Speaker 1: Pushkin. There's a bunch of stuff I want to ask you.
Speaker 1: A lot of it is about the relationship between technology
Speaker 1: and creativity, and especially given the fact that you've been
Speaker 1: working at Pixar for a long time, respectfully, how that
Speaker 1: changes over time?
Speaker 2: Okay, so how creativity changes as technology changes?
Speaker 1: Yeah? So, actually, can you just say your name and
Speaker 1: your job?
Speaker 2: Sure? My name is Danielle Feinberg, and I work at
Speaker 2: Pixar Animation Studios and I am a visual effects supervisor.
Speaker 1: So you're a visual effects supervisor. Now, if I understand correctly,
Speaker 1: you spent a lot of your career there. You've been
Speaker 1: at Pixar for more than what twenty five years at
Speaker 1: this point?
Speaker 2: So right, yeah, I hit twenty six.
Speaker 1: Musseltov, you were director of photography for lighting for a
Speaker 1: lot of your time there, right, And that's striking to
Speaker 1: me because, if I understand correctly, there are in fact,
Speaker 1: like no photographs and no actual lights in Pixar movies. Right,
Speaker 1: So what does it mean to be the director of
Speaker 1: photography for lighting on you know, movies like say Coco.
Speaker 2: So picky of you, Jacob, I'm sorry, so curious, I'm curious.
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein. And this is What's Your Problem, the
Speaker 1: show where I talk to people who are trying to
Speaker 1: make technological progress. My guest today, as you've already heard,
Speaker 1: is Danielle Feinberg, and as you will hear, we did
Speaker 1: talk about creativity and technological change. Also we talked about
Speaker 1: the problem she's trying to solve now, and we talked
Speaker 1: about how we can often wind up following rules that
Speaker 1: are not particularly useful and that in a lot of
Speaker 1: cases we don't even know we are following.
Speaker 2: So director of photography is in a live action movie,
Speaker 2: is the same as a cinematographer, and so they're doing
Speaker 2: camera and lighting together essentially. And so in our world
Speaker 2: and animation, we split that what is traditionally one role
Speaker 2: in live action to two roles, and so we have
Speaker 2: a director of photography for camera and a director of
Speaker 2: photography for lighting.
Speaker 1: And just to be clear, I mean camera is a
Speaker 1: metaphor in this instance, right, like just so I'm thinking
Speaker 1: about it, right, there is a camera, right.
Speaker 2: There is a virtual camera, and so we build a
Speaker 2: virtual three dimensional world, and we actually have a chunk
Speaker 2: of code that is our camera that mimics a lot
Speaker 2: of things that a real life camera does. And as
Speaker 2: time has gone by, in fact that that camera has
Speaker 2: gotten more and more like real life. And we even
Speaker 2: use specific sets of lenses, sometimes modeled after certain companies
Speaker 2: lenses and stuff, and.
Speaker 1: So the lenses are our code basically that generate images
Speaker 1: that look like a picture you take with a certain.
Speaker 2: Actual yes, exactly exactly.
Speaker 1: So similarly than presumably the lighting is sort of similarly
Speaker 1: virtual but modeled on actual lights.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know it's originally it was modeled on a
Speaker 2: version of a light. It wasn't like, oh, this is
Speaker 2: tungsten light, or this is a light bulb that I
Speaker 2: would have in my lamp at home. It was like,
Speaker 2: here's a light. You can do whatever you want with it.
Speaker 2: You can make it as bright as you want, you
Speaker 2: can make it as big as you want, you can
Speaker 2: all kinds of things. And so in those sort of
Speaker 2: early days, it was easy to do things that looked
Speaker 2: sort of wrong visually because we weren't beholden too some
Speaker 2: of the same physics in real life, huh.
Speaker 1: And so it was almost like too much. You had
Speaker 1: too much power, and you could just get crazy with
Speaker 1: the light and was going on, Yeah.
Speaker 2: We had all the power and you had to use
Speaker 2: it wisely.
Speaker 1: Yes, So, I mean, so there's different ways to talk
Speaker 1: about to talk about this, and I want to try
Speaker 1: a few. But one way that I thought might be
Speaker 1: interesting to frame this is to talk to talk about
Speaker 1: the way that the craft really of what you do
Speaker 1: has changed. I know you worked on Turning Red, the
Speaker 1: recent Pixar movie, which, like millions of other people, I
Speaker 1: watched at home during the pandemic with my daughters. So
Speaker 1: thank you for that. Excellent And then you also you
Speaker 1: worked on A Bugs Life in the late nineties, right,
Speaker 1: And so I thought it might be interesting to compare
Speaker 1: A Bugs Life to Turning Red in terms of the
Speaker 1: sort of technology and creativity, right, how you created in
Speaker 1: those different really kind of technological erars. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: a long time in the development of computer generated animation, right.
