When you see Elio this weekend, hang around for the end credits and keep an eye out for the name Matthew Silas. He’s a CU Boulder grad, and he’s working for Pixar Animation Studios in layout.

“Layout is the department that comes after story,” Silas tells me over the phone from Berkeley, California. “We’re basically involved in preparing the shots—the staging and the blocking—for the rest of the digital filmmaking pipeline.”

And he’s been doing it for 19 years. Silas started at Pixar as an intern on Cars (2006) and then professionally joined the studio for Wall-E (2008). Four years later, he became the layout lead for Brave, the position he holds on Elio, a sci-fi comedy about a young boy mistakenly abducted by aliens.

“With every film, I feel like we’re pushing on the limits of large-scale computer animation and finding new ways to do things that propel the art forward and remove creative constraints from our directors so they can push further and harder,” Silas says. “When you see Elio, you’ll see visuals that I don’t think you’ll have ever seen before.”

The intersection of all things

“It’s funny,” Silas says. “Pixar is this crazy connection point between technology, filmmaking and the animation I loved as a kid.”

Born in California, raised and educated in Colorado, Silas studied at CU in the 1990s but decided against a direct path to filmmaking even if it was his ultimate destination.

“I really felt like filmmaking and storytelling required a knowledge of a lot more than just filmmaking, so I really tried to go broad and touch a lot of different areas,” he says. That’s how he wound up with a “crazy degree” of humanities, fine arts, French, and computer science.

But before the studies came the show: The Ramblin’ Rod Show, which Silas watched while spending summers at his father’s home in Portland, Oregon.

“Ramblin’ Rod [Rodney Carl Andersen] was this guy who dressed up as a sea captain,” Silas explains. “His show was basically to interview the kids who came on and then play Warner Bros. cartoons.”

A light bulb went off while watching those Looney Tunes.

“It occurred to me that people were actually making those cartoons,” he recounts. That prompted a trip to the library, “grabbing every book I could about animation and trying to figure out how the heck it was done.”

Silas then started making his own animation. He was 12.

“I was taping pieces of paper to the back window like a light table so I could draw and sketch,” he says.

And those books weren’t just a guide of how-to but a revelation of who.

“I was like: ‘Oh my gosh, there are all these people who are layout artists, and there’s a cameraperson, there’s a director, and there’s a writer, and there are people who do ink and paint, and there are people who do backgrounds,’” he says. “There was this whole field of people who were working together to make these cartoons. And I thought, ‘That would be a lot of fun to figure out a way to work in that world.’”

So Silas created a studio in his Colorado basement: “I built my own light table, I got down there, and I started drawing.”

But the work of an animator, painstakingly reproducing image after image with slight variations to give the illusion of life and movement, isn’t a social activity.

“It was a lot of hours by myself,” he says. And his friends weren’t interested in helping: “They didn’t really want to come down and paint cells or paint backgrounds or whatever.”

That loneliness led Silas to live-action endeavors.

“I got into theater, and a lot of my theater friends were really interested in film, so we started making these short films,” he recounts. “We went up to Georgetown, Colorado, and made a 45-minute Western. I got my high school drama teacher to come and play the drunk mayor. And suddenly it was like, ‘Wow! This is awesome.’ Being with a bunch of people, pulling these things together, together, was great.”

Inside the Emeryville dream factory

When Silas joined Pixar, his passions converged.

“This is like combining the pursuits in the basement, but I’m doing it with a whole bunch of people,” he says. “A great balance of the two.”

Founded in the 1970s, Pixar came to prominence in the 1990s and 2000s as the new benchmark mark for quality animation—a position it has maintained thanks to artists and technicians like Silas, not to mention the Pixar touch, which Silas identifies as a deep care for the “melting pot of storytelling.”

“Creating stories and characters who really connect with our audience,” he explains. “You can go from a whole crazy crew of interesting aliens in one film to a kid who is going through puberty and turns into a giant red panda, and it feels like every single one of our films is doing something interesting and fun and unique and I feel really grateful to work with the directors and storytellers we have.”

The above interview first appeared in the pages of Boulder Weekly Vol. 32, No. 46, “The animated life.”