How Pixar Created the ‘Wall-E’ Visual Style

Fascinating Animation World Magazine story on the steps Pixar took to make Wall-E look and feel like a traditional film by mimicking the limitations and optics of real-world cameras. Director of photography Jeremy Lasky:

We used a spherical lens as a kind of control to look at depth of field and barrel distortion and the optical breathing you get when you rack from things really close to really far away. It gave us a chance to have something tangible. We used an Arriflex camera with Panavision lenses. We looked at lens flares and how to focus lights in the background. There’s that shot in the truck [his home] when EVE’s looking at the lighter for the first time from WALL-E’s POV and you see the bouquet stretched in the background. And this is the kind of thing we discovered doing those tests.

(Via Daily Kos.)

★ Thursday, 3 July 2008