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Filmic Animation

Sep 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Ellen Wolff

The DPs who helped create the look of WALL•E.

Natural light

Stanton and Lighting DP Danielle Feinberg also took note of Savides' approach to lighting — which was to light a room and let the characters inhabit it. “That's a mantra for me,” Savides says. “When I approach a scene, I light the space, and in doing that, I hopefully light the people enough to make it work and also keep it real. I don't specifically put lights up for the actors — and that's bitten me in the butt, too.”

Lighting the world of WALL•E was fraught with challenges. Stanton wanted audiences to feel as though they were seeing the robot in his element, which included a junk-filled trailer illuminated by a TV-screen light. So Morris called DP Roger Deakins and asked him to give a lighting demonstration to the Pixar team.

“I thought the idea was interesting,” says Deakins, whose Oscar-nominated work includes Fargo; No Country For Old Men; O Brother, Where Art Thou?; The Shawshank Redemption; and Kundun. “I do demonstrations in film schools, but an animation house? They'd set up a little stage and I lit their set in a very traditional way, with a key light, back light, and fill light. I went on for about a half hour adding lights and flags, and then said, ‘That's not actually how I light at all, but I'll bet that's how you think I light. I panned the camera around to where a work light was hitting somebody in the back of his head and said, ‘Now that's good lighting, because it's what happens naturally.’ Animation is usually known for meticulous detail, where you see everything in the frame. But I believe it's not what you light, it's what you don't light.”

Deakins made such an impression that Pixar invited him back, and he consulted with Feinberg about lighting and Lasky about camerawork on various occasions during 2006. “I thought it was odd that those two specialties don't mix more in animated films,” Deakins says. “In live action, you don't choose a shot without thinking about how the light's going to fall and affect that shot. But very soon, Danielle and Jeremy were talking about the way that the light integrates with camera movement.”

Shooting for real

When it came to camerawork, the WALL•E team soon realized they were in a world quite different from live action. In Pixar's virtual camera system, the tilt-and-pan point of rotation was at the lens, so artifacts of film cameras such as parallax were absent. If Stanton wanted WALL•E to appear photographed in ways that seemed familiar to audiences, Pixar's nodal system would have to be adapted. Deakins recalls when Pixar set out to test the differences by shooting Styrofoam models with film cameras. “A bunch of them got cameras with anamorphic and spherical lenses,” Deakins says. “I think it was the first time a lot of them had ever used a film camera. Their enthusiasm was amazing, and I think they stayed up very late that night.”

The results guided Pixar's programmers in redesigning their camera system, which enabled Stanton to get filmic artifacts where he wanted them. Adding something as simple as lens flare reinforced the feeling that WALL•E was photographed, though Deakins notes the irony of programming artifacts that live-action DPs often try to avoid. “Maybe they shouldn't try and copy the live-action world too closely,” he says with a chuckle. “It can be restricting.”

Since WALL•E follows the characters into outer space, Stanton wanted the camerawork to reflect the conventions of classic sci-fi films, including handheld and Steadicam photography. Deakins, who operates his own camera, addressed the issues associated with this — and so did another photographic outsider who consulted on the film: ILM's eight-time Oscar winner Dennis Muren.

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