Danielle Feinberg is a Visual Effects Supervisor at Pixar Animation Studios. Danielle’s problem is this: How do you optimize technology so that you can spend more time being creative?
Danielle Feinberg has worked at Pixar for 26 years. Earlier in her career, she was the director of photography on movies like Coco and Wall-E. She talks about how new software shapes creative work.
Pushkin. There's a bunch of stuff I want to ask you. A lot of it is about the relationship between technology and creativity, and especially given the fact that you've been working at Pixar for a long time, respectfully, how that changes over time?
Okay, so how creativity changes as technology changes?
Yeah? So, actually, can you just say your name and your job?
Sure? My name is Danielle Feinberg, and I work at Pixar Animation Studios and I am a visual effects supervisor.
So you're a visual effects supervisor. Now, if I understand correctly, you spent a lot of your career there. You've been at Pixar for more than what twenty five years at this point?
So right, yeah, I hit twenty six.
Musseltov, you were director of photography for lighting for a lot of your time there, right, And that's striking to me because, if I understand correctly, there are in fact, like no photographs and no actual lights in Pixar movies. Right, So what does it mean to be the director of photography for lighting on you know, movies like say Coco.
So picky of you, Jacob, I'm sorry, so curious, I'm curious.
I'm Jacob Goldstein. And this is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today, as you've already heard, is Danielle Feinberg, and as you will hear, we did talk about creativity and technological change. Also we talked about the problem she's trying to solve now, and we talked about how we can often wind up following rules that are not particularly useful and that in a lot of cases we don't even know we are following.
So director of photography is in a live action movie, is the same as a cinematographer, and so they're doing camera and lighting together essentially. And so in our world and animation, we split that what is traditionally one role in live action to two roles, and so we have a director of photography for camera and a director of photography for lighting.
And just to be clear, I mean camera is a metaphor in this instance, right, like just so I'm thinking about it, right, there is a camera, right.
There is a virtual camera, and so we build a virtual three dimensional world, and we actually have a chunk of code that is our camera that mimics a lot of things that a real life camera does. And as time has gone by, in fact that that camera has gotten more and more like real life. And we even use specific sets of lenses, sometimes modeled after certain companies lenses and stuff, and.
So the lenses are our code basically that generate images that look like a picture you take with a certain.
Actual yes, exactly exactly.
So similarly than presumably the lighting is sort of similarly virtual but modeled on actual lights.
Yeah, you know it's originally it was modeled on a version of a light. It wasn't like, oh, this is tungsten light, or this is a light bulb that I would have in my lamp at home. It was like, here's a light. You can do whatever you want with it. You can make it as bright as you want, you can make it as big as you want, you can all kinds of things. And so in those sort of early days, it was easy to do things that looked sort of wrong visually because we weren't beholden too some of the same physics in real life, huh.
And so it was almost like too much. You had too much power, and you could just get crazy with the light and was going on, Yeah.
We had all the power and you had to use it wisely.
Yes, So, I mean, so there's different ways to talk about to talk about this, and I want to try a few. But one way that I thought might be interesting to frame this is to talk to talk about the way that the craft really of what you do has changed. I know you worked on Turning Red, the recent Pixar movie, which, like millions of other people, I watched at home during the pandemic with my daughters. So thank you for that. Excellent And then you also you worked on A Bugs Life in the late nineties, right, And so I thought it might be interesting to compare A Bugs Life to Turning Red in terms of the sort of technology and creativity, right, how you created in those different really kind of technological erars. I mean, that's a long time in the development of computer generated animation, right. I mean one question in that context is what is something that you wanted to do when you were making A Bugs Life but that you couldn't that now would be really easy to do.
