WEN: And it all

starts with one very

simple thing, a pencil test.

A pencil test to me is

the purest form of what

it is that we do of animation.

For us, the pencil test is the

first reveal of a performance,

in its rawest form.

A pencil test is when you

find out how bad you are.

I've done a lot of

pencil tests actually.

When I was in college, when I

first started in this business,

that was probably the first

time I really had a sense

of what the potential was.

And we were still

working with film.

So you would sh**t, hope

to God you timed it right,

and wait eight weeks for

the film to come back,

which now seems crazy.

As painful as it

might be, it gives you

a really good

grounding and starts

to get it into your head

what a 24th of a second

really feels like.

It's a blink of an

eye for everybody.

But for an animator, you have

to know what that period of time

means in terms of

certain actions.

You have to know what a

24th of a second feels like.

It was rough and wild,

but the forms had weight.

And it was magic.

And I thought that to get it

work at Disney, to animate,

you needed to draw a

perfectly like Sleeping Beauty

and I didn't do that.

I didn't know it was possible

to animate like that.

Something pretty

amazing about a pencil

test that it didn't have color.

And really the artifice or

the fact that it was drawn

with a pencil was evident.

When you just have

stacks of paper,

you don't really get a

sense of the movement

and the timing and

the performance

until you see it playing

through the camera's eye.

A first peek, it's kind

of birth, if you will,

for an animated scene.

So there's a vitality that is

in the very first pencil test

after you sh**t them that is

very exciting, very exciting.

You're taking something

that only exists here.

Nobody else in the

universe has it.

It's only here.

And it's coming out of your hand

and it's going onto the paper

or on the screen.

And those lines

are going to define

that thing that's in your head.

But it's not just going

to define it as an image,

you're using all

four dimensions.

You're using height,

width, depth, and time.

And all of those to create

something that lives.