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when I was seven years old some well-meaning adult asked me what I
wanted to be when I grow up
probably has had an artist's no you don't he said you can make a living
being an artist's my little seven-year-old picasso dreams were
crushed but I gathered myself went off in search of a new dream eventually
settling on being a scientist perhaps something like the next albert Einstein
I have always loved math and science later coding and so I decided to study
computer programming and college in my junior year my computer graphics
professor showed us these wonderful short films it was the first computer
animation any of us had ever seen I watched these films in wonder transfixed
fireworks going off in my head thinking that is what I want to do with my life
the idea that all the math science and code I've been learning to come together
to create this world and characters and stories I connected with was pure magic
for me just two years later I started working at the place that made those
films Pixar Animation Studios he was here I learned how we actually execute
those films to create our movies we create a three-dimensional world inside
the computer we start with a point that makes a line that makes a face that
create characters or trees and rocks that eventually become a forest and
because it's a three-dimensional world we can move a camera around inside that
world I was fascinated by all of it but then I got my first taste of lighting
lighting and practices placing lights inside the three-dimensional world I
actually icons of lights I move around and they're here you can see I've added
a light I'm turning on the rough version of lighting and our software turn on
shadows and placing way as likely to lie I think about what it might look like in
real life but balance that out with what we need artistically for the story so it
might look like this at first but as we adjust this move that and weeks of work
in rough format might look like this in final form like this
this
there's this moment in lighting that made me fall utterly in love with it
it's where we go from this to this it's a moment where all the pieces come
together and suddenly the world comes to life as if it's an actual place exists
this moment never gets old
especially for that little seven-year-old girl that wanted to be an
artist as I learnt to light I learned about using light to help tell story
just at the time of day to create the mood to guide the audiences I how to
make a character look appealing or stand out in a busy so did you see all the
various as you can see we can create any world that we want inside the computer
we can make a world with monsters with robots that fall in love we can even
make pigs fly
while this is an incredible thing this untethered artistic freedom it could
create chaos it can create unbelievable world's unbelievable movement things
that are trying to the audience to combat this Tweet Adder ourselves with
science we are science and the world we know as a backbone to ground ourselves
in something relatable and recognizable Finding Nemo is an excellent example of
this major portion movie takes place under water but how do you make it look
under water in early research and development we took a clip of underwater
footage and recreated in the computer then we broke it back down to see which
elements make up that underwater look one of the most critical elements was
how the light travels through the water so we called it up a light that mimics
this physics first the visibility of the water and then what happens with the
color objects close to the I have their full rich colors as light travels deeper
into the water we lose the red wavelengths then the green wavelength
leaving us with blue with the fire deaths in this clip you can seat two
other important elements the first is the surgeon swell or the invisible
underwater current the pushes the bits of particular around in the water
the second is the caustics these are the ribbons of light like it might see on
the bottom of a pool that are created when the Sun shines through the cracks
of the ripples and waves on the ocean surface here we have the fog bees these
give us color depth cues but also tell us which direction is often shops where
we don't see the water surface the other really cool thing you can see here is
that we live that particular only with the caustics so that it goes in and out
of those ribbons of light it appears and disappears lending a subtle magical
sparkle to the underwater you can see how are using the science the physics of
water light and movement to tether that artistic freedom but we are not beholden
to it we considered each of these elements which once had to be
scientifically accurate and which ones we can push and pull the suit the story
and the mood we realized early on that color was one we had some leeway with
so here's a traditionally colored underwater scene but here we can take
Sydney Harbour and push it fairly green to suit the sad heard of what's
happening in this scene it's really important we see deep into the
underwater so we understand what the East Australian current is that the
turtles are diving into a going on this roller coaster ride so we put the
visibility of the water well past anything you would ever see in real life
because in the end we are not trying to recreate the scientifically correct real
world we're trying to create a believable world one the audience can
immerse themselves in to experience the story we use science to create something
wonderful your story and artistic part to get us to a place of wonder this guy
Wally is a great example of that he find beauty in the simplest things but when
he came into lighting we knew we had a big problem we got so geeked out on
making Wally this convincing robot that we've made his binoculars practically
optically perfect
his binoculars are one of the most critical acting devices he has he
doesn't have a face or even traditional dialogue for that matter so the
animators were heavily dependent on the binoculars to sell his acting in
emotions we started lighting we realize the triple lens inside his binoculars or
a massive reflections he was starting to look glassy eyes now glassy eyed as a
fundamentally awful thing when you are trying to convince an audience the robot
has a personality and he's capable of falling in love so we went to work on
these optically perfect binoculars trying to find a solution that would
maintain its true robot materials but solve this reflection problem so we
started with the lenses here's the flat front lines we have concave and convex
lens and here you see all three together showing us all these reflections we
tried turning them down we tried blocking them nothing was working you
can see here sometimes we get something specific reflected in his ice usually
Eve so we couldn't just use some fake abstract image on lenses so here we are
even the first lands we put even the second lines it's not working we turn it
down it's still not working and then we have our eureka moment we a delight to
Wally that accidentally leaks into his eyes
you can see it light up these gray a patrol blades suddenly those aperture
blades are poking through that reflection the way nothing else has now
we recognize Wally as having an eye as humans we have the white of RI the
colored iris and the black pupil now Wally has a black man I the great
appetizer blades and the black people suddenly a while it feels like he has a
soul like there's a character with emotional side later in the movie
towards the end while you loses his personality essentially going dead this
is the perfect time to bring back that glassy eyed look in the next scene while
he comes back to life we bring that might back to bring the app
her blades back any returns that sweet soulful robot we've come to love in
these unexpected moments when you find the key to unlocking a robot soul the
moment when you discover what you want to do with your life
the jellyfish and Finding Nemo was one of those moments for me there's scenes
in every movie that struggle to come together this is one of those scenes the
director had a vision for this scene based on some wonderful footage of
jellyfish in the South Pacific as we went along we were floundering the
reviews with the director turned from the normal look and feel conversation
into more and more questions about numbers and percentages may be because
unlike normal we're basing it on something in real life or maybe just
because we have lost our way but it has become about using our brain without our
eyes the science without the art that scientific tether with strangling the
scene but even through all the frustrations I still believe that could
be beautiful so when it came into lighting I don't get as like work to
balance the blues and pinks the caustics dancing on the jellyfish bells the
undulating fog beams something promising began to appear I came in one morning
and check the previous night's work and I got excited and then I showed the
lighting director and she got excited soon I was showing to the director in a
dark room full of 50 people in director of you you hope you might get some nice
words when you get some notes and fixes generally and then hopefully you get a
final signaling to move on to the next stage I think my in true and I played
the jellyfish scene and the director was silent for uncomfortably long amount of
time just long enough for me to think
oh no this is doomed and then he started clapping and then the production
designer Sir clapping and then the whole room was clapping this is the moment but
I live for enlightening the moment we're all comes together and we got a world
that we can believe in
wheels math science and code to create these amazing world's you storytelling
an art to bring them to life it's this interweaving of art and sang hymns that
elevates the world to place of wonder
a place with soul a place we can believe in a place where the things you imagine
become real in a world where girl suddenly realizes not only is she a
scientist but also an artist thank you