Yeah, probably so many things. When you think about A Bugs Life. That was my first film I worked on here, and at that time in the world, there there was one feature length computer animated film that had ever been released, which was Toy Story. A lot of what was happening was just being made up of how to make these movies and so and it was a very tiny group of people just kind of figuring out how to do this computer animation thing as a movie. And so, you know, back then Pixar was just this tiny little company that like nobody knew Pixar made Toy Story, like they saw the Disney on it, and like nobody. I used to have to say, oh, I do computer animation. I work out a place called Pixar. And then around the time of maybe finding Nemo, I said that and someone was like, we all know what Pixar is. You can stop saying, and so it was very cool. But like on A Bugs Life, part of the thing is it's this colony of ants, and you know what we know of the ants is there's a lot of them once you find them and where they live. And doing a scene with one hundred ants in it back on A Bug's Life was a huge, huge deal. We had to write a whole chunk of crowd software and figure out really how to jam it into the system and get it to render and meaning generate the final images, which is when the computer is crunching all of the work you've done and doing a million calculations to generate just one image, and you need twenty four of those images to make one second of film. So for a ninety minute film you're doing, you can imagine the sort of scope of the calculations you're doing. And doing a crowd of one hundred was a really big deal. You know, we can do crowds much bigger than that. Now we can give them all kinds of sort of acting properties. Where on a bug's life it really was someone was animating an ant and then you could sprinkle that animation across things, and then they'd animate another bit and you sprinkle in some of the other ones. But like I was giving a talk for I do a lot of talks for girls to try and keep them interested in math and science to get some better numbers in STEM, and I pulled some clips from a bug's life, and I was going through this whole thing of like, you know, what you don't want is for some two ants to be doing the same movement, and then you can see in the clip I pulled, like three ants are moving their arms like this or something. And it was very funny because Back then it was really what we were doing was very hard, and now it's much easier, and it would have.
Just been too computationally intensive to have all the ants doing different things basically, so you sort of cheated by like having some of them do the same thing.
Yeah, and like you did ten little animated bits and sprinkled at a crossing, and you thought that's probably enough, and we were probably out of time, honestly, you know, also and the next.
Certain level it was enough, right, Like I don't know that people watched a Bug's Life and like, oh, that's so cheesy. Those two ants are doing the same thing.
Right, And if we're doing our job right, you're actually looking at the characters who are doing the acting, and the crowd is the background in a lot of ways. But you know, there's this whole thing of back then you were you were much closer to some of the sort of the guts and the code, and you'd write a little code and you'd generate a picture and you'd kind of a lot of back and forth. I think a lot of the development that's happened over time has been to abstract away from that code so that people that really are coming from maybe a pure art background, or they're somewhat technical but they're really artistically based, could still thrive in this area. Now, Pixar is this really wonderful place where we have all of these people that are really like this wonderful combo of art and technology, and some are very technical and some are very artistic, and a lot of people are somewhere in between. So it makes it kind of accessible to more people in a great way, I think. But back in the old days, it was definitely it was just a different thing, and you were spending a lot of your time kind of not in a creative space. Part of it was in a just trying to get the computer to do what you want to do in a kind of rudimentary way.
Yeah, I mean, clearly Pixar movies have gotten more beautiful, right, and certainly complex, and so the benefits of technological improvements, I mean both. I'm sure a lot of it is just processing speed and more's law, but also I'm sure also on the sort of software side that you all have developed. So it's clear the ways in which it's gotten better, right. I'm curious though, In fact, I heard in one of the interviews I listened to in preparing for this interview, one of your interviews, you mentioned this idea that when you get new tools, obviously you gain things, but sometimes there are things that you lose as well. And so I'm curious when you look back, you know too much earlier in your career, when you had fewer tools and frankly worse technology, were there things that I don't know that you could do better or differently? Are there things you miss about that time from a creativity standpoint.
Yeah, definitely. So as an example of things, I'll start with the things that we couldn't do and now can. So bugs life, I mentioned the crowd, and then when we got to Monsters Incorporated, we needed a monster that had hair. We couldn't We had no idea how to do hair. That was a huge R and D project. The next was finding Nemo. We didn't know how to do underwater, and so we had to figure out how to do underwater and what the elements were, and then sort of developed the technology so that instead of just in a test shot, all the people across the show could could do underwater in this sort of easy way, from the most technical person down to the most junior that they could still sort of API, so you.
Didn't just have to sort of render water, you had to build kind of a toolkit so that people could create in water.
Yeah, and so that's one of the really fun things is you take some we took some live action footage of water and tried to recreate it, and then you start breaking down all of that messy looks development work you did, and it turned out there were five or six elements that when you put them together, we can make it look like underwater. And then you take each of those elements and turn it into a more pathge that's right. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, it's really fun. It's kind of scary while you're doing it because you don't know if you're ever going to get anywhere good. But and so then you go to a movie like The Incredibles and the daughter Violet has long hair, and that was a completely unsolved problem in computer graphics, and it was all the way up kind of to the last minute that it wasn't it got solved.
