American Cinematographer - July 2008 - (Page 24)

The makers of WALL·E sought the advice of several prominent visual consultants, including ASC member Roger Deakins, to lend the animated movie’s images the feel of real, live-action photography. Expert Eyes Enhance WALL·E by Iain Stasukevich With the Pixar film WALL·E, director Andrew Stanton wanted to pose the question, “What if humanity left the earth but forgot to turn the last robot off?” He posits the answer in the shadows of monolithic towers of garbage piled as high as skyscrapers, killer dust storms that sweep across a desolate landscape, and the plight of the titular character, a stoic trashcompactor on wheels who ekes out a lonely existence trying to make sense of the remains of the civilization that abandoned him. WALL·E (which stands for Waste Allocation Load-Lifter: Earth Class) differs from other Pixar films in that there is very little dialogue; the hero and his computerized co-stars communicate mostly through beeps, squeaks and chirps. “When you take away dialogue from the pot of elements you can use to tell a story, something has to fill that vacuum,” says Stanton. “All of the remaining elements, including camerawork, must rise to another level.” On WALL·E, as on every Pixar film, two technical directors, one specializing in lighting and the other in camerawork, share a screen credit for “director of photography”; they serve in roughly the same capacities that a light24 July 2008 ing cameraman and operator would on a live-action set. Danielle Feinberg supervised the lighting team, and Jeremy Lasky supervised the camera team. “From the very beginning, Andrew used the term ‘more filmic’ to describe how he wanted the movie to look,” recalls Feinberg. “At first, people thought he meant photo-realistic, which was not what he meant at all.” Lasky adds, “He meant he wanted the movie to feel photographed. He wanted the audience to believe the robot is in a real environment doing something and our cameras just happened to capture it.” “I was inspired by the work of Harris Savides [ASC] in Finding Forrester,” says Stanton. “I was very attracted to the way they were holding the focus; there seemed to be a very narrow, shallow focus throughout the entire movie, and it was always where the focus of your interest should be.” The animation package Pixar uses, Marionette, has the ability to calculate depth-of-field, f-stops and focal lengths, and can effectively emulate most of the other functions of a real motion-picture camera. But Stanton felt the images it captured never looked as if they came from a real camera. When he raised this concern with Pixar’s in-house software team, “they looked at the formulas they’d copied out of the American Cinematographer Manual and said their math was correct — the cameras and lenses were doing what they were supposed to be doing,” he recalls. Lacking practical experience in cinematography and the kind of programming knowledge required to address the problem, Stanton set out to find someone who could help. WALL·E producer Jim Morris, a former president of Lucas Digital, tapped an Industrial Light & Magic alum, cinematographer Marty Rosenberg, who subsequently showed up at the Pixar campus with a 35mm Panavision camera and a set of spherical and anamorphic lenses. The plan was to shoot a practical lens test that could be easily re-created in a digital environment; Lasky and Stanton would compare footage from the practical test with that of their computer-simulated camera. Prior to WALL·E, Pixar software didn’t have the ability to discern the differences between spherical and anamorphic lens characteristics, so all of its 2.39:1 features originated with a Super 35 frame. “We wanted to give this film a specific anamorphic look reminiscent of ’70s sci-fi films,” says Lasky. “With the existing software, we felt the depth-of-field was never right. We could never defocus things enough, even at f2 or f1.4.” For the camera test, the Pixar art department created cardboard and Styrofoam mock-ups of WALL·E and his love WALL·E images courtesy of Pixar/Walt Disney Co.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - July 2008

American Cinematographer - July 2008 Contents Editor's Note Global Village: Torn from the Flag Short Takes: On a Tuesday Production Slate: Before the Rains WALL-E Batman Looms Larger A Not-So-Super Hero Spy vs. Spy Laugh Factory Post Focus: CineSynce Streamlines Dark Knight Effects New Products & Services International Marketplace Classified Ads Ad Index In Memoriam: Burton "Bud" Stone, Honorary ASC Clubhouse News ASC Close-Up: Bill Taylor

American Cinematographer - July 2008

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