Why 'Elemental' was Pixar's hardest movie to make - SFGATE

Though Pixar is known for its trend-setting animation wizardry, its labor typically skews toward heartfelt storytelling rather than the flashiest visuals. But “Elemental,” which opens in theaters across the country Friday, deviates from that classic formula.

In the newest feature by the Bay Area-based animation studio, the characters themselves are humanoid versions of flashy, dynamic effects — there’s Ember, a fire-girl with a penchant for outbursts, built of head-to-toe flames. Her counterpart is Wade, a water-boy who can just as easily trickle along as he can walk and whose interior endlessly ripples with iridescent light.

The movie is tightly focused on the duo, whose “Romeo and Juliet”-style romance is layered atop a story about the expectations of Ember’s immigrant family. It’s set in Element City, also home to wind- and earth-based characters, but it’s water and fire that move in practically every shot.

This was no easy feat. “Elemental” required “way more” computing power than any film Pixar had ever made, according to visual effects supervisor Sanjay Bakshi. More than 50 effects artists worked on the project. The studio had to build relationships across teams that had barely collaborated in the past, create new tools for lighters and animators and put to use brand-new simulation techniques.

An early storyboard from Pixar’s “Elemental” drawn by director Peter Sohn shows Wade and Ember walking in Element City.

Courtesy of Disney/Pixar

But three to four years ago, when Pixar employees first started working on the project, some weren’t sure that creating a movie with effects-based characters would even be possible.

“There was no doubt that this would push the technical pipeline that we had in place,” Bakshi told SFGATE. “There was not a clear path from the [story]boards of how we should do this.”

‘Fire can be very distracting’

When director Peter Sohn pitched “Elemental” to the studio and eventually started working with the effects team, the edict was clear — Ember was not to be on fire but to be fully made of it.

In Pixar’s “Elemental,” fiery Ember has worked alongside her father in the family shop, Fireplace, for as long as she can remember.

Courtesy of Disney/Pixar

So the effects artists set out to work building a new type of animated character. They had to marry physics-based pyro simulations, which mimic the movement of actual fire, with the studio’s animation style. Ember’s physical expressions needed to be emotive, relatable and, crucially, possible to understand.

“Fire can be very distracting. It’s very fast. It’s flickery,” said Stephen Marshall, who led the project’s character effects team. “One of the first things we really had to understand is how to get that under control.”

Marshall’s team iterated on Ember’s and Wade’s appearances over a series of “development sprints,” building versions of the characters that it’d then test in old Pixar sets, like the New York subway from “Soul” or the “Toy Story” bedroom. For both figures, the team tried hyperrealistic and completely stylized versions, searching for a middle ground. Mesmerizing, but not distracting. Fluid, yet human.

As the artists ran each test, they’d make subtle changes. Marshall’s team reined in the trails of light Ember leaves behind to contain her body to a tighter form and pushed her flames’ movement to the edges of her figure. Quickly, the artists realized Wade’s face would need to be fairly opaque to show his expressions. They learned how to add detail inside his head to avoid strange refractions, then how his face should subtly ripple when he talked.

A marked-up board from the animation team for “Elemental,” which used computer simulations to make the characters appear and feel like their elements, provides a glimpse into the development of characters Wade and Ember.

Courtesy of Disney/Pixar

The trial and effort required patience. Bakshi and Marshall said they worked longer on the project than on other Pixar films, partly because they needed new technology. Relying on recent Disney research, the team used an algorithm-based and machine learning-enabled technique called “volumetric neural style transfer” to animate Ember and her community’s flames.

The technique combines raw physics-based fire simulation with hand-painted flames, which organize the dynamic movement into general shapes. The animators then used those realistically moving but stylistically structured flames to line the fire characters’ profiles. It makes the fire characters look “a little less chaotic,” Bakshi said, but “more appealing.”

A new computing paradigm

In some ways, “Elemental” shifted the technological paradigm at Pixar. Everything to do with computing was at a grander scale — storage hardware for all the fire and water simulations (“orders of magnitude more than we’ve ever done,” Marshall said), compute power and graphics processing capacity.

“We just needed all of it to be able to scale up to make the film,” Bakshi said. The effects and animation team met early on with Pixar’s systems team to figure out how they’d meet the project’s hardware needs.

A screen grab from “Elemental” features Wade and Ember fully rendered.

But the things that made “Elemental” a technical stretch, like building the graphics processing unit “farm” and securing petabytes of physical disc space (the equivalent of millions of gigabytes), will help the studio down the road, according to Marshall. Though no movie in Pixar’s current pipeline will need dynamic effects in every shot, Bakshi said, he’s glad the studio has the capacity and technology at its disposal and a greater degree of cross-department collaboration.

Marshall and Bakshi, each of whom has worked at the studio for more than a decade, are delighted with what they created and proud of how far the effect-based characters have come since the original storyboards.

“The complexity of building the characters is kind of lost on the audience,” Bakshi said, adding that the emotional stories should be at the center of the film. “That is a testament to them working.”

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