Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/526878
16 cgw m ay . j u n e 2 0 1 5 started with the same master rig, Sadness and Anger were so short, the riggers had to remove a segment of the spine. And, they gave Fear and Joy extra controls for the eyes. An- ger had a rig that allowed the animators to open his mouth extra wide. "The character design was cartoony, so we gravitated toward a Warner Bros./Tex Av- ery/Alice in Wonderland style," Navone says. "We wanted to have fun, but we needed to keep a sense of peril involved. They could do anything and survive. We wanted people to relate to them – particularly Joy and Sadness. We need- ed to have the audience feel the characters could be hurt or the audience wouldn't be invested." B E L I E V A B L E I M A G I N A R Y W O R L D S In the same way that the human characters tended to be realistic and the mind characters colorful and cartoony, so, too, are the worlds they inhabited. "In the real world, we have a lot of texture but not a lot of reflection," says Eggleston. "It's high key, low contrast. There aren't a lot of dark shadows. The mind world is high con- trast, saturated, and has a lot of translucency and light-emit- ting surfaces. It was by far a gazillion times the hardest film ever. We had to do two films at once – the real world and the mind world. And in the mind world, we take a journey, so that made it two and a half films. Any changes to the mind world changed the real world and vice versa. I felt like I was roller-skating on marbles." The film begins in Minnesota, but the Midwestern pastels became desaturated when the family reaches San Francisco. "In Minnesota, they had an acre of land," Eggleston says. "In San Francisco, they have a little place. There are lots of tracks, lots of wires." The mind world, by contrast, is filled with color and light. We first see the emotions in their headquarters. The walls and ramps are curved and purple, and glowing. Outside the tall windows, memory banks extend into the distance, walls of shelves filled with millions of colored, semi-transparent globes, each holding a memory. Joy waves to the train of thought as it whistles past the window. "Headquarters was a major set and the central focus of Act 1," Eggleston says. "We used elements of the brain, but we wanted the characters in the mind, not the brain. I proba- bly did 200 designs. We have cellular structures, and for the long-term memory, used folds of the brain." The inside world – which includes the long-term memory, the mind pit, personality islands, abstract thought, imagination land, dream productions, and, of course, the train of thought running through it all – is huge. "The mind pit is 2.3 miles across in virtual space," Eggle- ston says. "Joy is 4.2 inches tall. We couldn't cheat. All this stuff had to be rendered. It was scary. There are so many one-offs." Artist Dan Holland did 284 designs for the trains before finding the one that worked. "John [Lasseter] came up with the idea of an electric train because of the electrochemical brain," Eggleston says. "The track appears and disappears behind the train, and no matter where it went, if it stopped, it came to a train station." F I L M I N G I N S I D E A N D O U T The contrast between "Inside" and "Out" is heightened further with the cinematic style chosen for each. Director of Photogra- phy for Camera Patrick Lin led a team of 10 layout artists who choreographed the camera moves, starting with an initial character-blocking pass. "What we do is visual story- telling," Lin says. "We created a visual language that defined each world, created contrast, and kept the two separate." In the outside world, the camera is realistic and flawed. Inside the mind, the world is virtual and perfect. Outside, the camera has imperfect focus. Inside, spot-on focus. Outside, the camera is handheld or a Steadicam. Inside, the camera is on a mechanical dolly, a track, or a boom crane. Outside, an operator in a motion-capture room moves the camera. Inside, the camera is CG. Pixar first used motion capture to film a scene with a virtual camera for a home video sequence in Toy Story 3. The short film "Blue Umbrella" was next. "We expanded from there," Lin says, "made the technique more polished, and made a pipeline. In the motion-capture room, the camera is locked to a virtual set. Every time the camera moves in the outside world, we did it with the camera capture." In Act 1, the "outside" camera moves with motion captured from a Steadicam on a tripod as the DP films Riley in Minnesota; in Act 2, an unlocked camera is still on a tri- ALL THE CHARACTERS IN INSIDE OUT GLOW, BUT JOY IS THE ONLY CHARACTER THAT IS A VOLUME AND A LIGHT SOURCE.