Original subtitles

We're animation nerds who love this medium.

If you can do it in live-action, then we don't want to do it.

So we would have to come up with even crazier things.

We definitely had to make some big swings

in order to arrive at something that was uniquely ours.

Okay. This show is going to be weird.

Pete Docter, Meet the Pickles.

At Pixar Animation Studios we've done 27 feature films now,

and they're all super hard.

They're fun, but they always blow up and then stuff happens

and we have to scramble to put it back together.

We're used to that. We understand the challenge.

When long-form streaming started coming up,

we were like, "Woah. This looks really intriguing."

All of the conventions and things that we've gotten used to

are out the window.

How do we make something that is broken up into smaller bites,

continue to grab people from one week to the next.

It probably uses completely new technology.

There are probably all sorts of problems we have no idea how to solve.

So, let's do it.

Come on, look alive! Game day, folks!

Win or Lose is our first long-form series.

It's an eight-episode series

where we follow a coed middle school softball team

in the week leading up to their championship game.

We're making roughly eight episodes, 18 minutes each.

You're talking about 145-or-so minutes.

So it's longer than one of our feature films.

That's a lot of animation to produce.

And in a shorter amount of time.

Most of our films, 90 minutes, take about five years to make.

If you do the math, 145 minutes would take about eight years.

Well, we told these guys, "You got four."

Challenge accepted. Here we go.

We are a smaller show than most, and so we have to do more with less.

In terms of ambition,

I don't know if any of us knew what we were signing up for.

One of the big things we wanted to have was an ensemble cast.

You can't do that in a film.

You can't spend as much time with each character.

A multi-protagonist story.

Streaming is the perfect format for that.

This show doesn't have one main character

that we can put all of our people behind.

We have eight that are on equal footing in terms of their importance.

You are all winners.

Each episode is following a different main character.

And we get to work our way up to that game, through the perspective

and through the lens of a completely different character.

-Say "Pickles." -Pickles!

You get a chance to walk in someone else's shoes for a week

and see what the problem is in their life

and then experience that through animation.

Each character has what we're calling their own animation device.

And this is almost like a personified glimpse of their emotions.

Practice, practice. Come on, you can do it.

For Laurie, softball brings more stress 'cause she's trying to impress her dad.

Laurie's story, her problem being anxiety.

How we feeling? I'm feeling goodish-bad.

How do you move past that, and how do you shake that off?

Her confidence is not there.

And, of course, there's the pressure of her dad being the coach of the team.

The coach inflates up to a huge blimp.

Strike two!

Van is a very hard-working mom.

Van's mommy magic, which is all rainbows and sparkles.

She's bringing color with her to this dull environment.

She's the person that comes into the office

and she brightens everyone's day.

Guess what? It's Rochelle's playoff game today!

Rochelle is the catcher. It's a tough position to play.

Rochelle, the world comes apart

and floats whenever she feels stressed out.

We have Frank's armor.

He's the umpire and he has to make the calls.

And some people don't agree with his calls.

And so, in order to deal with that, he's built this armored shield.

Yuwen, who's the macho pitcher on the team,

his main animation device is that you go inside his little paper craft heart.

Please like me.

Ira is this character that sees the world

through his toilet paper periscope.

We have Ira's 2D animation world, which slots

into the 3D world through his kaleidoscope.

Another character we have is our character, Kai,

who's the new kid in town trying to find where she belongs.

Kai, the flying and the sinking.

Flying when she feels like

she's really helping people and feeling really successful,

to when she shuts down, she sinks below the ground

into a sunken place.

It's great fun to try to figure out a new idea for every single episode.

The cool thing about this show is that, because it's about perspective,

sometimes I would grow more attached to one character

and Michael grow more attached to the other.

You do have a point on the exit.

He's almost coming in like he's the savior here.

It helped make the episode stronger because we'd be arguing

from that different character's perspective.

I'm not quite getting the idea of the gut punch

to motivate his arms being flung forward.

And taking both of our points of view and mashing 'em together,

always constantly bettering each other's work as we go.

I never worked with two directors

who also carry the equal footing on the show,

and just seeing both Yates and Carrie merge

and it becomes the overall voice of the show,

it was just very beautiful to watch.

Carrie and Michael were story artists at Pixar for a while,

and for a little bit there, they were office mates.

And so we would talk a lot.

Always pitching ideas back and forth, showing each other our scenes.

And one thing we noticed was we would often have

different impressions of the same event.

We always talked about it.

Like, why are our perceptions of this different?

