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PIXAR'S SPARKSHORTS www.postmagazine.com 25 POST JULY/AUG 2020 Lighting was inspired by live-action movies. Some assets come from Pixar's past films. The floating effect is graceful. the house. We went as dark as we could. Michael Sparber, director of photography, was amazing." To this end, Rubio and the lighters looked to live-action movies for inspiration, and one scene of the father and son in the house by the window is in full silhouette — dark with black around them. The inspiration for that was the film E.T. Rubio's team mainly used tools from the Pixar box to craft the short. The biggest technical hurdle, according to the director, was the child's hooded jacket when the hood was pulled over Alex's head. "We didn't have a huge budget, so we tried to cheat as much as we could. We showed a little bit of a hand going over the head, but we didn't go completely over the head. Also, I wanted the dad to take off the jacket completely, and that was difficult. We cut corners for that, too," says Rubio. "You see dad start to take the jacket off and then it cuts to another shot, and we come back and the jacket is completely off of Alex." Creating the tears Alex sheds after his father's outburst was quite the challenge, as well. But, there were just some elements to the short that were too important to skip, despite the difficulty they presented. "They were really important pieces of the film, and I am super grateful that Jane Yen, supervising technical director, and her team were able to pull them off," says Rubio. Completing the short in the given time period required cutting a full minute from the film. "That was a tough one. We went right down to the wire. But I feel like we were successful," Rubio adds. "I still miss that one minute. Maybe there will be a director's cut some day," he says wistfully. As for the float animation, the timing couldn't have been better to tackle that, as many of the ani- mators were just coming off Incredibles 2, in which Jack-Jack flies. "We were looking for more of a graceful Peter Pan type of gliding across the screen for Alex, as opposed to Superman's powerful directional flight or Jack-Jack's tumbling," Rubio points out. Despite the emotional toll the film took, Rubio relishes the opportunity to direct. It also gave him the chance to learn the pipeline, something he nev- er experienced before as a storyboard artist. "As a director, you get to see the pipeline from the beginning to end, from story to character de- signs, to the art department and to the sets — how they are built — and animation," he says. "This is a totally different animal from traditional animation [which he previously did at Disney]." Plus, there are the music and lighting elements, too. "All the way from beginning to end, it was a big education for me and I thoroughly enjoyed it," says Rubio. "It was a big learning curve to go through in just six months, but I am confident that if I had to do it again, that I could."