Filmic Animation

Natural lighting is one of the elements that gives WALL•E its photographed look. To perfect the technique, the Pixar team enlisted the help of cinema¬tographers Roger Deakins and Harris Savides. Photo courtesy Pixar Animation Studios

One of the most iconic movie images of 2008 shows a rusty robot dwarfed by mountains of trash receding into distant haze. The image captures the plight of WALL•E, the trash-compactor star of the latest Pixar/Disney hit. But it illustrates something more: a visual style that's distinctly different from the eight previous films made by Pixar Animation Studios.

Director Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo) wanted a visual approach that suggested that his little robot was photographed, not just rendered by megacomputers with CG precision. What Pixar ultimately achieved evolved through advice from three very different photographic pros: Roger Deakins, Dennis Muren, and Harris Savides.

Director Andrew Stanton drives a specialized tank chair, made by Brad Soden for his wife, on a mound of dirt reference for a WALL•E tank chair test in the open lot next to Pixar Animation Studios. Photo: Deborah Coleman / Pixar

A goal that Stanton had for WALL•E was to convey a sense of intimacy between the little trash compactor and the sleek she-robot, Eve, that drops into his world. Since neither machine could speak, capturing their gestures would be crucial. Stanton saw a precedent in director Gus Van Sant's Finding Forrester, for which DP Savides had used shifts in focus to highlight the give-and-take between two key characters.

When WALL•E Producer Jim Morris heard Stanton and the film's Camera DP Jeremy Lasky discussing this idea, he suggested that they ask Savides directly. So Morris, who had built extensive industry contacts during his years heading Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), arranged to take his new Pixar colleagues to a set where Savides was shooting David Fincher's Zodiac.

“I was surprised,” Savides says. “They wanted to take tenets from the way someone would work on a regular movie and apply it to animation. Their project was just in its infancy, and I didn't know it was WALL•E. They had lots of questions about creative choices — like why someone would elect to have a shallow depth of field and what throwing focus does for the audience. Directing the viewer's attention to something specific is an important part of filmmaking, and focus is a great tool.”

That his camerawork for Finding Forrester inspired ideas for WALL•E is something Savides finds intriguing. “My discussion with them was just a catalyst, probably one of many that they had,” he says. “I think it may have given them a different perspective on a ‘buddy movie.''”

Renowned cinematographer Roger Deakins at a lighting demonstration in the Main Theater at Pixar Animation Studios. Photo: Deborah Coleman / Pixar

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.”

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.

To give the effect of realism for the trash towers in the distance of WALL•E's world, cinema-tographer Dennis Muren said, "Let them get hazy and don't increase the size of the details." Photo courtesy pixar animation studios.

“We did a Steadicam class, and it was great,” says Muren, who received visual-effects Oscars for Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Return of the Jedi, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and The Empire Strikes Back. During the several months' time when he worked at Pixar a couple of days a week, Muren delved into several aspects of photography. “We walked around with video-cameras to see how those shots are done and how the operator feels when he's doing those shots,” he says. “You don't need a Steadicam to learn how to move like a Steadicam guy.”

Muren, whose first love was stop-motion filmmaking in the Ray Harryhausen tradition, felt an affinity for Stanton's idea that there would be a cameraman following the characters in WALL•E. His advice to the Pixar crew was that the camera should always be reacting to what a character does, just like a handheld cameraman would do while following a live actor. “That makes a shot look more spontaneous and less preplanned,” he says. “I also suggested that when they cut into a shot, it should feel like there's been a preroll, and that what we're seeing is part of a longer take. Andrew Stanton had already been working on that, but I think it helped him to have somebody reinforce his instincts.”

Notably, it was Muren who contacted Pixar first, unaware of the ideas Stanton had for WALL•E. Dennis was working on a book and thinking about the role that realism plays in the believability of images. “I started thinking about animated films and all the effort that goes into them,” he says. “Until recently, they haven't gotten the recognition I think they deserve, which is right alongside live-action films. I thought, ‘What can they do?'' It dawned on me that there might be a new look they could try.”

After speaking with Morris and learning about Stanton's project, Muren brought to Pixar “a list of about 12 things.” High on that list was Muren's belief that animated films are rendered too clearly. “The edges are too specific and tend to look animated, which I think removes the audience from connecting with it as strongly as you'd want,” he says. “I'm a big fan of the painter John Singer Sargent; his edges disappear all over the place, but you don't think, ‘Hey, I can't see that face because I can't find the lower part of the cheek.'' Everybody at Pixar is an artist, so they saw that.”

Muren focused his efforts at Pixar primarily on the first half of WALL•E, which unfolds on the trash planet where the little robot resides. The towers of trash that dominate this landscape provided ideal examples to test Muren's thinking about diffuse details. “When the trash towers were in the distance, I said, ‘Let them get hazy and don't increase the size of the details,''” he says. “Artists tend to make details more prominent so that we can see every little rectangle. But I tried to bring the live-action sensibility that every shot should not be perfect. It can be good when a background is overexposed.”

Morris calls Muren “the master of atmospheric haze,” and his influence can be seen in the dusty ambience of WALL•E, just as Savides' shallow focus and Deakins' lighting aesthetic are evident. At the very least, the fresh perspectives of these artists reinforced Pixar's desire to try something new. As Deakins recalls saying to them, “If you're going to do this, you might as well push it.”