We'd always be analyzing how we each had a different interpretation

of how a meeting went.

One of us was like, "That was terrible."

And the other was like, "No, it was fine. What are you talking about?"

The spirit of that idea gave birth to the idea

of Win or Lose and how we all experience things differently.

We'd start meeting up after hours.

We would go to like local coffee shops and just brainstorm different things.

Sometimes we would improv dialogue as well as a way of writing,

-just like start to become the character. -No!

Michael is always drawing.

Yeah, I draw all the time.

He's got a sketchbook that's brilliant.

I carry sketchbooks with me everywhere.

Full of just constantly, like, riffing on who these characters are.

What it looks like when they act, what their design is.

And a lot of times, it was just us

talking about like our own families, life experiences,

like Vanessa, who's, like, the single mom.

And that was something that was really interesting to me,

to tell a story of a single mom 'cause my mom was a single mom.

My sister is a single mom. Like Rochelle, for example.

This is me at this age.

When I was in middle school, I used to, like, always try to make money.

I think I just wanted to buy video games.

The first initial pitch was like, you go to the school classroom,

and then each episode you follow a different kid home

and you see what their home life is like. That's what the episode would be.

Then Carrie, who played softball as a kid, was like, "What if it's a softball team?"

There's different personalities, and it was cool,

the girls that I played with weren't who I was going to school with.

I played softball growing up, and it's just such a unique environment.

And the sport itself... Okay, I love it.

Because it has this great metaphor for life.

You're playing this game...

Run, Carrie, run! Go! Go! Go!

...that there's a lot of time where you can think

and you can think on your mistakes.

And so you really have to learn to move on

if you make a mistake, and focus on the next play.

Homerun for Grandpa! Yeah!

Win or Lose has a lot of what we call "perspective views."

And that is like animation fun.

Anxiety, what does that feel like?

Make that into a character.

It seems straightforward, but it's really, really difficult.

Laurie, the voice of her anxiety

is a creature that grows through her entire episode.

Let's just replay all the mistakes you made today.

And it says all the worst thoughts we all have in our head about ourselves.

That's some deep trauma. You wanna unpack that?

We should unpack that now.

And we did many iterations trying to find

what's the right level of derpiness for this thing?

How does it evolve over the course of her episode?

So, in the beginning, Laurie's anxiety is small and insignificant,

and then grows and grows and grows. And what does that turn into?

You want it to be fun. You don't want it to be gross,

like various mud monsters or poo,

frankly...

came up a lot.

Excusez-moi?

And then Lou and I said, okay,

we need to have a bigger idea about what this is.

And we came up with the idea

that Laurie's challenge is between faith and doubt.

I have faith, but sometimes, the doubt creeps in.

And the faith is faith in her father.

But she's wracked with doubt.

And so, we said, "Let's use that metaphor."

So we used faith as, like, the Holy Spirit,

as a metaphor, and doubt would have been the snake.

And so, if you look in the final form of the blob monster,

it's actually just coiled up around her like a giant snake.

We all know, like, Laurie was sort of based on Carrie in some way.

She says she's not Laurie, but she's Laurie in the show.

There's a few similarities between Laurie and I.

My dad was my coach.

My dad, he's just, like, such a good dad and such a good coach

and I really struggled with softball.

I'm not the most coordinated.

Way to go, way to go!

And I always felt like I was letting him down,

and I think I was letting him down.

I learned so much from that time in my life.

Go, Carrie!

It's just so formative, like, being on a team.

I do really relate to Laurie. I do really relate to

that pressure of, like, I'm just looking for approval here,

like, I hate this sport.

-Are you having fun? -Loads.

I liked sports a little bit more than Laurie did,

but I still performed with quite a bit of anxiety.

One of my first coaches was my mom.

So I actually know what it's like

to have, you know, your parent there on the sideline,

maybe critiquing you a little bit more than they're critiquing the other players.

That's always fun, and then going home and talking about it over dinner,

all the mistakes you made.

That's what we're trying to do,

is seep up this sense of being a human and the specificity of what that is

and connect that to the storytelling.

I do see myself probably the most in Ira.

I'm gonna make a fun world for myself.

The Ira episode. When I was a kid,

I had these older friends that I shouldn't have been hanging out with.

I'm not sure why they hung out with me, they were way older.

But it was such a big learning and maturing phase for me.

For Ira's episode, we wanted to make it that he had this real,

like, little kid fantasy universe.

It just seemed like 2D

was a really exciting opportunity to be able to do that.

Whatever you can think of, you can draw.