Speaker 1: I mean one question in that context is what is
Speaker 1: something that you wanted to do when you were making
Speaker 1: A Bugs Life but that you couldn't that now would
Speaker 1: be really easy to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, probably so many things. When you think about A
Speaker 2: Bugs Life. That was my first film I worked on here,
Speaker 2: and at that time in the world, there there was
Speaker 2: one feature length computer animated film that had ever been released,
Speaker 2: which was Toy Story. A lot of what was happening
Speaker 2: was just being made up of how to make these
Speaker 2: movies and so and it was a very tiny group
Speaker 2: of people just kind of figuring out how to do
Speaker 2: this computer animation thing as a movie. And so, you know,
Speaker 2: back then Pixar was just this tiny little company that
Speaker 2: like nobody knew Pixar made Toy Story, like they saw
Speaker 2: the Disney on it, and like nobody. I used to
Speaker 2: have to say, oh, I do computer animation. I work
Speaker 2: out a place called Pixar. And then around the time
Speaker 2: of maybe finding Nemo, I said that and someone was like,
Speaker 2: we all know what Pixar is. You can stop saying,
Speaker 2: and so it was very cool. But like on A
Speaker 2: Bugs Life, part of the thing is it's this colony
Speaker 2: of ants, and you know what we know of the
Speaker 2: ants is there's a lot of them once you find
Speaker 2: them and where they live. And doing a scene with
Speaker 2: one hundred ants in it back on A Bug's Life
Speaker 2: was a huge, huge deal. We had to write a
Speaker 2: whole chunk of crowd software and figure out really how
Speaker 2: to jam it into the system and get it to
Speaker 2: render and meaning generate the final images, which is when
Speaker 2: the computer is crunching all of the work you've done
Speaker 2: and doing a million calculations to generate just one image,
Speaker 2: and you need twenty four of those images to make
Speaker 2: one second of film. So for a ninety minute film
Speaker 2: you're doing, you can imagine the sort of scope of
Speaker 2: the calculations you're doing. And doing a crowd of one
Speaker 2: hundred was a really big deal. You know, we can
Speaker 2: do crowds much bigger than that. Now we can give
Speaker 2: them all kinds of sort of acting properties. Where on
Speaker 2: a bug's life it really was someone was animating an
Speaker 2: ant and then you could sprinkle that animation across things,
Speaker 2: and then they'd animate another bit and you sprinkle in
Speaker 2: some of the other ones. But like I was giving
Speaker 2: a talk for I do a lot of talks for
Speaker 2: girls to try and keep them interested in math and
Speaker 2: science to get some better numbers in STEM, and I
Speaker 2: pulled some clips from a bug's life, and I was
Speaker 2: going through this whole thing of like, you know, what
Speaker 2: you don't want is for some two ants to be
Speaker 2: doing the same movement, and then you can see in
Speaker 2: the clip I pulled, like three ants are moving their
Speaker 2: arms like this or something. And it was very funny
Speaker 2: because Back then it was really what we were doing
Speaker 2: was very hard, and now it's much easier, and it
Speaker 2: would have.
Speaker 1: Just been too computationally intensive to have all the ants
Speaker 1: doing different things basically, so you sort of cheated by
Speaker 1: like having some of them do the same thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and like you did ten little animated bits and
Speaker 2: sprinkled at a crossing, and you thought that's probably enough,
Speaker 2: and we were probably out of time, honestly, you know,
Speaker 2: also and the next.
Speaker 1: Certain level it was enough, right, Like I don't know
Speaker 1: that people watched a Bug's Life and like, oh, that's
Speaker 1: so cheesy. Those two ants are doing the same thing.
Speaker 2: Right, And if we're doing our job right, you're actually
Speaker 2: looking at the characters who are doing the acting, and
Speaker 2: the crowd is the background in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2: But you know, there's this whole thing of back then
Speaker 2: you were you were much closer to some of the
Speaker 2: sort of the guts and the code, and you'd write
Speaker 2: a little code and you'd generate a picture and you'd
Speaker 2: kind of a lot of back and forth. I think
Speaker 2: a lot of the development that's happened over time has
Speaker 2: been to abstract away from that code so that people
Speaker 2: that really are coming from maybe a pure art background,
Speaker 2: or they're somewhat technical but they're really artistically based, could
Speaker 2: still thrive in this area. Now, Pixar is this really
Speaker 2: wonderful place where we have all of these people that
Speaker 2: are really like this wonderful combo of art and technology,
Speaker 2: and some are very technical and some are very artistic,
Speaker 2: and a lot of people are somewhere in between. So
Speaker 2: it makes it kind of accessible to more people in
Speaker 2: a great way, I think. But back in the old days,
Speaker 2: it was definitely it was just a different thing, and
Speaker 2: you were spending a lot of your time kind of
Speaker 2: not in a creative space. Part of it was in
Speaker 2: a just trying to get the computer to do what
Speaker 2: you want to do in a kind of rudimentary way.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, clearly Pixar movies have gotten more beautiful, right,
Speaker 1: and certainly complex, and so the benefits of technological improvements,
Speaker 1: I mean both. I'm sure a lot of it is
Speaker 1: just processing speed and more's law, but also I'm sure
Speaker 1: also on the sort of software side that you all
Speaker 1: have developed. So it's clear the ways in which it's
Speaker 1: gotten better, right. I'm curious though, In fact, I heard
Speaker 1: in one of the interviews I listened to in preparing
Speaker 1: for this interview, one of your interviews, you mentioned this
Speaker 1: idea that when you get new tools, obviously you gain things,
Speaker 1: but sometimes there are things that you lose as well.
