Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1530710
do this?" We both realized we would do it by staying where we be- long—in story. When I direct, I don't insinuate myself into other people's depart- ments, into their business. I stay where I belong, so we talk about things from a story perspective. When I talk to animators or back- ground artists or people who are doing the light, or if I'm in editorial, I talk about the needs of the scene, the needs of the story. If an an- imator goes off and animates a moment and it's not the way I saw it in my head, but it checks all the boxes, then we're done. I'm not going to say that's not how I saw it. You did it. That allows people personal freedom to be as creative as they can possibly be without interference. I say all this because all things go back to story. Whether you are lighting something, if you're painting something, if you're designing something, think about the story. In a single image, you can have a lot of story. And I would say, look at a Norman Rockwell painting. That's the thing I think that makes his art endure, is there's always a story within that painting. In one piece of art, you can have a story. And by putting story in things, it makes it relate to people and people can relate to it. It'll make it work better. VFX & PRODUCTION DESIGN How did the film's new color space help tell the story? VFX Supervisor Jeff Budsberg (JB): Raymond [Zibach] and I had some conversations early on. I told him that I wanted to overhaul our entire color space because I thought that would enhance the paint- erly aspect of the film—offering more hues to the 3D artists, similar to more hues on an artist's palette for a painter. If you can give some- one more pigments, I think that gives you a more visceral experience and it allows us to push into areas that are more saturated and more vivid. When I walk into a forest, there's something about the greens that are so rich, so vibrant, in there. If we can give us a little bit of that, it can give the audience something that may be imperceptible, but they're going to feel it. So I told Raymond I wanted to do this, and I fully expected him to be like, "You're insane," because this affects every single department at the studio, from the art department, from computer hardware to display hardware, to our theaters, to how the artists author textures and materials, to the renderer, to editorial. Raymond is as adventur- ous as I am and said, "Let's try it!" We moved from sRGB primaries and working display space into full ACES working space and then a P3 color space. Early on we were going to do a couple of tests in the art depart- ment to see if we could get to a place that allows us to explore this space. When you change your color space, you have this mental mapping of color in your head that's really difficult to decouple. Now you can reach out even further into the gamut of perceivable hues, so I think that's one of the trickier things to overcome. We can solve the pipeline problems—how you deliver images and media from de- partment to department. You can solve the hardware problems. But the really challenging thing is rewiring your mental mapping of color in your brain. 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 4 c g w 1 1 Animators shared their progress at weekly Color Dailies meetings.