And I think 2D gave us the flexibility

to be able to really just embrace the imagination of a little child.

We had Ira interacting with Cheryl, who is the snack lady.

When Ira looks at Cheryl through his scope,

you have to match up the 2D with the 3D in the same shot,

which also presented some challenges.

Really interesting questions came up,

like should the 2D element drop a shadow in the 3D world?

When a character is having a perspective moment,

how does that affect the physical world?

Is this something that everyone can see?

Is it something only he can see?

Should this thing that's not real,

that's part of his imagination, affect the world around him?

We decided, no,

because it's something that is only visible to Ira.

It doesn't make sense that it's casting a shadow.

It should just be affecting him.

One of the most exciting parts about this show

is that Carrie and Yates draw from so many things out in the world.

You watch TikTok and YouTube and you just watch all these things.

It's like, it's inspiring, and that gets infused into our show.

-That's my favorite part. -Pure gold, right?

One of the props that we deal with a lot on this show

just comes from the modern age, which is the phone.

Every kid has a phone.

And there's a lot of beats and jokes and whatnot

that come through watching what happens on the phone.

You won't just see a character on their phone, but go in with them.

Like what texting feels like, what dating apps feel like.

And then even when you're a mother looking into your daughter's phone,

what that feels like.

Which is different than when the daughter is in her phone.

And even talking to strangers online. What that feels like.

It just kept evolving as we went.

Could we actually do something where we go in and it actually feels like

there's this whole other world in there,

where you become an avatar and it's more like a video game.

It's a little bit more engaging and relatable.

We tried to make it a unique experience to each one instead of,

"Oh, this is what everyone's digital life is like."

Because, like the show as a whole,

it's their own perspective of what the digital world will feel like.

Lou actually came up with this really cool

8-bit animation style for a video game that Ira is playing.

Almost like an homage to old-school video games.

In Frank's case, he was on a dating app, running around, battling off people

-who want to match with him. -Not you.

Sometimes, when I watch the show, when we get to that dating stuff,

I'm like, "Yeah, we also made that."

There's just so many things. I can't even keep track of it anymore.

Frank hits a little too close to home for me.

I'm much more of a Frank guy.

Give me a sweater vest any day of the week.

The fact that each episode follows a different character

allows you to do these explorations of,

"Okay, how does that character see the world?"

There isn't one reality.

There isn't one way of thinking about the world or seeing situations.

What's unique to that perspective on life

and what are they feeling, and how do we show that feeling?

For instance, Frank, he has to defend himself

from the slings and arrows of the crowd yelling insults at him.

-So what did those insults look like?

And it would just be all hands on deck.

Every department, throwing in ideas to try to figure out

what's the best way to achieve that?

What does it actually mean for the armor to come on?

And how does it come on? Does it come on at once?

Does it just appear? And is there a glowing effect?

You start seeing the stuff that Art is producing,

and suddenly it doesn't become this abstract hypothetical.

It's no longer you just thinking,

"Frank putting on his armor is just a really loose drawing I did."

Suddenly it feels like, "This is what it's gonna be."

It becomes really inspiring

'cause you're no longer trying to conjure something.

You're trying to channel something.

You're seeing the characters as characters.

Strike!

We really wanted to keep the audience

in tune emotionally with where this character was

and never break their train of thought.

So, from the very beginning, Carrie and Yates are very clear

that they want very cool transitions.

Not just transitioning between scenes, but it's also how sets can transform.

One of the first ones we did was Frank in the classroom,

calling back to his memory with his ex-girlfriend.

He's in the classroom, sitting at his desk,

thinking about this memory in a different physical space.

I am always inspired by a live stage show,

how right in front of your eyes

they can move different pieces of the sets.

I always loved that idea of seeing something

that changes in front of your eyes.

And just give them just enough time to slow down

and the camera swung around to match his thoughts.

It's all about timing and the staging.

I proposed that,

"How about we try to do all the transitions in camera?"

When Frank goes into his memory, we built two sets together.

We built the school sets and the apartment sets.

And we merged them together,

so that when the camera's looking one way it's the school,

and a very simple camera movement, becomes his apartment.

So we can just shift between memory and real life seamlessly.

So we have to break the set in order to make that work.

And it's just those little things about filmmaking that I love.

That's cinematic.

And emotionally, that's what the shot needs.

"...removed his heavy helmet."

I think the one who I can relate to the most, it might have been Yuwen

because deflecting emotional feelings

and like leaning more into playing off as a joke.

