Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1343869
F E AT U R E All images courtesy of Walt Disney Animation Studios. 32 KEYFRAME statement about community. We tried different ways—is it about creating hope, inspiring others, working together?" There were false starts and detours, but with the arrival of two new directors, Don Hall and Carlos López Estrada, and an additional screenwriter, Qui Nguyen, joining screenwriter Adele Lim, the theme began to gel. "We felt like this idea of trust would give us the specificity that the movie needed," Hall said. "In a broken world, you can't trust anybody, versus the world is broken because you don't trust anybody." Once Lusinsky and the other depart- ments had a theme they could reflect visually, they explored cinematography techniques to convey it. They created film LUTs inspired by the out-of-print Kodak 5289 film stock. "Trust had the most color and had less contrast," he says, "[and] we had the grainiest, like 16mm grain, in the distrust. It's much harder and more con- trasty as well." "The strongest trust would [also] be the shallowest depth of field moments," Lusinsky adds, with prominent bokeh shapes in the background. Lighting Supervisor Gregory Culp recalls how this works in a scene in which Raya is talking to her father, the one person in the world she trusts. "In order to portray that trust, we took the roof off of the kitchen, and one of the lighting artists, Steve Null, painted a dappled light setup that would hit very specific spots of the room." Shiny objects were set dressed into the background— cans, pots, and pans with reflective qualities. This enabled the bokeh effect Lusinsky describes, giving the space warmth and keeping the focus on the intimacy between Raya and her father. Just as trust was tested in the movie's story, it was also put to the test on the production side. "We had planned on having a very heavy process of delegation," says VFX Supervisor Kyle Odermatt. "That was a direction we talked about long before 2020. But when it came time to work from home, we actually doubled down. We got initial direction from the directors and then let the supervisors and artists really run with [it]."