How Pixar uses hyper-colors to hack your brain... The animation studio痴 artists are masters at tweaking light and color to trigger deep emotional responses. Coming soon: effects you値l only see inside your head.

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The scene wasn't working. It was a moment from the Pixar film Coco, still in production at the time葉he part when the family of Miguel, the main character, finds out he's been hiding a guitar. It takes place at twilight or just after, a pink-and-purple-tinged time of day everywhere, but even more so in fictional Pixarian Mexico. And Danielle Feinberg, the photography director in charge of lighting the movie, didn't like it. She pressed Pause with a frown.

Lighting a computer-rendered Pixar movie isn't like lighting a film with real actors and real sets. The software Pixar uses creates virtual sets and virtual illumination, just 1s and 0s, constrained only by the physics they're programmed with. Lights, pixels, action. Real-world cameras and lenses have chromatic aberration, sensitivities or insensitivities to specific wavelengths of light, and ultimately limits to the colors they can sense and convey葉heir gamut. But at Pixar the virtual cameras can see an infinitude of light and color. The only real limit is the screen that will display the final product. And it probably won't surprise you to hear that the Pixarians are pushing those limits too.

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