In the Yuwen episode, when he's pitching,

and it's the way that this character feels.

Here comes the Yuwen Special!

We had to make sure that any motion we did

sold the mechanics of the softball action, which is very important to Carrie.

Carrie initially was really wanting Yuwen,

in his pitch, to be really specific and not too stylized,

'cause we wanted to say that, "He was a powerful, strong pitcher."

Then we had an animator that said, "I'm just gonna try a double windmill."

We showed it to Carrie, and she said,

"You proved me wrong. Let's go that way."

"Are you not entertained"?

Something super important to Michael and I was,

we wanted a very stylized show.

It's okay to be cartoony.

It's okay to push the expressions.

Embracing that it's a caricature of life.

We wanted to hit really big expressions throughout the show.

Super big mouths, cutout mouths.

Perhaps for an expression on someone like Yuwen,

remove the nose and make the mouth extremely large.

He's a very boisterous, loud character.

We saw all these storyboards and they were crazy,

and we were like, "Well, is this even possible?"

And these are all things that are very hard for us to do in characters.

Because we build our characters like a real person,

where the mouth is in one spot and the eyes are in one spot

and you expect those to stick in the same places.

What if we could Mr. Potato Head characters

where we take the ears or nose or mouth from any character

and reassemble them?

Oh, that just breaks my brain.

There was a new process that we created on this show specifically,

which internally we're calling DFF, or Detached Facial Features.

And what that means is that the mouth, the nose, the ears

are all separate pieces.

And you can slide those things around

and position them in weird places to get very specific performance choices.

There was a great test that animator Rob Russ did,

really, in some of the very first DFF,

where he took it, and he, like,

did "The quick brown fox" as a lip-sync thing.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

And just the mouth slides across the face.

And it took a ton of work

to figure out how to then blend the pieces back on.

You no longer have one surface that you're actually shading.

You have multiple parts that you need to make them look as if they were all one.

That's very tricky.

Ana and I, we went through a lot of tests.

We tried to break it as much as possible.

We put freckles in areas where we knew that

the mouth was going to move around.

Take the mouth, run it over the blush area.

What happens with that?

Or we put a character that had a beard

and see what happens when we have this mouth slide around.

Once we get into full production, we're gonna have to balance

both the shading issues and the rigging issues.

There's still some challenges with DFF.

In the end, I mean, it required a lot of hand work to come in

and fix stuff that was broken in DFF.

And yet, it unlocked spontaneity and joy of the animators

to do stuff that they've never done.

There's a freedom that you get as an animator with a character

that's designed in such a stylistic way.

You can push different expressions

in ways that you can't with a realistic character.

Just seeing what you can do when you give the animators

the tools to go out there and play, it's really exciting.

Because this is a wholly original story,

that gives you a lot of freedom and flexibility

to invent a style and a look bespoke to your story.

Initially, the design of the world was to be, every episode is different,

because it's from everyone's perspective.

And as I started to do artwork and we had lots of conversations about it,

we realized that's just going to be disjointed.

What we need is what we call "a default world."

It's much more caricatured than our natural world.

But it is a world that everyone can agree on design-wise.

It also means that we want the tactile quality of it to be soft.

You look at their hair, the grass and the trees,

it all has this tactile softness.

The hair is actually done with fuzz, the same treatment that we would use on,

like, a character's sweater

on a feature. We were like, "What if we modeled the hair

"and used fuzz to get that hair-like detail?"

We wanted to make it look like a felted fuzzy thing,

but it was very nebulous what that was gonna look like.

So we went back and forth a lot between

just finding the style of what this weird piece

of stylistic hair was going to look like.

But we used it as an opportunity to try something different

and said every time we have a challenge, we're gonna make an opportunity

to make a design choice.

So we made a really crazy design choice to simplify all the vegetation and trees.

We ended up using a very similar technology from what the fuzz

and from the hair technology was to create vegetation

and control the leaves and make it feel like vegetation,

but not necessarily have all the detail that you would see in nature.

Let's give it a cartoony, fluffy look.

It still reads as a tree, but that's all you need.

The trees got described as artichokes or corn dogs a lot.

It evolved from there to where it became a game of,

"Can you figure out what food this looks like?"

The trees look like corn on the cob or like heads of lettuce.

So do people's hairstyles.

We have characters, for example, who have, like curly fry hair.

There's cotton candy hair.

Frank's hair, we talked about cinnamon rolls.

And every time we'd come to a question of,

"What does this feel like or look like?"

Someone'd go, "Spaghetti."