Speaker 1: And so I'm curious when you look back, you know
Speaker 1: too much earlier in your career, when you had fewer
Speaker 1: tools and frankly worse technology, were there things that I
Speaker 1: don't know that you could do better or differently? Are
Speaker 1: there things you miss about that time from a creativity standpoint.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely. So as an example of things, I'll start
Speaker 2: with the things that we couldn't do and now can.
Speaker 2: So bugs life, I mentioned the crowd, and then when
Speaker 2: we got to Monsters Incorporated, we needed a monster that
Speaker 2: had hair. We couldn't We had no idea how to
Speaker 2: do hair. That was a huge R and D project.
Speaker 2: The next was finding Nemo. We didn't know how to
Speaker 2: do underwater, and so we had to figure out how
Speaker 2: to do underwater and what the elements were, and then
Speaker 2: sort of developed the technology so that instead of just
Speaker 2: in a test shot, all the people across the show
Speaker 2: could could do underwater in this sort of easy way,
Speaker 2: from the most technical person down to the most junior
Speaker 2: that they could still sort of API, so you.
Speaker 1: Didn't just have to sort of render water, you had
Speaker 1: to build kind of a toolkit so that people could
Speaker 1: create in water.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so that's one of the really fun things
Speaker 2: is you take some we took some live action footage
Speaker 2: of water and tried to recreate it, and then you
Speaker 2: start breaking down all of that messy looks development work
Speaker 2: you did, and it turned out there were five or
Speaker 2: six elements that when you put them together, we can
Speaker 2: make it look like underwater. And then you take each
Speaker 2: of those elements and turn it into a more pathge
Speaker 2: that's right. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it's really fun. It's kind
Speaker 2: of scary while you're doing it because you don't know
Speaker 2: if you're ever going to get anywhere good. But and
Speaker 2: so then you go to a movie like The Incredibles
Speaker 2: and the daughter Violet has long hair, and that was
Speaker 2: a completely unsolved problem in computer graphics, and it was
Speaker 2: all the way up kind of to the last minute
Speaker 2: that it wasn't it got solved.
Speaker 1: Uh, she might have had short hair if if somebody
Speaker 1: had something out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but this is one of the fun things about
Speaker 2: Pixar is sort of if a director says, well, that's
Speaker 2: a story point which is what Bradbird, the director said.
Speaker 2: He's said, well, this is how we're telling the audience
Speaker 2: who Violet is. So she hides behind her long hair
Speaker 2: and it's this big sort of story moment, and he says,
Speaker 2: it's a story point and that is sort of good
Speaker 2: as gold here, and it doesn't mean you spend a
Speaker 2: lot of time talking about whether you're going to do it.
Speaker 2: You just go figure out how to do it. And
Speaker 2: so it's this creativity driving technology and I think this
Speaker 2: really wonderful way and a very fun and scary way.
Speaker 2: But it's like we're doing this. There was quite a
Speaker 2: while where Violet's hair looked like kind of March Simpson's beehive,
Speaker 2: because when the computer doesn't do it right, it does
Speaker 2: something pretty spectacular with hair and cloth, so.
Speaker 1: It goes way wrong.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah. So so those are all things. Those
Speaker 2: are examples of sort of things we literally couldn't do
Speaker 2: that then the movie and the story spirit so that
Speaker 2: we then know how to do it. One of the
Speaker 2: things is there was kind of a push to get
Speaker 2: more and more real life mimicking real life more and more.
Speaker 2: So as we push, say lighting and materials more towards
Speaker 2: what sort of real life light responses. Say, suddenly, what
Speaker 2: started to happen is that we could get to something
Speaker 2: that looked better much faster. So you can start to
Speaker 2: put the sun in. In the olden days, we'd put
Speaker 2: the sun in and then you'd put another light that
Speaker 2: was the light bouncing off the ground, and you put
Speaker 2: another light in that the light coming from the sky,
Speaker 2: a bounce light, a fill light, a key light. And
Speaker 2: now what we could do is you put the sun
Speaker 2: in and the computer is calculating how that light is
Speaker 2: bouncing around, and then you can start aug.
Speaker 1: The computer is just figuring out what the world would
Speaker 1: look like if the sun were in that.
Speaker 2: Spot in the stit if the sun were in that
Speaker 2: spot and the light was bouncing off of things. And
Speaker 2: these materials are more real life than they were before.
