25 Things We Learned About the Pixar Movie During Our Visit – Armessa Movie News

The upcoming computer-animated film produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar Animation Studios, Elemental, is fast approaching after recently having its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. Taking place in the setting of Element City, it follows Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie) and Ember Lumen (Leah Lewis) as they try to make their way in the world while a romance begins to grow between the two of them. The only problem? Wade is made of water and Ember is made of fire. What ever will they do?

This past March, myself and other members of the press went to Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, CA to hear from some of those behind the film about how it had been brought to life. In addition to learning about casting, there were various presentations as well as discussions about both the personal and technical elements that went into the film. With the film coming out on June 16, here are 25 things we learned about Elemental.

RELATED: ‘Elemental’: Release Date, Plot, Trailer, and Everything We Know So Far About the Upcoming Pixar Film

Elemental Came From a Personal Place for Director Peter Sohn

The first person that we heard from was director Peter Sohn who had previously worked on Finding Nemo, Brave, The Incredibles, Incredibles 2, Ratatouille, WALL-E, Up, and Toy Story 3 in a variety of roles as well as directing 2015’s The Good Dinosaur. He said that, in addition to all the “blood and sweat and tears that went into each pixel,” it drew from personal parts of his own life.

• The first were Sohn’s parents who immigrated to New York from Korea. It was there that he said, with little money or connections, they “managed to create a beautiful life.”
• His family also started a grocery store where Sohn said he had “so many memories of growing up in the shop.” The customers who came there had similarly left their homes to come to the city and “they were all mixing into a beautiful neighborhood with their cultures and languages.”
• These parts of his childhood in New York were part of what then informed Elemental in addition to him imagining a neighborhood from an otherwise unlikely source. “When I saw the periodic table of elements when I was a kid, all I thought about was that these were apartment complexes and they all lived next to each other,” Sohn said. “Platinum lives next to Gold, but be careful of Mercury because they have toxic relationships.” These were the stories that he imagined exploring.
• Beyond that, Sohn said his marriage to his wife was part of the story’s foundation as well. “[It was about this] experience of marrying someone who wasn’t Korean,” Sohn said. “Growing up, my grandmother’s dying words were like ‘marry Korean!’”
• This led to the idea of opposites attracting in the film, serving as the “North Star” for the story they were going to tell. “We wanted to tell a story for everyone who’s ever made a sacrifice or taken a risk and set it in the hustle and bustle of a crazy city,” Sohn said. “This story of fire and water, how it would truly test the limits of our creative teams and our technical teams, it went beyond my wildest dreams.”

Designing the Characters of Elemental Presented Unique Challenges

Next up, we heard from production designer Don Shank who had similarly worked on some of the previously mentioned films as well as Coco, Primal, Onward, and Soul. He said his goal was to identify the visual themes and goals of the movie that he said are typically worked out in advance though was done with the intention of doing something different this time around.

• First, this required figuring out the look and design of the various elements so they could “create a world and visual language that would fit these characters in a natural way.”
• The creative ambition for the film also had to be balanced with what was possible. “What did we want to do artistically and what could we do technically?” Shank said. “Our technical abilities informed and inspired design choices then those design choices, in turn, inspired new technologies which then inspired new designs. So there was a lot of back-and-forth between our art and our technical teams as we discovered together how to make appealing elemental characters that still felt like the visceral impact of water, fire, and earth.”
• The final look they decided on was meant to have this more grounded sensibility while still allowing for whimsy. “We landed on our final look: a delicate balance between physics logic and cartoony appeal,” Shank said.
• When it comes to building the world, the goal was to have reference points to our own while still allowing for building things that would be unrecognizable. “The world should be recognizable, but also something we have never seen before. It should feel appropriate to the elements that live there,” Shank said. “We discovered unique options by imaging how elemental characters would have naturally evolved in the way that they built their world.” This meant fire people making things like glass and ceramics.
• This also extended to the bigger structures such as buildings. “For fire town, we used things like cooking pots, stove burners, gas lamps, and fireplaces to create new takes on familiar buildings like apartment buildings and shops,” Shank said. “Only rarely do we use a single object like a teapot by itself.” The ultimate goal for the team was to make sure all the elemental buildings belonged together in one world.

