[Smith] Every day I'll take a right, which is the long way to get to my office.
I'll walk by all the old drawings they have...
in order to tune myself in to the things
that I think those artists were tuned into.
You look at those drawings that were done 70 years ago,
and even though the technology has changed over the years...
the core principles of character and the emotion that started back w--
Snow White are still alive today.
I'm Marc Smith, and I'm a director of story at Disney Animation.
I've been at Disney for 29 years. It's the only job I've ever had.
I think the reason that I've stayed at Disney for so long
is that there's no shortage of challenges.
Every movie has its own difficulties.
I've had the blessing to work on Tangled, Frozen, the first Frozen,
Big Hero 6, Zootopia,
and then for the last three and half years it's been Frozen 2.
We're sort of the front line of all things visual,
and it includes the staging, the acting of the characters, cinematography.
We get into editing, how are the shots flowing together.
But, I think primarily, the story artist's job
is to really establish emotionally what's going on with the character.
One of the things I'll do is go back to my office, and I get to shut my door
and isolate myself from the busyness of the world
and then just sit with the sequence.
Some notes came back from editorial
about having Anna when she sees this Lieutenant Mattias,
she recognizes him.
So she's doing the little framing thing with her hands.
The challenging part,
the important part, is being able to immerse yourself
in these characters and in the moment
and being able to feel like the drawing is alive and thinking,
and some scenes are harder than others.
Really sad scenes or songs where the character's really emotionally upset,
those can be taxing on you because you have to feel that yourself
in order to make it believable in the drawing.
But this is a little bit more of a zen time,
where you can just sort of get lost in the world of these characters.
[chuckling] Look, guy's just looking at her like she's crazy.
That's the new little moment that the directors were asking for.
"I can think of something. Sven keep us steady, will you?"
Another thing we do in the process is meet with our storyboard artists
and issue them scenes to be boarded and to put in front of the directors.
So, this morning we were meeting with Sylvia Lee, one of the board artists.
She was issued one of the final scenes that's out there right now for Frozen 2.
-[laughs] -[chattering]
We read through the script pages that Jen Lee had written.
"Exterior. Back of the wagon. Olaf sleeps cutely under an ice blanket.
Elsa sleeps under her mother's scarf. Anna climbs up front with Kristoff.
'They're asleep.' 'Anna? [clears throat] Anna?'"
"'Remember our first trip like this when I said
you'd have to be crazy to wanna marry a man that you just met?'
'You didn't say I was crazy. You think I'm crazy?'"
We talked a little bit about what we wanted it to look like.
[Lee] When she says, "So, what do you wanna do?" What does she mean by that?
-Does she wanna kiss him or... -[laughs]
He's thinking he's going to propose to her.
She's thinking, "Oh, he's gonna lean over and kiss me."
The magic, I think, of animation is that we can just be looking at drawings,
or computer stills run at a frame rate of 24 frames per second
and believe that these are living, breathing characters.
It is magical. It draws you in, and that's the goal, right?
You can make people feel, then that's why we go to the movies.
[Lemay] "You didn't say I was crazy. You think I'm crazy?"
Like, that is just...
The fantastic part about being in the story department
is you get to be part of that first step, and then you get to watch
as it goes through all the other departments down the line,
and you just watch everything lift.
Sometimes I'll go to the park, to Disneyland.
All the boys and girls will get in line to meet Anna and Elsa.
And you look at 'em, and they're dressed in the outfits.
They're dressed as little Annas or little Elsas.
It hits me every single time.
And I look at these kids and how much it means to them,
how much inspiration that can provide for that future generation.
To be a part of creating that,
knowing that you're gonna have work put out into the world,
and millions of people, if not billions over time, might be able to see it.
As an artist, how do you get any better than that?