Computer Graphics World

November / December 2017

Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/915636

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 7 of 35

6 cgw n o v e m b e r . d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 7 F E A T U R E the tower, places where we could actually shoot a film," Bernardi says. "So, we built crude shapes and crashed them together to form larger chunks and jammed those into neighborhoods until we could see our hero walking down a street." In addition to wide views of the environ- ment, the camera moves closer to show a grand central station, the department of family reunions, and a large stadium where Miguel will perform. Throughout, representations of bones and skeletons appear in wood carvings, on doors, and also on a macro scale. In one shot, for example, two gondolas cross each other at the right moment to create a skull. Lights on the gondolas, in the windows, in streetlights, on plazas, on pathways, and elsewhere illuminate and define the environment. A technique developed on The Good Dinosaur to manage the fireflies and upgraded to work with RenderMan RIS helped the lighting artists manage the sev- en million lights. Rather than calculating, for example, the color and brightness for a million streetlights, the code takes the calculation for one light and extrapolates that into the million. "We used that for streetlights, lights in windows, and so forth," Feinberg says. "That way we could control all the lights with 12 or 15." To place lights, the artists adopted a similar philosophy. "We lovingly placed lights in 12 chunks of the environment and propagated them through the world," Feinberg says. "Then, this is the magical step, we had pockets we could change to any color and put wherev- er we wanted. This allowed us to highlight certain things and drop others back into silhouettes. The city drops back and we can see that it goes on forever." Because Pixar uses RenderMan RIS, which is a path tracer, tricks like these helped reduce render calculation times. "We leveraged the point cloud lights to pile in the lights without having a huge expense, but still with the flexibility to get what we needed," says Feinberg. "Also, [Senior Researcher] Christophe Hery worked on changes to the illumination model to make it faster." LAND OF THE LIVING Inspired by trips to villages in Mexico, Jessup designed Santa Cecilia with a somewhat muted color palette, muted at least in com- parison to the rowdy colors in the Land of the Dead. We see Santa Cecilia's town plaza, the marigold petal paths to the cemetery where families decorate the graves, Miguel's multi-generational family's shoemaking workshop, and Miguel's hideout, sometimes in daylight, sometimes at night. Two-thirds of the film takes place at night. "We could have gone desaturated for contrast [with the Land of the Dead], but we wanted to go for authentic Mexico," Feinberg says. "We have some bleached walls, chipping paint, and streets with fog, but it's a warm place. Where there are whitewashed walls, we put an orange light in the window. A kitchen in an outdoor scene has green fluorescent light. In the cemeteries, we have the totally spectacu- lar candles, and we also have fluorescent lights from vendors in the market. In the daytime, the sunlight comes through painters' tarps and tints everything under- neath. Lights in the distance turn into bokeh circles. It's total magic." When asked about his favorite locations in the film, Bernardi picks two in Santa Ce- cilia rather than the intricate towers, bright colors, and brilliant lighting of the Land of the Dead. "I'm torn between Miguel's hide- out and the ofrenda room," he says. "They sort of mirror each other. They're so much about people and a lot of love." SKELETONS In Santa Cecilia, Miguel's family includes his much-loved great-grandmother Mamá Coco, his papá and mamá, tio Berto his uncle, and abuelita, the family enforcer. In the Land of the Dead, Miguel meets great- great-grandmother Imelda, the source of his MIGUEL'S MUSIC "As we were developing this story, we struggled with how to have Miguel articulate how important music is to him," says Lee Unkrich, director. "All our ideas fell flat. They were clichés. Or sappy. Or something a kid wouldn't say." Adds Writer and Co-director Adrian Molina: "We knew Miguel needed to run from his family and risk his life, but in order for audiences to buy that this was worth doing, we needed to convince them that music was the air Miguel breathes. Our first idea was to have him say, 'Music is in my bones.' But that was intellectual." Test audiences said they understood that Miguel loved music, but they didn't really feel it. So next, the team had Miguel sing about wanting to be a musician. But although that worked in the isolated sequence, it turned Miguel into a character in a musical, which didn't fit the film. Coco is filled with music, and music drives the story, but it isn't a classi- cal Disney type of musical. "So, we created a scene that gave us a new setting, a new frame of mind to work in," Molina says. "We put him in his secret attic space where he's free to be himself." In this hideout, Miguel had created a kind of ofrenda for his idol Ernesto de la Cruz. It is here, in this secret room, where the 12-year-old boy passionately sings one of de la Cruz's songs. "We can see Miguel experience his love of music," Unkrich says. "Doing this in a wordless way effectively communicated how much music meant to him."

Articles in this issue

Archives of this issue

view archives of Computer Graphics World - November / December 2017