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ways to communicate through a love of different movies, and then you're starting to get to know them." Team collaboration took place virtually due to the pandemic, so Sohn and Ream were thrilled when they were able to return to the studio to watch animation dailies and see the film's characters begin to take shape. "We got to be together and finish the movie," Ream recalls. "When we finally ended up seeing our first scene that was lit with some VFX, it was like nothing I had ever experienced." Personal connections were Sohn's favorite aspect of making the film. "Babies were born during this production. We lost people during the production," he remembers. "I can't just see the shots anymore. I see the people that made them." Production Designer Don Shank Production designer Don Shank helped the team tackle the chal- lenge of balancing visceral realism with creative stylization. Fully realistic physics would not have been compatible with the film's character designs. For example, Wade's translucent body would re- fract distracting elements from his environment. "He was like a lens," Shank recalls. "There was just so much visual noise and movement that it was hard to not only make out his features, but really see him very clearly." It was important to introduce a cartoonish element to balance out the realities of physics and allow the characters to thrive on screen. "As an artist, you're trying to find ways to increase contrast and you're trying to make a focal point," he continues. "But when it's just noise on noise, it's very hard to make anything out. So from a visual communication and a storytelling need, we really had to be in complete control of physics." The team studied diagrams of fire and water and determined which scientific properties would work in the film, and which would not. This allowed them to selectively bend the laws of physics to bet- ter suit the characters. The team developed special technology to harness and control this modified approach to physics. Shank would paint solutions and ideas and bring them to the technical team to see if they could be transformed into tools. The way the surface of water curves when it touches another material, also known as meniscus, was crucial to the film's charac- ter physics. Techniques such as placing lights within the meniscus would add color to the outline and help a character like Wade stand out better against his background. It also helped solidify Ember's de- sign, which constantly emitted light. "You couldn't really shape her like you would normally with a reflective object," Shank recalls. "So we had a lot of these tricks to make things look more dimensional." Shank noted that the film presented a stream of challenges from start to finish. "Luckily there was an incredible tech team," he recalls. "In due time and a lot of work, they would have these Mars landings of art achievements." In these moments, he would realize that the film would be possible to make, and that he had to trust the pro- cess. "I used to always say, 'Something will get rendered,'" he adds. "In time you're going to work together and get where you need to be." Character Supervisors Junyi Ling & Jeremie Talbot The film's characters bend the laws of physics with stylized designs. Production designer Don Shank created the layout of Element City.