Speaker 2: They have a better material response, and like, oh, doesn't
Speaker 2: that look nice? It used to take me longer to
Speaker 2: get to something that looked nice like that, And there's
Speaker 2: complexity to it that we just couldn't get before. So
Speaker 2: isn't that lovely? And so all of that is fantastic
Speaker 2: until you want to do something that is maybe not
Speaker 2: real life, say you want to stylize it, or even
Speaker 2: say the director wants you to get the shadow off
Speaker 2: the face. Suddenly that you can't do that anymore because
Speaker 2: as you push more and more towards real life, those
Speaker 2: are things you can't do very well in real life.
Speaker 1: And so and you can't and because you've built essentially
Speaker 1: a piece of software where you've said make it real life,
Speaker 1: the software is like, no, you can't take the light
Speaker 1: off the face because I'm making it real life and
Speaker 1: there would be light on their face in real life.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so suddenly it was really funny. I'm talking
Speaker 2: to one of the sort of scientific engineering people who's
Speaker 2: who's engineering the system, and he's really brilliant guy, and
Speaker 2: I said, well, what if the director asked me to
Speaker 2: take a reflection off of something or move a shadow
Speaker 2: like that stuff we do all the time for the
Speaker 2: storytelling of it. And he said, oh, you just tell
Speaker 2: the director they can't do that. And you know it
Speaker 2: is I don't know what it's like anywhere else, but
Speaker 2: you don't really usually tell the director they can't do something,
Speaker 2: and especially not because we took that capability away, you know,
Speaker 2: like it was really hard, and he was coming from
Speaker 2: this purist he doesn't ever talk to the director. He's
Speaker 2: coming from this purists, like this is what the real
Speaker 2: world does. So there was sort of this time period
Speaker 2: where as they're getting the system up and running, the
Speaker 2: thing is they'd say, well, you could do that, but
Speaker 2: like it's going to slow everything down, and there were
Speaker 2: so many more calculations happening that slowing it down felt
Speaker 2: really like the ideal world.
Speaker 1: And people are like spending all days solving optimization problems, right,
Speaker 1: trying to speed it up so that the ants aren't
Speaker 1: all doing the same thing in the background or whatever.
Speaker 2: Right, yeah, and they're like, why do you idiots need
Speaker 2: to move a shadow that doesn't happen in real life,
Speaker 2: you know sort of thing, and so yah. So the
Speaker 2: interesting thing that's had that sort of an era, And
Speaker 2: then the interesting thing that happened is now we're in
Speaker 2: an era where we're getting some of both I think
Speaker 2: where you get this sort of harness the power of
Speaker 2: the computer in a lot of ways where it's mimicking
Speaker 2: real life, but now we have more ability to kind
Speaker 2: of break out into that. And I think that's.
Speaker 1: Because in terms of realism versus kind of.
Speaker 2: Just scilistic flavor and stylization and what a director wants
Speaker 2: and sort of guiding the audience in lighting. We spent
Speaker 2: a lot of time guiding the audience's eyes so that
Speaker 2: they're looking at the right thing. You imagine a film
Speaker 2: like Wally where there's no dialogue for the first thirty
Speaker 2: minutes if you're distracted bold.
Speaker 1: Old I couldn't believe it what I thought.
Speaker 2: It was very scary. When we were working on it.
Speaker 2: We're like, oh, it's going to go see this movie.
Speaker 2: But you know, if we leave some shiny thing off
Speaker 2: in the corner and you're looking over there, you might
Speaker 2: miss an entire chunk of the setup of the movie
Speaker 2: because that was all visual storytelling for thirty minutes and
Speaker 2: so so so there's a lot of just compositional things
Speaker 2: that we need to be able to do that aren't
Speaker 2: necessary early real world things, but we still need to
Speaker 2: do them. And you know, it also kind of invites
Speaker 2: the like we have these conversations sometimes that are like, well,
Speaker 2: why are we making this movie as an animated film,
Speaker 2: Like you could just go make this a live action movie,
Speaker 2: and like why we're not taking advantage of the medium,
Speaker 2: Like they're just different art forms, and like how do
Speaker 2: you make animations sing in an animation like you can
Speaker 2: do anything and so take advantage of it sort of.
Speaker 2: And so so I think we're in a better place
Speaker 2: now in terms of like there's all this like visual
Speaker 2: gain and speed gains by mimicking some of real life,
Speaker 2: but we've started to roll back in a lot of
Speaker 2: the ability to sort of maneuver it artistically too. We're
Speaker 2: not I don't know that we're totally there. Sometimes it's
Speaker 2: still really hard, but I think we're getting to a
Speaker 2: place that at least makes me happy. It might not
Speaker 2: make that engineer happy at all, but it makes me happy.
Speaker 1: So well, well that's the like you're telling the sort
Speaker 1: of Goldilocks story where like at first just you were
Speaker 1: limited by computing power and the lack of sophistication of
Speaker 1: the suffware because we're just figuring ou how to do this,
Speaker 1: And then there was a moment when you had sort
Speaker 1: of gone too far into just mimicking reality. And now
Speaker 1: you're in this sort of just right phase.
