated film,” says Horwitz. “It’s a lot about interacting and collaborating with other department leaders as well as my own team. We have a big edit team and we have a lot of different departments we need to work with and work with really well along the way. I'm working with the best and the most talented people on this movie and it was wonderful to see everyone asking things like, ‘How can I help you make it better? What do you need from us?’ There's a level of collaboration in animation that is unique compared to live-action, where shooting gets done and from there on out it’s in edit's hands.”
Still, it doesn’t make the editing process any less “cutting.” Pun intended.
“What I try to keep in mind is that even if none of the stuff I made for that sequence gets used, it’s all helpful for our director Kelsey [Mann] finding the right path,” says McVeigh. “It’s important to keep in your mind that, even if the scene that you worked so hard on and you felt so confident in gets cut because it's no longer serving the story, it contributed something. It helped the director make their vision more clear. That’s what I tell myself when in my head I’m like, ‘Oh, please. Please. Not my beautiful hard work!’”
As Thomas Edison once said, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
“Plus, it’s not like I’m suffering alone,” says McVeigh. “It's something that everybody can relate to because it happens to everybody at some point on a film. Your scene gets cut and all your co-workers are like, ‘Oh, rough go!’”
Much of the drafting and editing process is a mental exercise in staying focused, and not just on the story, but the language of the animation. It seems obvious that story artists and editors would have to keep a 3D-animated picture in their heads when crafting a story, but that’s easier said than done when one is working with hand-drawn illustrations.
“Early on in my career, I was definitely thinking in 2D, and it took a lot of pushing myself into how Pixar does things, to be mindful of the three-dimensional space,” notes McVeigh. “Because if I'm not, that's going to make other departments miserable down the line and I want to make sure that I'm not creating later problems for layout and animation. I tell myself, ‘This is not an illustration. This is a set of blueprints for how to shoot with a camera.’ Usually if I'm having trouble keeping camera-consistent, I'll draw myself a little isometric, top-down map of the area and then put my character in that space and think, ‘If I put the camera here, what can I see behind them?’”
Horwitz adds, “I think it is an interesting problem, and certainly you have to be really aware as you're cutting the storyboards what the physical space will be like. I like to think that I think in 3D, but I'm sure I've been tricked every now and then. Those storyboard artists are very funny and it's easy to get attached to their beautiful and hilarious drawings. But then layout brings in their cinematography and brilliant camera work. So, it's actually a great transitional process, where suddenly the world that you’re working in just keeps opening up.”
And, with every cut and critical piece of feedback, as tough as the process can be, McVeigh says she grows a little more. In fact, she says that working on Inside Out 2 has been one of the most transformative experiences in her career. “It’s such a big film and you’re working on it for such a long time that you not only improve on the skills you already have but also new skills outside your wheelhouse. For my own growth, I really feel like I've done the most growing on this film in our brainstorming processes because that is a kind of rapid-fire room where a director or our head of story will come in and say, ‘Okay, today I need ideas for this video game character's name and what he looks like.’ And we've had no prep time, we didn't know that that was going to be the topic, but suddenly we're just in a room and people are throwing ideas around. Before I started on this film, I don't think that that was my strong suit, but I've learned to rely on my gut and trust my own intuition. That’s a big part of this business.”
Inside Out 2 is now playing in theaters.
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
