Fri May 31 - 11:00 (Amsterdam)

Yesterday, Thursday, May 30, we woke up early to catch the tram down to the business district so we could see the Pixar: Amsterdam Expo (25 Years). The exhibit was fantastic. It told how Pixar started in the 1980s and grew into the wildly popular company it is today. Ed Catmull got into computer technology when he was in college and started to develop computer 3D models and animation. George Lucas took an interest in Ed Catmull and he started doing animation work for Lucasfilm. Then John Lasseter had gone to school for animation and worked for Disney for a short time. He worked on a computer animated short for them about a toaster. They said the only reason they would want computer animation is if it made things cheaper or faster. John couldn't believe that they did not see more potential than that. Once he finished his draft of the toaster short, they let him go.

So Lasseter and Catmull started working on short films and even some commercials. That is when Steve Jobs, a millionaire from starting Apple at the time, took an interest in them. They all decided to go into business together and they formed the company, Pixar. They made some award winning animated shorts. Then they finally got the opportunity to make a fill-length film. They teamed up with Disney who was doing the distribution. It was interesting that they signed on Tom Hanks and Tim Allen and no one even knew what the end result was going to really look like. They actually had to change some characters and lines because Disney wanted it to be more cynical and for adults. They realized that version was not what they wanted to tell so they re-wrote the story and characters. Once it hit theaters, it was a huge success.

Their second movie, A Bug's Life, was just as hard, if not harder for them to make because there were many more scenes and locations than in Toy Story. When it was successful in theaters as well, they had gotten over the second movie slump and had tons of support, but they needed more money to expand into a studio to increase their production. Steve Jobs decided to make the company public and got over 100 million dollars. After Toy Story 2's success, they decided to release a movie every year. Pixar made hit movie after hit movie and it caused a large shift of jobs from 2D to 3D animation. Disney fired a lot of very talented 2D artists because there was no need for them anymore. After Michael Eisner left Disney as CEO, Disney hired someone as CEO who was more interested in Pixar. In 2006, Disney bought Pixar with the agreement that Pixar would still have creative control over all their movies. Now Pixar is the biggest and most award-winning company in the 3D animation business. This whole story of how Pixar became Pixar was shown in a movie in the exhibit.
The exhibit had other great things such as the Toy Story Zoetrope and the Artscape, which was a room with 3 projectors that when combined created a panoramic screen. The Artscape used drawings from the development of all the movies in combination with sounds to create textures of certain scenes from each movie.

The halls of the expo featured  original and early sketches of all their movies. Also, sculptures, colorscapes, color testes, paintings, and diagrams of characters with notes on their personalities and movements lined the walls and filled display cases. Near the end, they played all the animated shorts by Pixar on screens. They had a table with tablets with videos about every process when making a film from initial ideas, storyboards, words, color schemes, music and sound, development, finishing the movies, and behind the scenes footage. We even got a picture with Mike and Sully (life sized statues) which was a promotion for the new movie, Monsters University, which comes out this year.

The Expo did an amazing job explaining Pixar's development and all the work that goes into making every Pixar movie.

After we finished the Expo, we took the tram back to the Rijksmuseum and walked to the Heineken Brewery where we took the Heineken Experience tour.

It told the history of how the company started and explained the whole beer making process to us. We had a taste test to learn how to drink the beer. I didn't know that the foam at the top keeps carbonation in your beer and oxygen out, which keeps your beer tasting fresh. Sipping your will cause you to drink the foam so they suggested to fill your whole mouth with beer so you will drink the beer underneath the foam.

The tour had many things to do to my surprise. There was places were you could take pictures of yourself with pretend backgrounds and email them to your family and friends. They had many touchscreen activities. They even had a lounge chair that you laid back in with a screen above you where you could watch videos about the Heineken company. It finished up with 2 free beers at the end of the tour. We got to pour our own draught Heineken and we got certificates saying that we are draught masters!

After the tour, we walked to the Heineken Brand Store that was a few blocks away and got our free gift, which was a Heineken beer opener.

Ricky and I walked back towards our room and tried to find a pizza place, but we passed a bunch of restaurants with no luck. We ended up just eating at the same thai place we ate at 2 days ago. Ricky got fried rice with chicken and I got chicken with cashews and rice.
After dinner, we went back to our room. We then left to buy train tickets at Amsterdam Central but we were not successful. We just came back to our room and I skyped with Barbara before going to bed early.
When we woke up, we went to the Clean Brothers laundromat to do laundry. Once we dropped off our clothes at our room, we went to the train station and got 2 tickets for Brussels. Our train left at 10:55 and we should be there at 13:00 or 13:30.