COVER
SOUL’S JOURNEY FROM ‘THE GREAT BEFORE’ TO NEW YORK JAZZ CLUBS By BARBARA ROBERTSON
All images copyright © 2020 Disney/Pixar. TOP: Soul introduces Joe Gardner (voice of Jaime Foxx), a middle-school band teacher who get the chance of a lifetime to play with Dorothea Williams (voice of Angela Bassett) at the best jazz club in town. BOTTOM: Pete Docter, Writer/Director/Executive Producer and Chief Creative Officer, Pixar Animation. OPPOSITE TOP: Set in fast-paced New York City and the abstract, illusionary world of The Great Before, Soul capitalizes on the contrast between the big city and the cosmic realm.
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PG 34-40 SOUL.indd 34-35
“How did they do that?” may not be your typical reaction to scenes in an animated feature. But consider this shot with two characters from Disney/Pixar’s latest film Soul: A tall stick figure, a “counselor,” is trying to catch a “soul,” a small, soft three-dimensional character with a big round head and almost no body. The counselor is also 3D, but looks like a partially shaded, partially transparent line drawing with a Picasso-esque face. His nose and mouth point in one direction, his eyes in another. One eye is outside the lines entirely. As the counselor frantically scrambles after the little soul, he grows extra arms for a moment, then stretches one arm w-a-a-ay out, grabs the soul, lifts it up... and drops it. As it falls, the soul loses shape entirely and stretches, eyes growing big, until it lands on another soul, the character Joe, and melts over his head. Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is a middle-school music teacher in New York, who, on the very day his dream to be a jazz musician is about to come true, steps into an open manhole. Joe’s soul escapes “The Great Beyond” and lands in “The Great Before” where new souls train before birth. There, he meets 22 (Tina Fey), a soul not yet born who looks with skepticism at the Earth. It befalls Joe, a soul who has already lived and wants to live again, to show 22 the promise of life. And thereby hangs the tale – a soul who doesn’t want to live meets a soul who doesn’t want to die. But what do souls look like and where are they before they are born? “The characters started as design problems and then quickly became technical challenges,” says Soul writer/director/executive producer (and Chief Creative Officer at Pixar) Pete Docter. “In literature and traditionally, people think of souls as ethereal. We wanted to see through them like fog but not be distracted by what was behind. How do we film that? And, that bled into location. Most religions talk about the afterlife. Few talk about before life. It’s one of those things that if you think about it too hard you’ll break your brain.”
The creative team decided the story would put blank-slate souls in a kind of training camp designed with grand abstract pavilions of knowledge. Mentoring and sorting those souls would be counselors like Jerry (Richard Ayoade), the tall line drawing who grabbed 22 and dropped her on Joe’s head. BODY AND SOUL
“The souls are not physical characters,” says Michael Fong, Visual Effects Supervisor. “They can change shape, elongate and stretch. They have no physical form.” Designers gave the souls faces, but the character’s ambiguity led them to lean on the technology group to help create foggy volumes that would sustain interest. “We needed to be inspired by technology,” Docter says. “We had weekly reviews. What if we push this way? What if we put a line around the fingers? It was cyclical art that was possible because we could be iterative and adaptable and change things quickly.” Docter didn’t want the souls to look like the emotions in Inside Out or otherworldly characters depicted in other Pixar films, so the team created souls that catch light and reflect it in an atypical way. “The characters are volumetric, like fog,” Fong says. “But Pete didn’t want the volumes to look like volumes that have used correct math. He wanted pink here, blue there, green in the middle. We didn’t know how to do that.” Over the past 10 years or so, physically-based lighting and rendering techniques have become standard for look dev, lighting, and rendering in most VFX and animation studios. They simplify lighting setups and bring synthetic worlds closer to reality. At Pixar, artists use RenderMan, a homegrown toolset based around Katana, for lighting and Nuke for compositing, a typical set of tools for many studios. But these characters weren’t typical.
“We wanted the characters to feel luminous, not emissive,” says Ian Megibben, Director of Photography. “Joy, a character in Inside Out, was a volume, but she was a light source. Soul’s Joe and 22 are also volumes, but they are affected by an external light source. We used volume rendering for a good portion of the soul world and characters. But we didn’t want them to take on local color. We didn’t want the shadows to look dark. And we didn’t want them to come across as a ghost. I remember asking the designers what their expectation was for light entering one end of a volume and coming out the other end. We narrowed down on the theme of prismatic light.” BLUE IN GREEN
For reference, the artists looked at opalescent glass, beetle shells, rainbows in the mist – anything that showed light splitting. Then, rather than shadows, they used variations of color to create something that would feel like shadows. “The rainbow was our surrogate for light and shadow,” Megibben says. “Warm colors represented light and cooler colors represented shadow. The characters shift from yellowish green to turquoise or teal to, on the unlit side, deep blue as shadows. On the edges, they have other rainbow colors – magenta, orange, yellow. We call that their ethereal helmet. To preserve the luminance so they felt glowy, we relied on the hue of the color.” Shading technical directors created a system in Houdini, Katana, Mari and Pixar’s own shading tool called Flow. Working with the shading team. the lighting team devised a method for casting shadows that was independent of light falling off a rounded object. “I relied heavily on techniques from 20 years ago for this project,” Megibben says. “How do you ensure a mouth that is a translucent volume occludes light? Well, it doesn’t actually do that. At the end of the day, the rules of composition and creating an image still applied,
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