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Island Time MOANA Walt Disney Animation Studios Landscape: Pacific Island Production Designer: Ian Gooding Set on the fictional island of Motunui, Moana captures the lush beauty of the Pacific Islands and the ocean that surrounds them. Originally from Jamaica, the film's Production Designer Ian Gooding thought that being from a small island in the tropics would be beneficial to his job. "But it turned out to be helpful in the opposite direction, which was that I wanted it to not look like it could be in Jamaica," he says. Gooding points out that the islands in the Pacific are formed differently due to the nature of their volcanic eruptions. As a result, they tend to have reefs going all the way around which give them "a very specific look and a very specific kind of wave action." Because of this, he learned about how islands differ geologically so that he and his crew would be able to highlight these differences. The ocean is an integral part of the film, and much of the action takes place on the water as Moana sets out on her voyage. At the start, Gooding and his team "looked into a lot of … methods of stylizing the water so that it looked like tattoos and all sorts of interesting things," he says. But ultimately, they felt it would be better to try and capture what was so spectacular about these places in real life. One example is the way that light interacts with clear water and the white coral sand beneath it, or what he calls "the spectacular dance of light." Gooding explains that the whole movie got a color script to show how color would be used in any given sequence. When the action took place far out to sea, the ocean was given deep ultramarine colors as opposed to the shades of turquoise you get closer to the shore where the white sand is visible beneath. The ocean itself is a character in the film, choosing Moana to return the heart to the mythical mother island, Te Fiti. When the ocean became a sentient creature, the artists reserved a very specific blue-green color for those scenes. The intention was to help cue the audience that the "ocean is going to do something magical now," says Gooding. At the same time the challenge was not to make it so obvious that it would take viewers out of the movie. The fictional Motunui, says Gooding, "was inspired by the three islands that were where anthropologists believe initial [Polynesian] migrations ended: Tonga, Fiji, and Samoa." For research, he and his team visited Samoa, Bora Bora, Tetiaroa Atoll, and the tiny island of Manana, to drink in the experience of the quieter pace of life and immerse themselves in the ancient culture. When Gooding first landed in Samoa, he was surprised to find it looked exactly like Jamaica. He learned the flora F E AT U R E 18 KEYFRAME