Pixar movies dazzle audiences with their beloved characters, imaginative worlds, and gripping plots.
But there is another hero that belongs on that list: impeccable lighting.
Danielle Feinberg is a director of photography at Pixar. She's responsible for creating the awe-inspiring shots that fill viewers with wonder and guide them to each scene's most important subjects. Without Feinberg's touch, films such as "Wall-E,""Brave," and "Monsters, Inc.," wouldn't be nearly as rich or complex.
Feinberg recently shared with Tech Insider how she and her lighting team help Pixar movies meet mega-success.
1. Color
Pixar movies are not dull. They burst with color, and masterfully use each hue to tell stories.
Feinberg points to "Wall-E," a movie about a lonely robot that finds love. The movie doesn't use dialogue in the first 40 minutes of the film, so Feinberg had to find a way to communicate where Wall-E lived without words.
"We realized very quickly that if we let things go too red — the clouds, the dust, the atmosphere — it began to look like Mars," she says. "We all seem to have this ingrained notion that red equals Mars. So I had to be very careful to keep the colors of that monochromatic version of Earth in the whites, yellows, and oranges but never let it get too red."
Here are a few shots, known as progression images in lighting designer lingo, that show how the various color schemes for "Wall-E" changed over time. What begins as gray and overcast, but otherwise ordinary, ends up as a smog-filled wasteland.
The final result is clearly dystopian, but still suggests that Wall-E is living on Earth.
"Every department is helping to tell the story," Feinberg says, "but here just small changes in the color of the lighting could have ruined everything" by confusing the audience about something as basic as which planet the story is set on.
2. Nature
Unlike movies that take place on land, where creating the look of air only involves some haze or wisps of wind, creating believable underwater scenes presented a unique challenge for Feinberg while working on the 2003 film "Finding Nemo."
Feinberg had to find a way to situate audience inside Australia's Great Barrier Reef without dialing up the colors too much, in order to preserve the actual look of the ocean. One tool the team has, she says, is a light they call "murk."
"We use it to set the visibility of the water [by] decontrasting the objects as we go away from the camera, until they are the same contrast as surrounding things," Feinberg says, "so you can't make out any detail thus losing visibility and the color."
A good example of that is the scene in which Nemo and company are riding the East Australian Current (EAC) as if it were a giant underwater roller coaster.
"With the turtles riding the East Australian Current, we set the visibility of the water to be much deeper than you would ever see in real life, to help tell the story, by showing the EAC and what it is the turtles are in for their roller coaster ride," Feinberg says.
"With 'Nemo,' the lighting is not only setting up the world that is critical to the story," she adds, "but also able to set the mood without impacting the believability of the world for the audience."
3. Theme
Sometimes lighting cues can add to the tone of the overall story. Happy stories aren't set in darkness. They're bright and cheery.
In the 2012 film "Brave," Feinberg had to find a way to convey Merida's uncertainty and trepidation through the film's lighting, all while making considerations for where the story takes place.
"The lighting design I came up with for the scenes in the forest had all the light cutting off outside a little area we set up around the characters and action," she says. "The Scottish mist then hung around these dark silhouettes of trees and vegetation in the distance."
Visually, this helped calm "the busyness of the forest," but also made it easier for the audience to understand the story thematically.
"It helps with the idea that there are a lot of unknowns in that forest — magic, bears, witches," says Feinberg. "It is also the place where our main character, Merida, is figuring out who she is going to be in the world, venturing out into the great unknown of the forest and adulthood."
4. Character
Lighting can be essential to bringing non-human characters — Pixar's bread and butter — to life. Feinberg had perhaps no greater challenge in that regard than when she and her team worked on the binoculars that make up Wall-E's eyes.
Since the tiny robot has no face, all his humanity comes through his emotive lenses. The Pixar team tried out a handful of different lenses in order to perfectly match the three-part anatomy of the human eye: the colorful iris, the black pupil, and the white sclera.
"There are 3 lenses inside his binoculars," Feinberg explains. "These became a mess of reflections when it got to lighting. This made him look glassy-eyed which is a pretty awful look when you are trying to convince an audience that a robot has a personality and is capable of falling in love."
By cleverly choosing which lenses would reflect in which scenes, the team was able to give Wall-E a personality without seeming hokey.
Then, because they had avoided the glassy-eyed look throughout most of the movie, it retained its emotional power when it mattered most: at the end of the film when Wall-E loses his memory.
"It is the perfect thing to help tell you what is happening," Feinberg says. "Having eyes makes it easier for us to believe there is a personality, perhaps an ability to fall in love."
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