'Inside Out 2' cinematographers Adam Habib & Jonathan Pytko shares what it's like being a cinematographer for animation and how that differs from a live action one.
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00:00Hi, my name's Jonathan Pitko.
00:01I'm one of the cinematographers on Inside Out 2.
00:04And I'm Adam Habib, the other cinematographer on Inside Out 2.
00:07♪♪
00:15Come on, Riley. Get it together.
00:17Come on, Riley. Get it together.
00:19I'm not good enough.
00:21Inside Out 2 is building on the first film.
00:23We come back to Riley when she's 13 years old,
00:26and she's discovering all these new emotions that she now has.
00:30We're just kind of getting into what those new emotions
00:32feel like that are a little different
00:34from our original folks that we had.
00:36Riley has gone away to hockey camp,
00:40and she really wants to make the varsity team
00:43to set up herself to make new friends in high school.
00:46And she's putting more and more pressure on herself
00:49as the story goes along.
00:51And so the scene that we're going to talk about
00:53is really where it hits kind of a crescendo.
00:55All this pressure that anxiety has been helping to create on Riley,
00:59because she wants the best for her,
01:00because she wants her to make the team,
01:03kind of goes in an unexpected direction
01:05and actually leads to Riley having an anxiety attack.
01:08The scene is really about how joy and the rest of the emotions
01:12try to undo some of the damage
01:14that they've unintentionally done to Riley
01:17through wanting the best for her.
01:18One of the things that changed a lot technology-wise
01:21between the first film and this film
01:22was motion capture was a little newer then,
01:24and we were using that on all the human world shots then,
01:27which we did in this film as well.
01:29But we sort of used the motion capture a little bit differently
01:32to make it more of a collaboration tool
01:33and a way to actually bring the director
01:36and bring supervisors who might work
01:39in totally different software, like Jonathan does.
01:41But we had an iPad that you could walk around the scene
01:44or walk around the set, if you will, the virtual set.
01:46For animation, a lot of it is the cinematography
01:49is trying to ground this world, which is very unique.
01:52It's typically not a scene world,
01:53especially when we talk about the emotions in the mind.
01:57Even though these are fantastical characters,
01:58we wanna ground them.
01:59So we try to come at the cinematography
02:01from physical principles of light and camera.
02:04And then when we look at what we did with the human world,
02:08we actually really try to emulate a cinematic world
02:11where we're doing cinematic cameras.
02:13Lighting-wise, we're trying to approach it
02:15from a very physical sense, complete with flares and grain
02:18and trying to give a real filmic look.
02:21A lot of things surprise me
02:22about cinematography and animation.
02:24One of them is my department,
02:26sometimes we call it camera and staging,
02:27which is the name that you'll see in the credits.
02:29We are actually responsible for the blocking
02:32and the staging of the actors or the characters.
02:34So as opposed to a live action set
02:36where you might walk on a set
02:37and the actors will kinda start walking through some ideas
02:41that they have themselves,
02:42we're actually building that blocking and that staging
02:46in addition to figuring out the shots,
02:48the compositions, the camera angles, and things like that.
02:51You're almost a little bit part actor,
02:53a little bit part director.
02:55You're kinda wearing a lot of hats at that moment
02:57that you're trying to make a scene come together.
02:58The beginning sequences take us a long time
03:01because the movie's still being sorted out story-wise,
03:04but also I think there's the visual language
03:06of the movie is all coming together.
03:08I think there's a big change that happens with the movie
03:10once you start seeing animation.
03:12You start seeing the performances
03:13and it starts informing things you wanna do in the movie,
03:17like visually, like in headquarters.
03:19There's all these different light sources
03:21you have to deal with.
03:22You have the console glows, joy glows,
03:24all the emotions glow, the sense of self glows,
03:26memory spheres are glowing, the screen is glowing.
03:28What is the priority of that image?
03:30What's the visual hierarchy that's there?
03:33And once you start seeing animation come in,
03:35all of a sudden you start making really interesting choices.
03:38So we have to get a little bit into the movie
03:40to actually start seeing all the pieces come together.
03:43We're constantly working back and forth
03:45with the editorial team.
03:46So on a live action shoot,
03:48I know sometimes the editors are cutting
03:49while they're shooting, but maybe more typically,
03:52it's like you shoot the scene,
03:53you give it over to the editor,
03:55they cut it in animation.
03:56And in our process,
03:57we're actually sending footage to the editor.
03:59We look at it together and then we shoot more coverage,
04:02shoot different ideas.
04:03And so we're constantly evolving
04:05and iterating the scene with the editor.
04:07So I fell in love with that process.
04:09We had a lot of conversations early on
04:11about how we wanted anxiety to feel.
04:14And so we started doing a lot of things
04:16like tightening up the shutter angle.