Uh, she might have had short hair if if somebody had something out.
Yeah, but this is one of the fun things about Pixar is sort of if a director says, well, that's a story point which is what Bradbird, the director said. He's said, well, this is how we're telling the audience who Violet is. So she hides behind her long hair and it's this big sort of story moment, and he says, it's a story point and that is sort of good as gold here, and it doesn't mean you spend a lot of time talking about whether you're going to do it. You just go figure out how to do it. And so it's this creativity driving technology and I think this really wonderful way and a very fun and scary way. But it's like we're doing this. There was quite a while where Violet's hair looked like kind of March Simpson's beehive, because when the computer doesn't do it right, it does something pretty spectacular with hair and cloth, so.
It goes way wrong.
Yeah yeah, yeah. So so those are all things. Those are examples of sort of things we literally couldn't do that then the movie and the story spirit so that we then know how to do it. One of the things is there was kind of a push to get more and more real life mimicking real life more and more. So as we push, say lighting and materials more towards what sort of real life light responses. Say, suddenly, what started to happen is that we could get to something that looked better much faster. So you can start to put the sun in. In the olden days, we'd put the sun in and then you'd put another light that was the light bouncing off the ground, and you put another light in that the light coming from the sky, a bounce light, a fill light, a key light. And now what we could do is you put the sun in and the computer is calculating how that light is bouncing around, and then you can start aug.
The computer is just figuring out what the world would look like if the sun were in that.
Spot in the stit if the sun were in that spot and the light was bouncing off of things. And these materials are more real life than they were before. They have a better material response, and like, oh, doesn't that look nice? It used to take me longer to get to something that looked nice like that, And there's complexity to it that we just couldn't get before. So isn't that lovely? And so all of that is fantastic until you want to do something that is maybe not real life, say you want to stylize it, or even say the director wants you to get the shadow off the face. Suddenly that you can't do that anymore because as you push more and more towards real life, those are things you can't do very well in real life.
And so and you can't and because you've built essentially a piece of software where you've said make it real life, the software is like, no, you can't take the light off the face because I'm making it real life and there would be light on their face in real life.
Yeah. And so suddenly it was really funny. I'm talking to one of the sort of scientific engineering people who's who's engineering the system, and he's really brilliant guy, and I said, well, what if the director asked me to take a reflection off of something or move a shadow like that stuff we do all the time for the storytelling of it. And he said, oh, you just tell the director they can't do that. And you know it is I don't know what it's like anywhere else, but you don't really usually tell the director they can't do something, and especially not because we took that capability away, you know, like it was really hard, and he was coming from this purist he doesn't ever talk to the director. He's coming from this purists, like this is what the real world does. So there was sort of this time period where as they're getting the system up and running, the thing is they'd say, well, you could do that, but like it's going to slow everything down, and there were so many more calculations happening that slowing it down felt really like the ideal world.
And people are like spending all days solving optimization problems, right, trying to speed it up so that the ants aren't all doing the same thing in the background or whatever.
Right, yeah, and they're like, why do you idiots need to move a shadow that doesn't happen in real life, you know sort of thing, and so yah. So the interesting thing that's had that sort of an era, And then the interesting thing that happened is now we're in an era where we're getting some of both I think where you get this sort of harness the power of the computer in a lot of ways where it's mimicking real life, but now we have more ability to kind of break out into that. And I think that's.
Because in terms of realism versus kind of.
Just scilistic flavor and stylization and what a director wants and sort of guiding the audience in lighting. We spent a lot of time guiding the audience's eyes so that they're looking at the right thing. You imagine a film like Wally where there's no dialogue for the first thirty minutes if you're distracted bold.
Old I couldn't believe it what I thought.
It was very scary. When we were working on it. We're like, oh, it's going to go see this movie. But you know, if we leave some shiny thing off in the corner and you're looking over there, you might miss an entire chunk of the setup of the movie because that was all visual storytelling for thirty minutes and so so so there's a lot of just compositional things that we need to be able to do that aren't necessary early real world things, but we still need to do them. And you know, it also kind of invites the like we have these conversations sometimes that are like, well, why are we making this movie as an animated film, Like you could just go make this a live action movie, and like why we're not taking advantage of the medium, Like they're just different art forms, and like how do you make animations sing in an animation like you can do anything and so take advantage of it sort of. And so so I think we're in a better place now in terms of like there's all this like visual gain and speed gains by mimicking some of real life, but we've started to roll back in a lot of the ability to sort of maneuver it artistically too. We're not I don't know that we're totally there. Sometimes it's still really hard, but I think we're getting to a place that at least makes me happy. It might not make that engineer happy at all, but it makes me happy.
