Interview With Lighting Director On Disney's Bolt

By George 'El Guapo' Roush on September 16, 2008

In our continuing coverage this week of Disney's Bolt, we talk to the lighting director Adolph Lusinsky. (Missed my earlier Bolt article? Click HERE to check it out!) Adolph has been in the lighting business for ten years now, having worked on such films as Armageddon and Reign of Fire. In our continuing coverage all this week on Disney's Bolt, we sat down and chatted with the look and lighting director and got some insight on how the process is done. We sat at stared at a big screen with images from the movie as Adolph explained a bit more about the lighting process.

Lusinsky: …what the lighting is, the process of taking these kind of bland ray models and characters that are just animated with gray shells and we paint all the textures and develop all the shading algorithms to make cloth look like cloth and metal look like metal, hair look like hair and we set the mood with the lighting. So it's kind of the second half of the cinematography situation. So it's similar to the buildings and the environments. We do the same with the characters. We get the gray characters and we established [?] that reflects like hair and like skin. The first thing that I wanted to talk about was kind of some of the inspiration and the look of the movie. We're really heavily influenced by an Edward Hopper painting sensibility. We really wanted to get that into this particular movie. So a lot of our early R&D efforts were on how we could do this in a CG world. So I'll point out three of the main things that we developed over three tests. The first thing that we did is that we developed a technique in which we paint where we have these really realized brick. Every brick, every nook and cranny of the brick is apparent and once you get away from the camera things tend to fall off and bricks start to mass up into really simple shapes. You don't see all the details. You don't see every brick at that point. So you get this really nice sensibility of things and it gets really simple as you get away from camera. The other thing we really focused on is edges on things. Computers tend to give you really hard, crisp, clean edges and we wanted to really break those things up. So in particular with this piece of trim on the diner car here, we developed a technique in which we can paint all of the models and we can bend those models to take on aspects and broad strokes. So things look like they're painted with broad strokes as opposed to just a CG model. The last thing we developed was the ability on all these things, on the silhouettes of things to have a really kind of broad stroke, painterly edge to it. It's a technique called Repainting which the texture artists paint broad strokes onto the three-d model and that stuff gets projected out onto the screen space and it gives us the ability to instead of having a really hard edge CG model we have a painterly edge to all these models. This is our last R&D test where everything has come together. We can do these really cool painterly looking staircases that are actually quite models with some really sophisticated painting techniques and then addition this back area here, part of the image is actually a matte painting which we developed techniques to seamlessly integrate that into our three-d world through projection techniques of three-d space and by being able to have painterly aspects to it.

Is there a lot of that in the movie?

Lusinsky: Most of that is off in the background so this stuff really kinds of push things close to the camera. The one thing that I should've pointed out when we were looking at that building with the realized brick is that the reality is that we have really tangible characters like Wolf who's got tens of thousands of little hairs and so we wanted these characters to be able, wherever they're at we wanted that to be more realized. So, for instance, we have a thing like this where the characters would be more tangible and realized and when you get off to the background you get these really simple buildings and some detail will fall off. I'll go through these really quick. That's really touching on the technical quality of the movie. There's a couple of main aspects to lighting. One thing is that we wanted the movie to really have the sensibility of the different lighting divisions across the country and we also wanted to find detail in different places throughout the country. John Lasseter is really big on finding details of all the places that we're going so that they look really convincing. So if someone was there they'd see some of those details in a really tangible way. So we do a lot of research. So, San Francisco and Oakland aren't necessarily any particular place in the movie, but part of the TV Bolt, the movie within the movie, in which there's a big scooter chase with motorcycles and helicopters chasing them, we based that kind of loosely on San Francisco and these old shipping yards that we found the San Francisco Bay. Actually, they were shipping yards that were built in the 19th century. You know if you were to walk along the street and the asphalt was coming up, you could see cobblestone streets underneath and it just had a really cool quality to it. So in the TV show part of the movie, we really wanted that to be pushed, to have this sensibility of pushed film like in a Michael Bay film, really saturated colors, over the top lights that don't really make sense. When Bolt gets shipped from the studio to New York the first thing that we wanted you to see was a really de-saturated color palette. So we went to New York and we spent a lot of time in New York, in different parts of New York like the garment district and pulled from those color palettes and that sensibility of the gray haze. So it'll be a really strong contrast from Bolt's TV world to New York.

This will be Madison Square Garden which be a part of the movie. Some other cool qualities that we found as we went through the country were things like as sunlight comes down it hits the windows on the buildings and casts this reflected light. There are pools of reflected light into the shadowed side of the street. So there were things like that which gave us some nice lighting pools to be able to set off the characters in relatively dim areas. And as we traveled through the country we tried to find different lighting conditions that we needed. In Kentucky and Ohio you have this really kind of turquoise haze that sat over everything like the trees here and so those are the kind of things that we really tried to find and use to make you feel like you're traveling through the country in a really convincing way. This is actually the RV park here that we based our RV park on. Vegas is another place that we go which is another completely different world. We really wanted that sensibility of the neon lights and really studied how the lights animate there so that it'd be really convincing so that if you went there you'd feel like you were there. On the flipside, the day after Penny builds a shelter for Bolt just off the strip and so we found this really cool abandoned parking lot that we used both for the lighting and for the textural quality of it. This is where he ends up building the shelter for Bolt and we really wanted to capture that sensibility in this hundred degree weather and yet she's built this little shelter under a tree for him. You see the strip off in the distance. Lastly, Los Angeles. Although we're from L.A. we still wanted to do a lot of research to make sure that we got all the details right. When we get to L.A. we really create L.A. like a Santa Anna, like a day when the Santa Anna winds come through and you get that really purple sky as opposed to a gray sky in New York and the gray sky in Kentucky. We really studied the buildings and the architecture. Like I said, we really wanted some naturalistic lighting conditions so that it really felt like you were going to different parts of the country. This is a morning in Madison Square Park at 8:30a in the morning. We really wanted a sensibility of exposure so this idea of seeing a cat under a shadow of an RV, if you were to take a photo of that probably the glass behind it would blowout. So those are the kinds of things [we wanted]. We really wanted people to believe that the images they were seeing were real. It's similar here. If you were to take a photo outside at night the inside would be blown out. And a real sense of air and atmosphere especially in the middle of the country and in New York. We can use the color of the atmosphere and the air to really establish what part of the country that you're in. This is actually in Ohio like the photo I showed you of the turquoise kind of haze. Clearly, we used that in this particular part of the movie to really set you in that part of the country. Lastly, as far as cinematography goes we really wanted the sense of this thing being shot with a camera. So if you have a really bright sky behind you you're going to have that bright sky contaminating the lens. So some of the blacks would get washed out without light scattering through the lens. Certainly if you were to shoot black helicopters with a really bright sky behind them they would be really lifted and the blacks would get flash with all the light scattering. Our inspirations for this were Vilmos Zsigmond who did 'Close Encounters' and Gordon Willis who did 'The Parallax View' and 'The Godfather'. Those are two cinematographers who take a really naturalistic approach to their cinematography, a lot of 1970 films played into this.

Look for more Bolt interviews all this week on Latinoreview! And shout out your excitement for this new cartoon when you e-mail: george@latinoreview.com

 

Source:Latinoreview

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