04:17So suddenly like everything's a lot sharper,
04:19focus got a lot deeper.
04:21And then when the anxiety attack hits,
04:23suddenly we flip almost everything.
04:25Focus goes extremely shallow, the world drops away.
04:28And the other thing that we were always interested in
04:30was the kind of shaking background effect.
04:32We had talked about like,
04:33what if we start vibrating the background
04:35as Riley gets deeper into this panic attack?
04:38It's one of those things where it's like,
04:40you wanna show an image that is really compelling.
04:42It's not something you wanna just like
04:44throw out to the director
04:45of like this thing we haven't done before
04:47in a really rough image.
04:48So we actually refined the image in lighting quite a bit.
04:51And then we added that element into it
04:53so that what we were showing is a pretty finished image
04:57with this concept in there.
04:58And you know, you wanna try and get buy off
05:00on that kind of thing before you do it
05:01because it takes a lot of time
05:03to sort of mock that stuff up.
05:04But in this case, it felt like the images
05:06were really trending in this beautiful direction
05:09with this flaring, lots of depth of field
05:13coming in the camera.
05:14We overexposed the light a lot.
05:15Really flooded this light coming around Riley
05:19as she's going through this moment.
05:20And then adding that element in there
05:22really sold what happened.
05:23And then we were able to increase it
05:25as she gets more and more anxious.
05:27And then as the panic attack dies down,
05:30it starts to mellow out, soften,
05:33and then starts to warm up.
05:34So we start changing the color
05:35from like a cooler to a warmer tone
05:37to start introducing that joy back into the frame.
05:40The camera is virtual.
05:41It starts out perfect.
05:43And I think the challenge is often
05:45how do we bring that familiar language
05:47to the audience and start to add,
05:48basically, pile on imperfections
05:50that you would get with physical camera equipment
05:54into our virtual camera.
05:55So as Jonathan was saying,
05:57we kind of have these two different worlds
05:58that the movie is set in.
06:00There's Riley's human world.
06:01And for that, we took a very physical camera idea
06:05or cinematography idea.
06:06And it's anamorphic in our films.
06:08And then the mind world camera,
06:10that one we think of a little bit more
06:12as virtual or perfect.
06:15And it's almost like a 1930s studio camera.
06:18Everything's very choreographed
06:19and the movement is a lot more precise.
06:22One of the things that was fun about this film
06:24was like we really, early on,
06:26we're like, okay, we want it to feel
06:27like the inside-out world that people know,
06:30but we don't want to stop there.
06:31And we want to find ways to go farther.
06:33One of the things was just right
06:34from the beginning of the movie, it's widescreen.
06:36Sometimes it drove our animators crazy
06:38as there were too many characters
06:40and that makes it rather expensive to animate.
06:42But for me, I would a lot of times
06:43find myself arguing like, no, but that's the comedy.
06:46You want to see embarrassment and sadness
06:48on opposite sides of the screen,
06:50both clocking kind of the same moment
06:52and having either a similar reaction
06:53or different reactions.
06:54And it extends a lot to like our film grain.
06:57We apply film grain to the images
06:59and we have a grain for the human world
07:01versus the mind world to sort of further identify
07:03towards like a live action kind of human world
07:06and then a more perfect mind world.
07:09We have a team of layout artists
07:10and these are the artists who actually
07:11are building each shot in the computer.
07:13So they're blocking out rough animation
07:15and then they might shoot that animation
07:17from four or five, six, we figured out.
07:19Every shot in the movie,
07:20there was about six alternate angles
07:22that we delivered to the editorial team
07:25to try to find the best one.
07:26And then we'll show it to the director,
07:28we'll work with the editor to get it passed together.
07:30Sometimes at that stage even, we'll be like,
07:32okay, something's clearly missing
07:34or these shots don't cut,
07:35or you see how they're using it
07:36and they ask you for something else.
07:38Those story beats and those moments
07:39are getting reshuffled on the fly
07:41and you just have to be comfortable with rolling with it
07:43and we just keep generating new stuff
07:45and we might get a call in the morning
07:46and have something out by lunch
07:48and then there's a new version of the scene out.
07:49Because we're rendering this imagery,
07:51it takes a lot of computing power to do that
07:53and we don't often see the finished images
07:56until the last possible moment,
07:58like the highest quality, actual done stuff.
08:01Everything up to that point
08:02is some sort of rough render, it's broken,
08:05hair is going all over the place,
08:08characters are intersecting each other,
08:10nothing works and every department
08:12refines it and refines it and refines it.
08:14And then finally at the end,
08:15you see a finished image.
08:17It goes from down here to up here.
08:19It just completes the whole thing
08:21in a way that you just don't get to see
08:23until the very end.