Speaker 2: Although you know it's never going to be just right, yeah,
Speaker 2: because you're always I mean, I'm sitting on a movie
Speaker 2: right now where it's like, how on earth are we
Speaker 2: going to do that? Like it's not clear, and our
Speaker 2: system isn't made to do that. So what are we
Speaker 2: going to do? You know? And so well, let's talk
Speaker 2: about this like this.
Speaker 1: So the sort of frontier questions that you're bringing up,
Speaker 1: First of all, can you talk about the movie that
Speaker 1: you're working on?
Speaker 2: I can't. It's totally secret.
Speaker 1: I love secret. So you're working on a secret Pixar movie. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: what's the thing that you're working on right now that
Speaker 1: you haven't figured out.
Speaker 2: In a general way? So there's this great thing happening
Speaker 2: within computer animation right now, I would say, which is
Speaker 2: the original Spider Verse came out.
Speaker 1: The Spider Verse that came out a couple of years ago.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it was loved it, respectfully.
Speaker 1: I know it's not a Pixar movie. Blew my mind.
Speaker 1: I loved the New one. Went to the New One
Speaker 1: a couple of years, a couple of weeks ago at
Speaker 1: the theater in the old school style.
Speaker 2: Awesome, like high art right, totally Yeah, incredible, incredible movie.
Speaker 2: And I think both of those movies, the first one
Speaker 2: and now the second one again really inspired almost the
Speaker 2: entire industry.
Speaker 1: Huh.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't even know if it's almost I
Speaker 2: think inspired the entire industry because as you look at
Speaker 2: the films that have come out since then, everybody, there's
Speaker 2: so many instances of stylization that were not there before.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean, let's be clear when you say
Speaker 1: stylization for people who haven't seen the Spider Verse movies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like they don't look anything like real life. They're not
Speaker 1: trying to look like real life. They look really interesting.
Speaker 1: They look kind of like comic books. In the case
Speaker 1: of the new movie, it's like pastiche. Sometimes there's like
Speaker 1: six different styles on the screen and it sort of
Speaker 1: goes to this thing you're talking about about moving away
Speaker 1: from just trying to represent reality, so go on, sorry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, no, no, So it's that first one, I think,
Speaker 2: because it was like anything anyone had seen in the
Speaker 2: same way. Maybe that Toy Story was when I went
Speaker 2: and saw it when I was in college of just
Speaker 2: like what is this and this is amazing? And then
Speaker 2: Spider Verse did that, and I'm not sure any of
Speaker 2: us at that point realized that we could do something
Speaker 2: that was that different and that new, and so it
Speaker 2: was really exciting because we're working in this art form
Speaker 2: and suddenly it's like, uh, Oh, that's amazing, someone did that.
Speaker 2: We want to do that, you know, and so and
Speaker 2: was part.
Speaker 1: Of it that like, oh, we're Pixar, and there's this
Speaker 1: thing that a Pixar movie is, and it's a particular thing,
Speaker 1: you know. I feel like, in a much smaller way,
Speaker 1: I have felt that on smaller projects I've worked on,
Speaker 1: where you sort of have this kind of internal grammar
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, this is a whatever, this is a
Speaker 1: plant money story, but nobody who's listening actually cares or
Speaker 1: even knows. Right, It's like you're just creating these rules
Speaker 1: that are binding yourself for no reason, right.
Speaker 2: I think the thing is that when I got onto
Speaker 2: Turning Read, the director was like the word in the
Speaker 2: hallway before I got on, It was the director wanted
Speaker 2: to do a different look, which was exciting to everyone
Speaker 2: here because it's just doing different things is always exciting.
Speaker 2: And she's at the time was twenty nine maybe, and
Speaker 2: so younger than some of the sort of old school
Speaker 2: directors that have been here, and so coming in with
Speaker 2: just sort of different references, and she grew up with
Speaker 2: anime and so was really inspired by anime and wanted
Speaker 2: it to have some reference to that and so there's okay,
Speaker 2: it's going to have a different look, and she said,
Speaker 2: I don't want it to have the Pixar look. And
Speaker 2: I had to ad this moment of like, what do
Speaker 2: you mean the Pixar look. We try so hard on
Speaker 2: every film to do whatever's right for the film, and
Speaker 2: then you sort of go, well, yeah, I mean, I
Speaker 2: guess we do sort of have a Pixar look, but
Speaker 2: it's not intentional. It's sort of like we all just
Speaker 2: grew up here figuring out how to make movies together
Speaker 2: a lot in this sort of core group of folks,
Speaker 2: and we use our own rendering system and half our
Speaker 2: software is our own software, and so like there's something
Speaker 2: that comes from that. And I think we were just
Speaker 2: always pushing to be able to do sort of bigger
Speaker 2: and better things depending on whatever the story was, and
Speaker 2: not so much thinking about stylizing stuff. And so here's
Speaker 2: this director saying I want to, I want to, I
Speaker 2: don't want to do the Pixar look, and I'm like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, I don't even know what the Pixar
Speaker 2: look is. Let me think about this. I've been in
Speaker 2: the middle of it for so long that I didn't
Speaker 2: even realize it sort of and so kind of looking
Speaker 2: at how that look comes about and then what do
Speaker 2: you need to do to break out of that and
Speaker 2: what It was this really interesting thing for me since
Speaker 2: I've been here so long, of like what are the
Speaker 2: rules that you're following that you don't even realize are
Speaker 2: out of date because some of them were based on
Speaker 2: old technology, Like, oh, we never do that, and then.
