Brown, Noel. " An Interview with Steve Segal." Toy Story: How Pixar Reinvented the Animated Feature. By Susan Smith, Noel Brown and Sam Summers. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. 197–214. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 2 Oct. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781501324949.ch-013>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 2 October 2021, 03:24 UTC. Copyright © Susan Smith, Sam Summers and Noel Brown 2018. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 1 97 Chapter 13 A N INTERVIEW WITH STEVE SEGAL N o e l B r o w n Production histories of Toy Story tend to focus on ‘big names’ such as John Lasseter and Pete Docter. In this book, we also want to convey a sense of the animator’s place in the making of the fi lm and their perspective on what hap- pened, along with their professional journey leading up to that point. Steve Segal was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1949. He made his fi rst animated fi lms as a high school student before studying Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he continued to produce award- winning, independent ani- mated shorts. Aft er graduating, Segal opened a traditional animation studio in Richmond, making commercials and educational fi lms for ten years. Aft er completing the cult animated fi lm Futuropolis (1984), which he co- directed with Phil Trumbo, Segal moved to Hollywood and became interested in com- puter animation. In addition to producing his own computer- generated (CG) animated short, Dance of the Stumblers (1987), his many professional cred- its include contributing special eff ects to Th e Brave Little Toaster (Jerry Rees, 1987), and animation for Pee- wee’s Playhouse (1986– 91) and numerous other feature fi lms and television shows. During the 1990s, he worked at Pixar, where he produced animated shots for Toy Story and A Bug’s Life (John Lasseter, 1998), and the short fi lm Geri’s Game (Jan Pinkava, 1997). He has taught animation at Virginia Commonwealth University, Cal Arts, the San Francisco Academy of Art University and California College of the Arts . Noel Brown: To begin with, would you like to tell us how you became interested in animation in the fi rst place? Steve Segal: Well, I’m always mystifi ed why everyone isn’t interested in animation, because I don’t know any kid that didn’t watch cartoons. I guess the idea that you could make them – I remember in my Sabbath School class, in Fourth Grade, I made fl ip- books, and it was probably the most boring of all my classes. I think I saw it on the Disney show. I was fi ve- years- old when Disney started his Sunday show, and 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 119797 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:35:49:35 PPMM 198 198 Noel Brown about a year later started the Mickey Mouse Club. And they would occasionally show the process, and on Walter Lantz’s show [Th e Woody Woodpecker Show , 1957– 58], he would show it quite frequently – maybe every other week he would go behind the scenes on ‘how do you write a story’, ‘how do you design a character’, ‘how do you animate’. I started fooling around making fl ip- books and animating my G.I. Joes, and whatever I had. I made a fi lm, I guess when I was about 17 or 18, a minute- and- a- half fi lm – it’s on YouTube – called Evolution [1968]. It was just drawn on paper with watercolour, and it shows waves, and an amoeba morphing into a paramecium, then a fi sh, then an amphibian, then a reptile, and one animal kind of resembles the other. I believe in Darwin’s Th eory of Evolution, so I have an animal walking up, then a squirrel jumps up on two legs and becomes a chimpanzee, then becomes a human, and then his head pops off and it’s a robot. I made one more fi lm when I was still in high school. Evolution was silent (although a friend put sound on it, so the one on YouTube has sound), and then I decided I would try a sound fi lm. So I got a song that was popular at the time called ‘A Walk in the Black Forest’ by Horst Jankowski, and I made a little guy walking. It’s three minutes or so, and I think it won fi rst place in the Super 8 Film Festival. NB: Th at must’ve been a proud moment. SS: It certainly was. Th en my thesis project at school – I worked on it for three years – it was my fi rst time working on 16mm. And that won fi rst place at the International Independent Film Festival. So I had a couple of good credits early on. Th is was kind of avant- garde. A Walk in the Black Forest [1969] was kind of inspired by Fantasia [Samuel Armstrong et al., 1940] . Not so much Fantasia but the later Disney musicals like Make Mine Music [Jack Kinney et al., 1946] and Melody Time [Kinney et al., 1948]. I love those, because they’re sort of abstract. Pandora’s Box [1972], the 16mm fi lm, had a lot of special eff ects. It was pretty much just stream of consciousness. It’s 7 ½ minutes. NB: And obviously you would have had very limited resources? SS: Well, I had my own camera, and I built an animation stand out of wood. It was crude. I remember my fi rst fi lm: I didn’t know anything, so I punched the drawings with a 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 119898 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:35:49:35 PPMM 1 99 An Interview with Steve Segal 199 hand punch and put them in a loose- leaf notebook and just fl ipped the pages, so they kind of wiggle around, but it didn’t matter. And then I learned about actual animation pegs and peg bars, so I started using that. I used cels in A Walk in the Black Forest and Pandora’s Box . NB: So even though resources were limited, you were still able to make fi lms. I suppose at that time, it was a case of making a virtue out of necessity? SS: It was a defi nite advantage. Today it’s relatively easy to make this stuff – some of the eff ects you could do in a few minutes. But there was a lot less competition, because it took a lot of time, a lot of patience. You’ve got reams of paper, and you’ve got to punch them, and now you can just draw on a tablet. So it’s a little harder to cut through the clutter now. NB: Te l l u s a b o u t t h e fi lms you produced while you were at Virginia. SS: A ft er Pandora’s Box I did a fi lm called Russian Rooster [1974], which won a prize at the Nashville Film Festival. I liked the music of Rimsky- Korsakov, so I got a recording of ‘Le coq d’or’, and I did a drawing on fi lm of these hunters chasing a bird. It was a really simple story, very simple style. It was maybe a little more elaborate drawing- wise than [Norman] McLaren. McLaren would do these very simple drawings and then optically print colours in it. I was drawing on the frame – I didn’t have access to an optical printer, so I just coloured it using Dr. Martin’s dye. Actually, no: I used magic markers. I coloured the whole thing with permanent markers. And it looked great when I was looking at it – I would see the colour be very rich – but then when it was projected it was very washed out. I was very disappointed. So I found out, for the next fi lm about Dr. Martin’s dyes. Th en I got the colour I wanted. Th e following year, Red Ball Express [1975], which was done to bluegrass music . I actually started a piece, the ‘Little’ Fugue by Bach, and I probably animated a minute. I had a recording on a synthesiser and animated these abstract shapes, and aft er about a minute I looked at it and thought, ‘this is kind of boring’, and scrapped it. And I’m still amazed that I would do that. I don’t think I gave it a second thought. I didn’t go, ‘Oh, I worked on that for fi ve months’ – or probably two months – I just went, ‘Just start over’. So the next day I just got another recording, ‘Orange 99781501324918_pi-240.indd781501324918_pi-240.indd 119999 111/8/20171/8/2017 22:49:35:49:35 PPMM 200 200 Noel Brown Blossom Special’. At that time, the movie Deliverance [John Boorman, 1972] was popular, and it had duelling banjos. In Virginia, there was a lot of that music. I drew it directly on to fi lm, and painted it with Dr. Martin’s dye. I wanted to do something more abstract – Russian Rooster was almost strictly fi gurative. NB: At this point, there was a commercial niche animating for advertisements, and this is how you made a living for a while. SS: I n fi lm class I met Phil Trumbo, and a bunch of other people were working on a fi lm that was inspired by Red Grooms’s fi lm, Fat Feet [1966].