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www.postmagazine.com 16 POST JULY 2018 SUMMER MOVIES BACK TO THE FUTURE ARTISTS AT PIXAR ANIMATION STUDIO EMBRACE NEW TOOLS & TECHNIQUES TO CREATE INCREDIBLES 2 BY BARBARA ROBERTSON n realtime, Disney Pixar's Incredibles 2 takes place 14 years after the first film, but in "Incredible" time, it's only a few months later. Superhero stunts are illegal in Municiberg, the Parr family's hometown, so Mr. Incredible/ Bob (Craig T. Nelson) and Elastigirl/Helen (Holly Hunter) have been lying low, raising their kids Violet, Dash and baby Jack-Jack, and hiding their superpowers. Violet seems almost like a normal high school kid. Dash plays video games. Jack- Jack has a few teeth now. "I thought about aging [the Parr family], and then I thought, 'That sucks,'" says Brad Bird, who wrote and directed both films. "That's about as deep as it went." Instead, he switched up the family dynamic. The film opens with a wild action scene as Mr. Incredible (primarily) tries to stop the villain Underminer, who is attacking the city. But havoc ensues, and the government decides to completely shut down the program that protected "supers." The Parrs have two weeks left in a subsidized motel room and no way to pay the bills. Fortunately, a rich brother and sister team, whose father loved superheroes, wants to bring back the supers. Rather than promoting Mr. Incredible, though, they choose Elastigirl — Helen — as their super star. Bob must stay home and take care of the kids. And, what a home. The Deavor siblings have given the Parrs a futuristic home with sliding floors above a swimming pool, a rain curtain and other inventions. There, Bob does his best to be a doting father, even though Violet suffers teenage angst, Dash is determined to be a superhero, and Jack- Jack...well, Jack-Jack has more superpower than any of them — powers unleashed by the toddler's random whims. A hilarious fight with a raccoon demonstrates Jack-Jack's ability to replicate himself, shoot laser beams from his eyes, become invisible, walk through walls, set himself on fire and, later, become a demon baby. Bob tries to control him with cookie bribes. "He's still a baby," Bird says. "He has only limited control over his powers. What interests him is what interests a baby." Meanwhile, Helen has her first superhero assign- ment — to save a runaway train — a train running away in reverse. And with that, back to realtime. Fourteen years after the first film, technology has advanced, artists have become more proficient, and the result — complex visuals, spectacular effects and amazing animation — is on screen. "We'd been gone a few years," says producer John Walker, who had worked with Bird on The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and the live-action film Tomorrowland. "I was surprised by the level of com- petency and artistry that the crew exhibited. Pixar has always been a great place, but it is stunning how great the people have become. And they're so young. They're embarrassingly good." "Humiliatingly good," Bird says. Take that runaway train sequence, for example RIDING THAT TRAIN Evelyn Deavor has invented an elastic motorcycle for Helen that she uses to fly, flip and race through the city to catch the runaway train. "Ryan Heuett [layout artist] designed the city according to Helen's ability to move through traffic," says Mahyar Abouosaeedi, camera and staging supervisor. "Brad kept saying, 'faster, faster.' Once she's on the rooftops, she has to hop from building to building, and things felt haphazard. So, we spread out the buildings to give her longer jumps less often." The bike stretches apart and comes back togeth- er magnetically. She sends it ahead and uses her elasticity to parkour through the buildings to catch up. Sometimes, literally through. Six effects artists created the tire smoke, glass destruction, sparks and explosions for the sequence. Effects technical director Michael Catalano was responsible for the tire smoke, effects TD Ferdi Scheepers shattered the glass in a building, effects TD Amit Baadkar was the artist on sparks and Michael Hall handled elasticycle explosions as it crashed into the tunnel wall, creating a volume effect with sparks added on top. As Elastigirl races after the train, we see a big city in the background. CITYSCAPE "From a sets perspective, the city is terrifying," says sets supervisor Nathan Fariss. "We have to build, ar- range, age, weather and treat the buildings in a way that makes them feel normal. You know inherently when it's wrong. But, we decided to not be afraid. We decided to build a real 3D city with suburbs, manufacturing districts, an old town." One goal was to give the director flexibility. "Brad had been away for a while, so at the beginning of the show we had a long breakfast, brunch, lunch, dinner," says production designer Ralph Eggleston. "I told him what's going on at Pixar now, the new technology we have, and how we wanted to work. It boiled down to a simple idea: 'Brad, tell your story. We'll make it happen. Let's not waste time figuring out whether we can or can't. Let's just say we can.'" To link this film with the previous one, they worked backward from the original. "We can cheat, but we have to account for it," says Eggleston. "We intentionally withheld what we can do technically now until the moment where the Underminer goes underground. Then we show what we can do now." Action scenes start with layout artists and set dressers working together to determine how long a street should be and what it should contain. "Because we're using ray casting [Renderman RIS], we want to be sure that if we take some- thing out, it isn't contributing," Fariss says. "That things outside a square contribute to rendering what's in a square. We have to look at the whole." Once editorial provided the shots that would be in a cut, the artists did final camera dressing and fine-tuned the CG world for each shot by using elements from a library to draw the eye to a par- ticular area. For instance, bushes might be added to a shot to frame a shape, dead leaves placed in a swimming pool, and so forth. "We model all the props, the architecture, veg- etation, vehicles and skies," Fariss says. "We build everything. Every chair, lamp, toaster, tree, pots and pans, bikes, radio towers. We had a team of about 10 people creating a warehouse full of ran- dom things. The mid-century design of the film is about straight lines and broad shapes, so we have to be very careful about that as we go." Shading artists added color and texture, and determined how the objects would react to light. I