Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1474486
j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 2 c g w 9 language we had to make our own backlot. That was the strength of having a modeling art department; we were able to replenish our pieces and make a new movie." Extensive graphics were required. "If you go onto a battleship or warship or military tank and look around, all of the decals tell information. There are caution signs. It's all meant to give a believability that these buttons do everything. [Art director] Paul Conrad and his team were able to go in and give that life. If the decals are not there it feels like something is missing." Ian Megibben and Jeremy Lasky shared cinematography duties for the film. "I would work closely with the layout department and Jeremy Lasky, and would set up lighting kits for them while they were blocking both with characters and their camera moves," remarks Megibben. "The first thing for us was to figure out was how far we were going to lean into the realism of how physics and light react. But at the end of the day, we veered more to the side of photorealistic but at the same time with an illustrative and stylized bent to it. Once we got out into outer space, we had to have more lighting cues that were localized to Buzz, such as the instrument panel that is illuminated with self-illuminated buttons." None of the camera shakes and lens flares were accidental. "Chia-Chi Hu, my compositing supervisor, and I got a lens package and a camera and went onto a sound stage to shoot different lens tests. We talked about what we liked about different lenses and actually came up with our procedural lens flare package inside of our compositing soware Nuke." When Buzz flies around the sun, it was important to convey a sense of peril and heat. "We tended to overexpose those shots from a lighting standpoint," states Megibben. "We're throwing away information because the exposure and the dynamic range is so crushed you can't see Buzz clearly all of the time; that actually heightens the sense of danger." Watral and the effects team made a handshake deal with the lighting artists. "We said to them, 'We have these simulations that can be cached out to a regular speed, half speed, quarter speed, or a static version. You can choose any one of those versions you want on this pulldown in Katana. You pick the silhouette you want and the speed for the scale, then place it in the scene and dress it around. We originally explored ways, maybe at render time, of re-rasterizing these grids into voxels [units of graphic information in three-dimensional space] that are larger and further away while the closeup voxels are not. But in the end, what we found is if we let RenderMan do its thing, it was mostly okay as long as we had these layers split out on a separate layer and lighting had control over it. We could iterate on those independently and had enough time." The film pays homage to the original Space Ranger uniform worn by Buzz Lightyear in Toy Story. "We definitely wanted the Buzz suit to reflect the toy, but we also thought of the manufacturing," states Evatt. "If the toy was manufactured from a third-party company, it would not have gotten the details right, or maybe they were restricted in the manufacturing of the toy. NASA let us walk through to see their suits, as we wanted to add some realism to them." The proper silhouette and poses for the hard suit were not easy to achieve. "We would be in pre-production and say, 'Buzz can't raise his arms. What are we going to do?'" remarks animation supervisor Animation Supervisor David DeVan Co-Cinematographer Ian Megibben Production Designer Tim Evatt Effects Supervisor Bill Watral Producer Galyn Susman Director Angus MacLane