Breaking Down the Digital Effects Required for Elemental‘s Visuals

Following this, digital effects supervisor Sanjay Bakshi outlined how he oversaw the technical department who made the visuals of the film itself. This began with working in the very beginning storyboards all the way to the conclusion, navigating various challenges on the way.

• More than just being made up of these elements, the intention was to have these various characters all behaving like them as well. “This one was pretty crazy. The idea of characters being made up of elements, water, air, earth, and fire, is a huge challenge,” Bakshi said. “Pete also wanted these characters to emote like elements.”
• This required taking a whole new approach to designing the characters. “Ember isn’t just a standard Pixar character who we’ve set on fire, it should really feel like she’s made of it,” Bakshi said. “Similarly for Wade.”
• This all made for an intimidating production process. “We had never made a movie like this before. I was terrified,” Bakshi said. “But I was reminded that this isn’t the first time Pixar has done something that seemed impossible. When Pixar made Toy Story in 1995, they had never made a feature-length animated movie before.”
• With that being said, the work required for this film was beyond much of what the studio had done of late. “All of our films have technical challenges, but we haven’t had one on the scale of Elemental in a while,” Bakshi said. “That’s really exciting for us.”
• The team then used actual fire as a reference for Ember and actual water as a reference for Wade while working virtually, coming up with a variety of different iterations of the characters until they found the one they wanted.

Controlling the Characters of Elemental

After these designs were complete, there still was the all-important element of actually being able to animate the characters and make them expressive. Character supervisor Jeremy Talbot was in charge of the work that goes into this which is known as modeling and rigging.

• Working from concept art, this part of production required building the characters so that animators could work to control them for the film itself. However, while characters with flesh and bones would move one way, the characters of Elemental were completely different. “Pete told us from the beginning, elements are not human,” Talbot said.
• This meant making sure to capture how they would be impacted by interacting with each other and the world. “Ember is fire, she is not something on fire,” Talbot said. “If you pass your hand through her, it would behave like fire.”
• In order to make this work, the team had to identify “core features” of each character. “Characters need to be very malleable and everything is fluid. Water looks like water because it is moving like water,” Talbot said. “We wanted to build these as tools for animators.”
• Specifically, beginning on the film in 2020, Talbot said the first inspiration test that they jumped off of was all about how Ember reacts to everything. “We started to build the right kind of tools they needed to compose water and fire,” Talbot said. “As these building blocks came together, we were able to show Pete some tests that showed promise.”
• Later, in 2021, the capabilities of what they had built began to grow. “Animation could use our tools to produce tests that Pete could evaluate creatively,” Talbot said. “Our goal in the beginning was to get to the character and not be held back by the technique we used to get there.”

Bringing It All Together in the Animation of Elemental

Lastly, animators Gwendolyn Enderoğlu and Allison Rutland talked through how their team brought the characters to life after all the building blocks had been completed.

• In order to achieve this, they had to use creative thinking followed by precise implementation. “Our role was to work with the animation team to help define the style and execute Pete’s vision,” Rutland said.
• Like their colleagues, the animation team found themselves in uncharted waters. As Ember and Wade were entirely new characters for them, there was both a high degree of freedom and challenges that they had to navigate.
• They ended up relying on a “fake science” that allowed for emotions to be expressed visually in the scenes. While this was initially described as being “tricky” for the animators, it wasn’t too long before they were “on fire” (get it?).
• The team stressed the importance of the characters emoting as part of the performance along with them behaving like elements.
• This involved newly created controls that “harmonized our animation” which made everything come together in the feature which audiences will now be able to see for themselves.

Elemental comes to theaters on June 16.