Chris had this idea.

"What if we just put, like, a piece of bacon on her face?"

Not real bacon, like a piece of hair that looked like bacon.

Maybe fuzzy? Like a fuzzy piece of bacon.

We must have just been a very hungry crew.

Maybe I'm not feeding them enough.

It's the simple, cute foods.

I don't know where it came from, but it's funny.

Always looking for something that was playful

and maybe a little bit more on the junk food side of things.

It's all like softball field foods.

Anything you can buy at the snack shack is in the world.

The world is built from that.

The sports are sort of the thing that connects everyone.

We never wanted it to be a sports show. It's more of a show about life.

Sprinkle in that softball

-just enough... -Out!

...to make some unique flavor to the show.

But not enough that it becomes the sole focus.

Because this is just a character-driven show,

and that should always remain at the core of it all.

Softball is the vehicle of them just trying to find

their sense of community, their sense of love.

This is not a show that should only be for sports people...

We tried.

...and it is not a show made by only sports people.

Because we're a bunch of artists, and even though I played softball,

I was not the most coordinated.

We definitely have a good mix of those who love sports

and grew up playing sports.

And then we have some folks who would never set foot on a sports field.

There are those kids that, like, have that raw passion or that raw energy

of, "I am getting so much out of this."

And then there's the other kids that are just like,

"My dad signed me up."

We will need a catcher.

-Terrence. -Oh, no.

Obviously, you got a lot of the getting-picked-last as a kid.

I played Little League when I was super, super little,

but my only memory is, like, playing in dirt,

playing with worms, pulling grass out in the outfield.

I came onto the show

with no knowledge about softball whatsoever.

I can now say, "Oh, this person is on first base,"

and I feel very proud of that.

I know that they have innings and not touchdowns.

That's basically all I know about baseball.

It's not baseball, though. It's softball.

It is not baseball. It is softball.

Most of our time is spent thinking about the internal life of characters.

It's not just making a character, it's making this character.

And what we end up doing is we look at ourselves.

Each character is a version of me and Carrie together.

And that's what makes our characters so rich,

hopefully, is that they come from real places.

These are characters that you end up

really, truly, deeply caring about and identifying with.

I relate to all of them.

I feel like every character's struggle is something that's universal.

Wanting the approval of your parent.

Am I good enough?

Wanting friends.

-Bleacher Creatures for life! -Quack, quack!

Wanting to find love.

-I love to cook. -Me, too.

I'm hoping that people see themselves in everybody.

I certainly see a little bit of things that I respond to in everyone.

That tapestry of experience and perspective is,

I think, what's so beautiful about the show.

That's it, buddy.

Hey, good to see everybody.

While there was technical challenges,

I think on this show, more than any show I've been on,

everyone was not only up for the challenge, but pushed it

every opportunity they had.

Making a series like this is certainly very much like

being on a team like the Pickles,

and everybody has their strengths and weaknesses,

and we just come together and try to support each other

and fill in each other's blind spots.

I truly believe that making a movie is a team sport.

Because you have to understand your teammates, what their roles are.

When they pass you something, you know what to do with it.

And you have to pass it to the right person afterwards.

A sports team and a film crew is very similar

in the sense that if I don't pull my weight,

then I'm gonna drag everything down. It's the same pressure.

Either you hit the ball or you don't.

But you have to keep going no matter what.

You can't just stop.

All of that is in service of this idea that we have our own perspective.

And that everyone around us,

no matter what it seems like they're doing,

is living that same experience in their own way.

Win or lose, they come together as a team.

I feel like that's been the story of our show as well.

Everyone on your crew becomes a partner in shepherding this little baby.

We're all its parents.

It's legit now.

Everything's become serious now.

Quiet on set.

I'm sorry. Is that my job?

-Thank you, Carrie. -Okay.

Don't look directly at the camera and like...

Yeah, I had a great time working on this.

My piece is still in place, though?

-Yes. -Okay.

We try to have a base set of...

The airplane. Okay.

Is it a helicopter?

-Airplane. -Okay.

-This is gonna happen all day. -Okay.

Any time he throws a pitch, there's this motion trail

that comes off in the back of the softball.

-Dog.

He's just a bouncing toupee.

Some of the first times we were returning to doing...

-Bird.

More dogs.

Oh. Okay.

Firetruck. Oh, no, hope someone is okay.

It's a new sound every time.

Wow. How many of these do you get a day? Or an hour?

It's not trains, it's sirens, it's planes, it's civilization.

-Say "Pickles." -Pickles!