Speaker 1: We never do that because you had because previously the
Speaker 1: technology had not allowed that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it looked terrible, but maybe now with the technology
Speaker 2: it wouldn't look terrible. Or I'll give example. So I
Speaker 2: was doing some looks tests early on before a lot
Speaker 2: of people were on, and we were trying to get
Speaker 2: this this really this the lighting look in there, the
Speaker 2: sort of if you think about light to dark, there's
Speaker 2: not a lot of dark stuff in that movie. In
Speaker 2: the first act of it or something. It's very the
Speaker 2: mids are very lifted kind of. So I'm trying to
Speaker 2: figure out how to do that without doing a lot
Speaker 2: of like you know, photoshop type work on it.
Speaker 1: And that was like a particular creative sort of storytelling
Speaker 1: desire is to have the color palette be in a
Speaker 1: certain way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, to mimic sort of the main character May's sort
Speaker 2: of world, and then it changing to be much more saturated,
Speaker 2: much more contrasting, and getting kind of crazy when kind of.
Speaker 1: Like Kansas being black and white, but in a more
Speaker 1: subtle way. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so I I did some stuff, but the
Speaker 2: way I was doing it was like not working. I'm
Speaker 2: doing ten other things while I'm doing it. And then
Speaker 2: we got our director of photography for lighting. He comes
Speaker 2: on and he sits down, he's doing some tests and
Speaker 2: he shows something. I was like, that's awesome. What did
Speaker 2: you do. He's like, oh, I put a light from
Speaker 2: camera on everything. So a light blasting straight into camera,
Speaker 2: which we would never do because it looks flat, it
Speaker 2: flattens everything out, looks kind of stupid. But in this
Speaker 2: world and in this way, he totally made it work.
Speaker 2: And it isn't how we ended up doing it for
Speaker 2: the movie, but it was that was the moment where
Speaker 2: I was like, oh, I think I'm going to have
Speaker 2: to let go much more than I thought I did
Speaker 2: in order to like really find the ways that we
Speaker 2: can push stuff to find a new look.
Speaker 1: As you realize that in fact, there were a bunch
Speaker 1: of things that you did the same without thinking about
Speaker 1: and there were other ways to do it that didn't
Speaker 1: even cross one hundred.
Speaker 2: Percent, And so then it was that really was the
Speaker 2: sort of pivotal moment where I then was like, Okay,
Speaker 2: anytime your reaction is like, yeah, we don't do it
Speaker 2: that way, or there's good reason, you have to reconsider
Speaker 2: that and decide whether that's actually still relevant. Ory just
Speaker 2: it's just sort of this long held thing.
Speaker 1: In a minute, with video games getting better and movies
Speaker 1: using more and more CGI, are we heading to a
Speaker 1: world where more or less everything is computer animation? Now
Speaker 1: back to the show. You know, you've talked about all
Speaker 1: these ways over time in which you, Slash Pixar have
Speaker 1: solved technological problems to allow you to do more things creatively.
Speaker 1: And I'm curious now about that particular dynamic, whether it
Speaker 1: is for purposes of stylization or for purposes of just
Speaker 1: going into a world where computer animated films have not gone.
Speaker 1: Are there things where you all you Pixar are trying
Speaker 1: to figure out to solve technological problems so that you
Speaker 1: can do new creative things.
Speaker 2: You know, right now we have conversations about like, well,
Speaker 2: that's a lot of hair, that's going to be hard
Speaker 2: general final image, or oh glass is expensive, or that
Speaker 2: translucent thing could be hard, or that animation is going
Speaker 2: to be really tricky, like Hank the octopus in Finding
Speaker 2: Dory very hard. Eight Tentacles turns out very hard doing
Speaker 2: a room challenge. Yeah, and so so there's these things
Speaker 2: where they're like, it's not like you couldn't do it,
Speaker 2: but they're annoying to do, so you don't see them
Speaker 2: very often, and so at a.
Speaker 1: Certain and expensive basically.
Speaker 2: And kind of tedious and like. And so at some
Speaker 2: point a lot of that hopefully is not tedious anymore,
Speaker 2: and so that opens up different stories in different worlds,
Speaker 2: and maybe it opens up that, you know, like now
Speaker 2: everyone has a camera, they could shoot anyone can shoot videos.
Speaker 2: I mean TikTok is proof of that, right, maybe anyone
Speaker 2: can make you know, animated films in a totally different way.
Speaker 2: I don't know. You still have to tell great stories
Speaker 2: and so that's that's still going to always be the
Speaker 2: main building block of it. But faster and easier is
Speaker 2: always the thing we are always sort of going after that.
