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LIGHTYEAR www.postmagazine.com 21 POST JULY/AUG 2022 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 photore- alistic, 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," Megibben explains. "We talked about what we liked about different lenses and actually came up with our procedural lens flare package inside of our compositing software, Nuke." When Buzz flies around the sun, it was import- ant 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 pull-down 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-ras- terizing 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. Animation supervisor David DeVan recalls, "We would be in pre-production and say, 'Buzz can't raise his arms. What are we going to do?' We had to accept the limitations. You cheat when you have to cheat it. Part of it is accepting that he is in this big barrel thing and that's part of how he moves. We wanted to incorporate that into the motion and feeling of things. He dives and rolls in a fight scene. Those shots are exciting because they incorporate the limitations and physicality of what's there." Heightening the danger factor of antagonist Zurg (voiced by James Brolin) and his robot army did not require them to be in constant motion. "We always talk about how Yoda doesn't have to do anything," reveals DeVan. "The harder you show them working, the less powerful he must be. You're trying to make characters that have the highest status or danger do as little as possible; it will still be menacing. The camera and cutting help you." Sox, a feline companion robot belonging to Buzz Lightyear, has received much love from fans and critics. "It took a little bit of time to figure out what was successful," explains MacLane. "I've gravitated towards robotic characters as an animator. If it was a realistic cat, it wouldn't be as interesting. There is something charming about that limitation. It felt like something that would be funny to see in the movie." Animalistic traits were taken into consideration for the character. "We went through the gambit of: 'How cat-like is he and does he do cat stuff?' It gets boiled down to what's funny," says DeVan. "Only move a part of the toy that moves. The challenge with Sox early on was it had to have rotational joints on a complex shape, and it took some time to figure out how it was going to work." Much has been made of Tim Allen being replaced by Chris Evans as the voice of Buzz Lightyear. "We knew that we needed to go with somebody different because there would be confusion as it is," explains Susman. "This is the voice of the character in the movie. We still needed to have a strong rich voice because you can't go in a totally different vocal direction altogether. We needed to look for some- body who could pull off that superhero thing but also have a level of sensitivity to be able to carry off the emotional moments. As soon as we defined what was needed, Chris Evans was the clear winner." Sustaining the emotion over a wide variety of action set pieces was the biggest challenge. "We have a lot of action keeping you not just entertained, but also caring about the characters," notes MacLane. "That's always a challenge because there's so much going on. Trying to get a cohesive, non-episodic emotional journey has been difficult. Making a movie in COVID-19 was hard, but we were fortunate to have a creative team that knew each other quite well, trusted each other and worked to support the movie. There are a lot of design aesthetics and retro tech that are going to be the film's trademark. We have a robot cat operating a computer, which is ridiculous but charming!" Buzz has certain limitations, like the amount he can raise his arms.