'Inside Out 2' Cinematographers Adam Habib & Jonathan Pytko Break Down the Anxiety Scene

Variety

'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.

Transcript

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.

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