As always, I am amazed at how much goes into making a movie. That is why talking to Sharon Calahan, Director of Photography/Lighting, Effects Supervisor Jon Reisch and Sets Supervisor David Munier was so interesting. The Good Dinosaur looks as good as it does, because of these people.
Sharon has worked for Pixar for 20 years! For A Good Dinosaur, she found her inspiration with movies like The Black Stallion, Never Cry Wolf, 7 Years in Tibet, and Heaven's Gate. She was one of the people who went on the research trips to help develop the sets for this story. She took the inspiration from the trip and created the color script up above to aid the animations.
The overall theme that The Good Dinosaur is going for is “struggling in a hostile environment”. Her goal was to create a world that you genuinely feel like you are breathing the air. They wanted the sets to be authentic to a real location and to capture the “big sky” feel of the West. In case you haven't seen the trailer yet, I want you to watch how well this gets incorporated:
This segways me into our conversation with Sets Supervisor David Munier.
When you watch The Good Dinosaur, you will find yourself feeling like you are looking at some place familiar! The reason is that you are! If you can believe it, they used U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) data as an initial framework! Pete (the director) had given them the direction that at any point in the film that he wanted to be able to see 50 miles. They used 64,000 square miles of North American terrain in the movie to be able to accomplish that. The thing I learned that amazed me that most is that every tree that you see in this film (and in these vast sets) was placed one by one. The thought of doing that just blows my mind (and I will pay much closer attention to the trees when I go see The Good Dinosaur in the theater!).
My favorite part of the day was talking to Jon Reisch.
Yes, animation has their own special effects team! It's one of those things I never knew! They take care of the natural phenonium in this film like rain, fire, smoke, fog, mist, storm clouds, and water to name a few. Jon's goal is to make it all look believable. These effects heighten the mood and even create drama which is why they are so important and need to be done right. The special effects in The Good Dinosaur are used as a storytelling tool.
When you watch The Good Dinosaur, you will ask yourself if the footage is real, and they just put the Arlo in there. That's how amazing it is. My daughter asked me how they do it, so I'm sure a few you want to know too. They use software that understands physics of how things move and behave. They tell it things like physical forces, velocities, drag, etc and it solves the equations for the motion. Creating the water proved to be the most difficult. It required expensive simulations that had to run multiple days. It was important to get it right though — the river in the film is the “yellow brick road” to get home and propels us into the journey. There is also 300 river shots that were used in this film, so it had to be perfect!
The special effects in The Good Dinosaur were massive. Over 900 shots in the film have special effects work. That is twice as much as they ever had done before. For us geeks out there, the special effects alone were 300 TB of data! That is 10 times more than Monsters University! They spent one and half years on special effects alone! It is also why it looks as amazing as it did!
I can't tell you enough times how amazing it is to learn all of this. Movies are great and amazing because of people like this. What little I've seen of it, I can tell you that it looks amazing. The Good Dinosaur opens in theaters on November 25, 2015! Go see it!