Speaker 1: So that's this sort of there's this sort of bottom
Speaker 1: up convergence, right, I mean, there's another convergence that's interesting
Speaker 1: to me when you're talking about, like, you know, this
Speaker 1: sort of arc of first trying to make films that
Speaker 1: look more like reality and saying, oh wait, wait, that's
Speaker 1: not actually the business we're in. Let's make things that
Speaker 1: are you know, beautiful and interesting and look like nothing
Speaker 1: you've ever seen. I feel like, to some significant degree,
Speaker 1: over the decades you've been working at Pixar, live action
Speaker 1: films have started to look more like animated films, right Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you think of Marvel, which is probably
Speaker 1: the most important thing to happen in movies, at least
Speaker 1: on a commercial level and in some ways on a
Speaker 1: creative level over the last whatever ten years, Like you know,
Speaker 1: there's like whatever, a talking raccoon and a person, right Like,
Speaker 1: they are not going for reality and they are live
Speaker 1: action films, but they are you know, CGI is basically
Speaker 1: computer animation, and so right like, maybe there is some
Speaker 1: convergence where it's everything's made with a computer. So whether
Speaker 1: we're calling it animation or like live action, like Marvel
Speaker 1: movies aren't exactly live action, right It's like a dude
Speaker 1: doing motion capture in front of a green screen.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's everything is overlapping and that, you know,
Speaker 2: and a lot of the live action stuff they're using
Speaker 2: all of the same stuff we do. There is no
Speaker 2: difference except that they're shooting some live action plates that
Speaker 2: they're matching it to, you know, in a lot of ways,
Speaker 2: or they're doing virtual production.
Speaker 1: Avatar maybe even more so, right, Yeah, Avatar is kind
Speaker 1: of a computer animation movie. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And so you think about things like the Academy Awards,
Speaker 2: the animation category that's getting hazier and hazier, like what
Speaker 2: is animation and what is live action? And you know,
Speaker 2: especially with some of the things like live action Lion
Speaker 2: King or Jungle Book or different things like that where
Speaker 2: there is really a huge mix. And you talk about
Speaker 2: games and that same thing and those the visual level
Speaker 2: of games has increased coming towards us. It used to
Speaker 2: always be that we were we would spend a lot
Speaker 2: of time on our renders to make them look beautiful.
Speaker 2: Games had to be so fast that there's no way
Speaker 2: that they could approach sort of the look we had.
Speaker 2: And that's coming together and live actions coming together, and
Speaker 2: so everything's becoming much more possible, I think, on all
Speaker 2: those fronts. And so maybe at some point it all
Speaker 2: is just one one pie that everyone's pulling from.
Speaker 1: Does it make you sad? Is that a sad ending
Speaker 1: for you?
Speaker 2: It's not sad to be able to think about being
Speaker 2: able to work, being able to try anything and have
Speaker 2: no cost to it, so that you could try this,
Speaker 2: you could try that, and try this and throw it
Speaker 2: out and do a different thing and not feel precious
Speaker 2: or worried about it. That's very exciting.
Speaker 1: Uh huh. Yeah, the cost constraint. I mean it's funny.
Speaker 1: The editor of this show was like, yeah, ask about
Speaker 1: cost constraints. I was like, no, let's not do cost coinstints.
Speaker 1: So then you've brought it up, so points to her.
Speaker 1: I mean it's interesting, right because there is one of
Speaker 1: the simple and I think underrated things technology does. Maybe
Speaker 1: the fundamental thing is make things cheaper, right, And you're
Speaker 1: talking about that from the creative point of view, Right,
Speaker 1: If it's cheaper to just try seven different things, or
Speaker 1: cheaper to make an octopus or whatever, then you can
Speaker 1: try more stuff and make more stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So on every movie you look at a thing
Speaker 2: and you go, okay, am I going to build a
Speaker 2: system for that that makes it easier to do in
Speaker 2: a bunch of shots or are we just going to
Speaker 2: like kind of force it through, right, and we'll just
Speaker 2: hodgepodge it in every shot to get it through. And
Speaker 2: so in something like if it's a little bit tricky
Speaker 2: and it's intense shots, you're just going to kind of
Speaker 2: make it happen and force it through, you know, kind of.
Speaker 1: If it's water for finding Nemo, you're going to build
Speaker 1: a water.
Speaker 2: You're going to build something that is really usable that
Speaker 2: people can make it look great. And so there's there's
Speaker 2: sort of always that trade off and consideration of how
Speaker 2: you're investing your sort of time and money.
Speaker 1: And Pixar started as a tool company, right, basically a
Speaker 1: hard company, and there's this software render Man that is
Speaker 1: still like there's like a website and you can like
Speaker 1: pay and use the software that picks our users to
Speaker 1: make movies. Right, it is at some level a tools company.
Speaker 2: It is. Yeah, it's we're a funny place in that
Speaker 2: where where we have our own studio tools group that
Speaker 2: write are a bunch of software that we use. We
Speaker 2: have the RenderMan group that writes rendering software that's used
Speaker 2: throughout the industry. We make movies, but we're not totally Hollywood.
