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34 cgw s u m m e r 2 0 1 9 dummy gang. Meanwhile, Buzz sets out to find Woody and Forky and becomes an uncooperative prize at a carnival across the street from the antique mall. Woody finds Bo and they escape, and Buzz escapes the prize rack along with two stuffed toys, Ducky and Bunny. They all unite to save Forky. WHEN IT RAINS… So, what happened to Bo all those years before? We find out in the opening of min- utes of Toy Story 4, in a flashback. There is a big rainstorm and the toys are attempting a daring rescue of the toy car RC, which is trapped in a gutter and about to be washed away. Aer the mission is accomplished, Woody finds that Bo Peep, part of the lamp in Andy's sister's room, is missing. Andy's sister outgrew her. Woody tries to help her escape her fate, but Bo accepts it and is driven away in a box. Cooley estimates that the majority of the effects team's time and budget were spent in that prologue. "The opening of the film is huge," says Cooley. "It's a downpour, making it as hard as possible for the toys to rescue RC. It's like a flash flood to them. And as RC is being swept away, there's leaves, dirt, sticks, and debris in the runoff along the side of the driveway. It's all mixing with the rain and in- teracting with the toys. It's pretty amazing." Bill Reeves, global technical supervisor, agrees. "It was an impressive, effects-heavy sequence that we worked really hard on to make it look authentic," he says. "When Woody climbs down to help RC, the rain is really big from his perspective. He's a toy, maybe 15 inches tall. It took a lot to make that scene work." As Bob Moyer, supervising technical di- rector, points out, the artists used SideFX's Houdini Engine to make the rain feel authentic at both a human level for scenes involving the human characters as well as a toy level. "It had to feel like the rain was a real threat to the toys, and the effects team had to make the splashes threatening and the gutter feel like a raging river to a toy," he adds. Moyer explains that the effects artists worked out a palette of effects they could dial in depending on the shot. Initially, they planned to have human shots and then toy shots. But as they progressed, they realized that each shot would have its own special blend of both types, so they developed techniques and qualities they could push forward or backward depending on the requirements of the shot. Interestingly, the original film also con- tains a rainstorm, when Buzz was strapped to a rocket in Sid's room. "John Lasseter wanted the scene to be moody and dark, and the pitch was to do a rainstorm," says Reeves. "Back then, that was really hard, so we just did some particles zipping through the air in one exterior shot, and then we cut inside and did drips on the window for the rest of the storm. We had a matte painting outside with clouds, but we never showed the actual rainstorm other than those simple effects. It was all we could do at the time." Flash-forward to 2019, and the water is rushing down the gutter, hitting and pushing RC. He's spinning his wheels, and mud and debris are flying into the air. Indeed, time and technology do march on. And, Reeves should know, as he, along with production designer Bob Pauley, worked on all four Toy Story films, starting with the first one back in 1995, through 1999 with Toy Story 2, again in 2010 with Toy Story 3, and now the current sequel. "1995 was sort of the Stone Age of computer animation. The technology and soware was really primitive when we were working on the original Toy Story, and we managed to cobble it together and made a movie," recalls Reeves. "To this day, we con- tinue to make a movie with the technology we've got at that point in time." As Reeves points out, each Pixar film builds upon the previous one in terms of overall knowledge, technology, and general know-how. "As films come along, they feed off each other. Some are radically different, and others just have small changes. Toy Story 4 is sort of in the middle of that spec- trum," he says. THE EFFECTS TEAM SPENT THE MAJORITY OF ITS TIME AND BUDGET CREATING THE RAINSTORM IN THE FILM'S PROLOGUE. WOODY TRIES TO HELP BONNIE'S NEW CRAFT PROJECT ACCEPT HIS ROLE AS A TOY.