"Wreck-It" Inside the Hat

I spent part of my morning climbing up and down stairs at the hat building. Also, too, going into board artists' rooms and animators' rooms ...

The lighting crew is right on top of the end of the movie. As one tech director said:

"We've been working long days and seven day weeks. It's been pretty intense. But now we're doing our last shots ..."

But the most interesting piece of the movie that I saw today were the end credits. They're witty and zippy and, as a couple of people said, fit neatly into the plot countours of the picture. How they came about is equally interesting:

"Management didn't want to spend a lot of money on the end credits, and there wasn't a lot of time left. So animators came up with end credit ideas. We boarded it, and passed out pieces of the credits to different animators. People had their own little section to work on.

We worked through it quickly, the executives looked at it and said 'Yeah, this works,' and it was done. There was very little that got changed. The whole thing went right through, and the animators got to have a lot of input. It was nice to do more than just move the characters around ..."

Sort of like the old days.

Not to reveal anything, but the end credits are effective, (and I'm not going to piss people at Disney off by revealing them here.) Further, nobody had to spend months noodling them to death. Just pitch the idea ... do the boards ... animate ... and done.