Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1505114
j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 3 c g w 9 fire and water characters. "We decided early on that we wanted them to feel very light, very low gravity," recalls Enderoglu. "Because they're so fluid, we wanted their features to be driing and dragging around. The computer doesn't do fluidity very well on its own, so a lot of that was hand keyed by the animators." Effects Supervisor Stephen Marshall With significant effects work in every frame, it was essential for the effects department to expand its typical pipeline. The workload was split between two parallel groups: shot effects and character effects. As a part of the latter team, effects supervisor Stephen Marshall helped bring the film's fire, water, earth, and air characters to life on screen. The character effects team was able to expand on relevant tech- nology from previous Pixar productions. "We actually built on top of some work that was done on Soul [2020] originally, where they had to solve some problems of how to create a subset of volumet- ric characters," Marshall recalls. "Ours was a much bigger task where pretty much all of the characters were either volumetric or simulated or both. So we had to come up with techniques to be able to simu- late these characters efficiently, be able to make sure that they were expressive, make sure that they could perform, and be able to deploy it across 1600+ shots." This daunting task required the effects team to rebuild their work- flow and engage in more cross-department collaboration than ever before. "We were collaborating with other departments we never collaborated with before, like characters and animation," Marshall notes. "And then on top of all that, we were trying to come up with a common language. We'd never talked with each other before, and we had to start understanding what our roles were about." As pro- duction was taking place remotely, Zoom meetings and virtual col- laboration tools kept the communication on track. This was a major departure from the typical Pixar effects work- flow. "We're usually a downstream department. Characters will be done, animation usually still is running, but the shots that we get started on, they're already done. If we ever need help from anima- The character supervision team integrated machine learning into their workflow for the film. Air characters were hand keyed by the animation team.