It always amazes me how much goes into making a movie. Most people think somebody writes a script, they draw it, add some voices, and then done. It doesn't work that way. Everything is right and perfect for a movie due to the research that is done. Even if a movie is animation, they do an incredible amount of research. Things look real because of this!

We were invited to a campfire and smores with Director Peter Sohn, Producer Denise Ream, Supervising Technical Director Sanjay Bakshi and Director of Photography – Lighting, Sharon Calahan. Unfortunately, it did rain that day, so we were moved indoors. We got to enjoy the Pixar fireplace instead. They even had a singing cowboy for us to enjoy:

Peter went through and told us the amount of research that went into The Good Dinosaur.

I have to tell you that Peter was amazing to talk to and to listen to. This guy is from New York. He had never really been out in “nature” before they did the research for The Good Dinosaur. We laughed about how excited he was to be out there. (As somebody who lives in Chicago and grew up in Wisconsin, I always laugh when I take people home with us, they are always amazed about how you can see the stars. It is something not easily visible here.). One of my favorite quotes of Peter has to be:

Everything is so large it makes you feel tiny and so you start to have a weird kind of feeling of growth where you get very inward.

You realize your insignificance in the world and how nature is always changing things. Denise had a great comment about how nature changes things:

Yellowstone has this geothermic features where there’s steam blowing at everything and all this bubbly water, and from year to year, it changes a lot. You see a lot of photos of some of these areas that have a lot more water, and you go there and it’s like oh, where’d all the water go. We’d always be asking the guys question about why is it different and they never really know. They just kind of chalk it up to the plumbing always changing.

Isn't that the truth for humans too? We are all changing all the time. Who knew that the a little dinosaur named Arlo could make us look into ourselves as we watch nature and his situation changing from what he knows.

The T-rexs in The Good Dinosaur are modeled after cowboys/ranchers. To help them with this, this team went to a ranch to learn what being a rancher is. Remember, Peter is from New York. He knows buses and never had been on a horse for real. Ranching was a rude awakening for him! He told us that they basically learned on the job. They learned by doing (which is actually how I learn best myself). To quote Peter:

We went out there thinking that we were just going to look at some cows and ride some horses, but that family, I swear to you, blew me away in terms of what that lifestyle was and what it was like living out there. I had no idea what a working horse was like.

He had so many great stories from the ranch. There is a scene in The Good Dinosaur where they tell stories around the campfire. It reminds me of our evening and hearing their stories.

The Good Dinosaur opens November 25. It is a must see movie.