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out,'" visual effects supervisor Aaron Weintraub recalls. Ultimately, it was more important for all of the visuals to stay true to the style of the film, rather than insisting on achieving everything practically. Visual effects producer Jeffrey Schaper worked closely with Weintraub during the production process. "We had an in-house VFX supervisor, Cameron [Carson], who was the person who oversaw all of the shoot days and made sure things were shot correctly for visual effects to be integrated in post," Schaper explains. He also collaborated with the art department to maintain a consistent look across the extensive set-extension and matte-painting work. PRACTICAL REFERENCES FOR DIGITAL DELIVERY The VFX team handled simulations of any elements with tiny details that would be impossible to replicate practically frame by frame. "We knew that there was a world that existed that we had to match," Weintraub explains. "We couldn't just do photoreal smoke, photoreal explosions, or photo- real ocean. That wasn't going to cut it because there were no truly photoreal elements in the rest of the film." Art director Robert DeSue and his team designed miniature references for the VFX artists, helping them maintain a consistent stop-motion feel across prac- tical and digital elements. "I think it worked really well when there was a physical element that the digital VFX team could look at," Hansen adds. "We made something in the stop-motion style and then they were able to repeat it and scale it up." A stop-motion test for Geppetto's fire- place was a particularly useful reference. "They took pieces of cheesecloth wrapped around armature wire and lit it with a lot of creative lighting effects," Weintraub explains. The animation team created a frame- by-frame flicker effect using a mo- tion-controlled gobo device they called a "time machine," and cinematographer Frank Passingham completed the effect with a veneer lens filter that applied a soft Pro-Mist look. "Our fire simulations were not in any way like pyro fire sims that you would normally expect when you're doing live action visual effects," he adds. "The fire was actually a cloth sim." This became the basis for all of the film's flame sequences, from small fireplaces to mas- sive explosions. Simulating the film's ocean sequences was a pivotal challenge for the VFX team. "We took a lot of inspiration from a sequence in a stop-motion film called Two Balloons [2017]," Weintraub explains. "They built an ocean, and it was a rubber sheet surface with these plungers under- neath that would go up and down." The team completed the ocean sim- ulations in Houdini, post-processing the geometry to remove the lateral flow so it became static and matched the style of the practical reference. "We then applied a bunch of displace- ment and bump maps to create a texture, which gives it this kind of static, rubbery feel on the surface," Weintraub notes. Photoreal raindrops are typically fast fluid simulations, but Pinocchio's raindrops were designed to resemble little individual spikes built from practical materials. "We created these little shards that expanded at the head and dropped them down. So it became like a storm of needles as opposed to a fluid simulation," Weintraub explains. This blended well with the stop-motion glycerin water elements that were captured practically on-set. TOOLS OF THE TRADE Encompassing 60 working stages with a total of 99 sets, the Pinocchio shoot was a massive feat of production. Designed to best suit the needs of the animators, the sets included removable walls and various access points for optimal puppet control. A few of the major environments, such as the interior of the dogfish, were almost completely digital. "Wherever there's critical contact, where the characters had to touch some- thing or walk on something, that bit was built. But the rest of the environment, that's all digital," Weintraub explains. "We had a data wrangler team on the ground, Jon [Weigand] and Mia [Sires], who were responsible for scanning the objects. We LIDAR scanned every set, every prop, every character, and every puppet to have digital models that we would use in our simulations or to animate. And then back at Mr. X, we had our producer, Emma Gorbey; Warren Lawtey, our CG supervisor; Perrine Michel, our compos- iting supervisor; and just a massive team of hundreds of artists here who worked on it." "We used ShotGrid to integrate all our notes and submissions," Schaper explains. "Mr. X was using ShotGrid for over ten years to keep us on track. It was great that the production was using it as well," Weintraub adds. "We wrote some tools that would keep their ShotGrid in sync with ours or vice versa." Schaper adds, "We started off us- ing Evercast as a tool for screening or viewing shots, and we then moved into ClearView Flex as our review tool with Guillermo and the team. That was the software we used primarily to help deliv- er this project." Both the practical animation and the VFX crews were impressed by the pas- sion and teamwork that guided the entire project from start to finish. "Every department head was really on top of their game, understood the process and was a pleasure to deal with," Schaper recalls. "The collaboration was very special on this one, and the look is something very unique that we may never see again." Kendra Ruczak is the Managing Editor of Post's sister publication, CGW. ANIMATION www.postmagazine.com 15 POST NOV/DEC 2022 Characters were developed as fully-working puppets. Mr. X provided VFX services for the feature.