Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/14320
n n n n Animation worked with art director Daisuke “Dice” Tsutsumi and Unkrich, providing feedback as Tsutsumi developed the color script. Ten, Tsutsumi created color keys, two or three key paintings for each sequence that showed col- ors, values, and mood. White gave those keys to the master lighters on her team of approxi- mately 37. “Tat’s when we did the broad strokes for entire sequences,” White says. “We’d have the lights for the sets and characters—sunlight streaming from a window, bounce light from a floor—the broad strokes.” Individual shot lighters would then add, remove, and move lights to compose the frames for each shot. Te goal was to set the mood, support the sto- ry with emotion, and direct the viewer’s eye. For example, at one point in the film, Buzz locks up Andy’s toys because he doesn’t know who his friends are. He puts them in prison. “During that sequence, we desaturate the lighting so it feels bleak and hopeless,” White explains. “We pull a little saturation out of the saturated Toy Story world over the course of the shot. You don’t know it; you feel it.” By contrast, dappled light gives viewers the At top, an upgraded cloth-simulation engine moved 3D models of Ken and Barbie’s clothes. At bottom, Lotso’s gang plays poker in a sickly yellow light, a color cue that this group of toys is bad. collider. For Toy Story 3, we pretend every ob- ject can interact with every other object. We can select 1000 objects, push a button, and they’re live and active in the simulation process.” Lights Te lighting department also worked with more flexible tools for this film. Te goal was to do more multithreaded, interactive rendering, rather than pushing rendering off to a render- farm, and that meant lighters could work more interactively. “We have eight-core machines on our desktop now, and we’ll soon have 12 cores,” Quaroni says, “So this movie helped us develop the interactive technology. And, we’re using Lumiere in RenderMan now.” Lumiere, explains Kim White, director of photography for lighting, allows the artists to change lights and see rough, quick renders. “It’s a tool we had a while ago, but it got lost in soft- ware changes,” she says. “It caches shading and animation so it only recalculates the lighting. It helps the lighters make faster iterations.” White, who was a lighting supervisor on Ratatouille, decided to incorporate some of the tools developed for saturation and contrast control on that film (see “Most Delicious,” 18 July 2010 July 2007). “We pushed some of the tools fur- ther to get more detail in the darks, more value down at that end,” she explains. “We didn’t use exactly the same color space as Ratatouille, but we wanted that richness.” In addition to Ratatouille, for reference and inspiration White cites the live-action films Amelie and Searching for Bobby Fisher. You can see some beautiful things done with color in Amelie,” she says, “where a lot of the frame is one color, like green, and the character wears another color that pops out, like red. Or, a lot of the frame is yellow. So we looked at that. When Lotso was the center of his little girl’s world, we had one color for a lot of the frame, and let him be the only pink thing. And then when the girl gets a new Lotso, [the aban- doned Lotso], who looks at them through the window, is still pink, but no longer a vibrant pink. Te new Lotso is a pinker thing.” Bobby Fisher inspired a scene in which Woody and the toys are in a cardboard box in the back of a car. “A shaft of light falls on Jessie,” White explains, “but rather than have it fall on her face, we let the bounce light come up on her face.” At the beginning of production, White feeling that Bonnie provides a safe place for her toys. But, when Woody falls out a window, the lighting is harsh and contrasty. “Tat’s why I’m in lighting,” White says. “I love how we can make a viewer feel the story.” Color also helps provide subtext. In this film, blue means safe. Andy’s room and his car are blue. Te characters hide in a blue bin. Red and sickly yellow, on the other hand, are bad. “When the toys get caught by Lotso [who is pink] as they’re trying to escape, they’re under yellowy street lights,” White says. “We do a little of that through the film.” The End? Te first Toy Story opens with a scene of Woody riding on Andy’s back. He does so again in this film, but this time, it’s a bitter- sweet moment. “I wanted to end the toys’ relationship with Andy,” Unkrich says. But, although Andy might disappear, Buzz and Woody could live to infinity and beyond. Pixar’s relationship with the characters won’t end, at least not yet. “We’ve announced that we’re doing a short,” Unkrich says. “People love these characters.” Especially the people at Pixar. “We just want to entertain ourselves,” Katz says. n Barbara Robertson is an award-winning writer and a contributing editor for Computer Graphics World. She can be reached at BarbaraRR@comcast.net.