Speaker 2: We're not totally a tech company. We're some weird combination
Speaker 2: in between. And then we're in the Bay Area, so
Speaker 2: we're not even like down in Hollywood or down in
Speaker 2: Silicon Valley. And so it's an interesting place that I
Speaker 2: think has bread a lot of interesting things in terms
Speaker 2: of the combination of sort of art and technology here,
Speaker 2: and the interest in driving computer graphics to make our
Speaker 2: movies to suit the story, and then being inspired by
Speaker 2: technology to then change the story to take advantage of it.
Speaker 2: And so there's this really cool kind of feeding back
Speaker 2: and forth and advancement of technology because we don't put
Speaker 2: limits on story in the way you might otherwise. So
Speaker 2: when you know they storyboard a character with long hair
Speaker 2: and we don't know how to do that, we still
Speaker 2: go after it and do it. And that's that's an
Speaker 2: amazing place to be, I think.
Speaker 1: And then you not only have that character presumably in
Speaker 1: that instance, you have now a way that, oh, great,
Speaker 1: people in these worlds we create can now have long hair.
Speaker 1: That's another thing we can do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally, until we got to Brave, and then long
Speaker 2: curly hair was its whole own problem. We have to
Speaker 2: rewrite the simulator, So.
Speaker 1: Does it have to be curly?
Speaker 2: It's always something.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll be back in a minute with a lighting
Speaker 1: focused lightning ground. Back to the show. Okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: ask you a bunch of questions. Edith said, you listened
Speaker 1: to some episodes of the show, so I don't even
Speaker 1: need to explain that this is the lightning round.
Speaker 2: But I didn't prepare it.
Speaker 1: Also, Okay, there's no way to prepare the best part
Speaker 1: of the show. For that reason, I'll start with an
Speaker 1: easy one that you were totally prepared for. I know
Speaker 1: from listening to some other interviews you've done that you
Speaker 1: have often been the only woman in a room full
Speaker 1: of men at work. What is one tip you'd give
Speaker 1: to somebody who is in that setting, you know, the
Speaker 1: only woman in a room full of men at work.
Speaker 2: I found when I became a director of photography for
Speaker 2: lighting for Wally that I was I was generating my
Speaker 2: own imposter syndrome. So I was getting quieter and quieter
Speaker 2: because I was suddenly in a room with sort of
Speaker 2: a new level of people, and I kept thinking, well,
Speaker 2: would I have known that? Would I have been able
Speaker 2: to answer that? And there was this moment where I
Speaker 2: realized that my boss was particularly outspoken, and he suddenly
Speaker 2: was talking about something about lighting, and I actually knew
Speaker 2: he was wrong, but he was saying it as if
Speaker 2: it was fact, and I sort of suddenly realized that
Speaker 2: just because someone is presenting something as fact doesn't necessarily
Speaker 2: mean that that's what that is, and that I was
Speaker 2: sort of like sidelining myself over something that was completely false.
Speaker 1: So what did you do? What did you do?
Speaker 2: My jaw dropped, and then I spoke up because I
Speaker 2: knew he was wrong, right, And so I was emboldened
Speaker 2: in that way to say, wait, wait, wait, that's that's
Speaker 2: not true, and or I'm sure I probably found some
Speaker 2: nice way to say it, so I wasn't poking the bear.
Speaker 1: But yes, and yeah, yeah, yeah yes. And what's your
Speaker 1: favorite non Pixar movie? Mm hmm, I'm gonna do another one.
Speaker 1: I got a better one. Okay, what's the best lighting
Speaker 1: you've ever seen in a non Pixar movie?
Speaker 2: Oh? Uh, you know what? The original Blade Runner I
Speaker 2: love so so much for many reasons. Lighting is wonderful.
Speaker 2: The newer Blade Runner is fabulous.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting when you mentioned Blade Runner, I think
Speaker 1: of the that relationship between live action and animation. And
Speaker 1: I mean, if you want to like be warm and
Speaker 1: fuzzy about it. This is the relationship between like what's
Speaker 1: real and what's not real, what's made by a computer
Speaker 1: and what's yeah, yeah, thematically nice. What's one tip for
Speaker 1: my living room?
Speaker 2: Oh? I like that? No bear bulbs?
Speaker 1: Thank you?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 1: Am I getting interrogated?
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, warm light to me always?
Speaker 1: Yeah. You think you'll ever leave Pixar?
Speaker 2: It's hard to imagine. It feels like it's my other family. Uh.
Speaker 2: And I have so much sort of knowledge invested here,
Speaker 2: and I love this place, and I love getting to
Speaker 2: work on our films and I love what we do.
Speaker 1: Danielle Feinberg is a visual effects supervisor at Pixar. Today's
Speaker 1: show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang and Edith Russolo.
Speaker 1: It was edited by Sarah Nix and engineered by Amanda K. Wong.
Speaker 1: You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm.
Speaker 1: You can find me on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. I'm
Speaker 1: Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another
Speaker 1: episode of What's Your Problem? MHM.