Exclusive: Elemental’s VFX supervisor on bringing elements to life in Pixar’s most unlikely film

Traveling in the Elemental City where fire, water, land and air reside was full of challenges and the producers took inspiration from everything from Miyazaki’s works to The Godfather II in between. In an exclusive interview with Filmfare, Elemental’s VFX supervisor Sanjay Bakshi, known for The Good Dinosaur and Onward, opened up about the scenes from the film.

what brief did the director give you,

I know Pete Sohn. I have worked with him earlier so I spoke to him about the story early on. He wanted to talk about his parents and his immigration experience in the world of elements. He thought it would be a good way to express how he felt – to move to New York City. And my parents immigrated to Canada from India. So I told that experience. He wanted to talk to me more generally about my experiences and see if they were relatable and universal.

The visuals are very different from any other Pixar movie. What experiments do you want to do with it?

Thanks for saying so, because that was our intention – to be unique looking. The goal was to balance realism and stylization. But the stylization for Pete (Sohn) was that it didn’t have to be like a comic book or a graphic novel, but in the medium of computer graphics. You’ll notice that Ember has worked the contours of her face but it’s dynamic and dynamic and light. You see the line work on the drawing, even on Wade’s face. If you want to draw that, it will be pencil work. But for Wade, it’s the meniscus that occurs in the water. It reacts to light and it’s moving so I hope that makes it unique. It is not trying to look like any other medium or hand drawn stuff but made on a computer using computer graphics.

This is an interesting question. The early versions of Wade look very different than in the film. We spent a lot of time making the character feel watery. We have also done a lot of work on his face. When his mouth changes shape, waves emanate from them and lift microscopic bubbles through his head. But we could see it in action when it came to animation. So we had to dial it back. It’s something we had to leave on the cutting room floor. We dialed back some of the techniques we developed to make Wade feel like water, and we discarded that for other parts of his body. So that still seems watery but we get the subtle acting that was needed.

What was the key to achieving Amber’s fierce look and not making her look scary?

One thing we did to style her was run something called a pyro simulation to simulate the heat. Fire is very distracting and really mesmerizing. People can watch the fire for hours as it is constantly changing and it is very interesting. But if you had that on Ember’s head it would be distracting. We still wanted it to be dynamic. So we used neural-style transfer to modulate the flames. It is still a simulation but we organize it into shapes that someone has painted. So it simplifies them. This was one of the keys to unlocking Ember’s stylization.

What were some movie references you saw?

there was a lot. Pete is a cinephile and he really loves movies. Hayao Miyazaki was – Calcifer is a character that we saw. He’s so funny and 2D and cartoony. These were the fun things we wanted a fire character to do, transform and still be more realistic. We also watched immigration films. There’s a beautiful scene in The Godfather Part II where there’s no dialogue and we see patriarch Vito Corleone going to Italy and going through Ellis Island and going through those steps. Not many Bollywood movies, unfortunately.

Yes, earlier some Indian movies were used as references but we slowly moved towards making it more universal because now you can’t tell from which country it actually came. This makes it more reliable.

I think it has evolved a lot. Technically, this film was definitely the most challenging for me. The industry is constantly changing. I like the idea of ​​a lot of movies moving a little away from realism and towards stylization. This is a trend I’m really enjoying. The Spider-Verse movies really feel like that. One of the goals with Elemental was to create an imaginative world without overwhelming the audience by being colorful and bold. I hope this continues as a trend in animated films.

Elemental will be released on June 23, 2023.