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8 cgw o c t o b e r • n o v e m b e r • d e c e m b e r 2 0 2 2 armature wire and lit it with a lot of creative lighting effects," Wein- traub explains. The animation team created a frame-by-frame flick- er effect using a motion-controlled gobo device they called a "time machine," and cinematographer Frank Passingham completed the effect with a veneer lens filter that applied a so 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 massive 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 underneath that would go up and down." The team completed the ocean simulations in Houdini, post-pro- cessing 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 displacement 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 Pi- nocchio'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 ele- ments that were captured practically on-set. TOOLS OF THE TRADE Encompassing 60 working stages with a total of 99 sets, the Pinoc- chio shoot was a massive feat of production. Designed to best suit The production encompassed 60 working stages with a total of 99 sets, each featuring multiple access points for animators. Each puppet began as a sculpted clay maquette.