So well, well that's the like you're telling the sort of Goldilocks story where like at first just you were limited by computing power and the lack of sophistication of the suffware because we're just figuring ou how to do this, And then there was a moment when you had sort of gone too far into just mimicking reality. And now you're in this sort of just right phase.
Although you know it's never going to be just right, yeah, because you're always I mean, I'm sitting on a movie right now where it's like, how on earth are we going to do that? Like it's not clear, and our system isn't made to do that. So what are we going to do? You know? And so well, let's talk about this like this.
So the sort of frontier questions that you're bringing up, First of all, can you talk about the movie that you're working on?
I can't. It's totally secret.
I love secret. So you're working on a secret Pixar movie. Yeah, Like, what's the thing that you're working on right now that you haven't figured out.
In a general way? So there's this great thing happening within computer animation right now, I would say, which is the original Spider Verse came out.
The Spider Verse that came out a couple of years ago.
Yeah, and it was loved it, respectfully.
I know it's not a Pixar movie. Blew my mind. I loved the New one. Went to the New One a couple of years, a couple of weeks ago at the theater in the old school style.
Awesome, like high art right, totally Yeah, incredible, incredible movie. And I think both of those movies, the first one and now the second one again really inspired almost the entire industry.
Huh.
I mean, I don't even know if it's almost I think inspired the entire industry because as you look at the films that have come out since then, everybody, there's so many instances of stylization that were not there before.
And yeah, I mean, let's be clear when you say stylization for people who haven't seen the Spider Verse movies. Yeah, like they don't look anything like real life. They're not trying to look like real life. They look really interesting. They look kind of like comic books. In the case of the new movie, it's like pastiche. Sometimes there's like six different styles on the screen and it sort of goes to this thing you're talking about about moving away from just trying to represent reality, so go on, sorry.
Yeah, no, no, no, So it's that first one, I think, because it was like anything anyone had seen in the same way. Maybe that Toy Story was when I went and saw it when I was in college of just like what is this and this is amazing? And then Spider Verse did that, and I'm not sure any of us at that point realized that we could do something that was that different and that new, and so it was really exciting because we're working in this art form and suddenly it's like, uh, Oh, that's amazing, someone did that. We want to do that, you know, and so and was part.
Of it that like, oh, we're Pixar, and there's this thing that a Pixar movie is, and it's a particular thing, you know. I feel like, in a much smaller way, I have felt that on smaller projects I've worked on, where you sort of have this kind of internal grammar you're like, oh, this is a whatever, this is a plant money story, but nobody who's listening actually cares or even knows. Right, It's like you're just creating these rules that are binding yourself for no reason, right.
I think the thing is that when I got onto Turning Read, the director was like the word in the hallway before I got on, It was the director wanted to do a different look, which was exciting to everyone here because it's just doing different things is always exciting. And she's at the time was twenty nine maybe, and so younger than some of the sort of old school directors that have been here, and so coming in with just sort of different references, and she grew up with anime and so was really inspired by anime and wanted it to have some reference to that and so there's okay, it's going to have a different look, and she said, I don't want it to have the Pixar look. And I had to ad this moment of like, what do you mean the Pixar look. We try so hard on every film to do whatever's right for the film, and then you sort of go, well, yeah, I mean, I guess we do sort of have a Pixar look, but it's not intentional. It's sort of like we all just grew up here figuring out how to make movies together a lot in this sort of core group of folks, and we use our own rendering system and half our software is our own software, and so like there's something that comes from that. And I think we were just always pushing to be able to do sort of bigger and better things depending on whatever the story was, and not so much thinking about stylizing stuff. And so here's this director saying I want to, I want to, I don't want to do the Pixar look, and I'm like, oh my god, I don't even know what the Pixar look is. Let me think about this. I've been in the middle of it for so long that I didn't even realize it sort of and so kind of looking at how that look comes about and then what do you need to do to break out of that and what It was this really interesting thing for me since I've been here so long, of like what are the rules that you're following that you don't even realize are out of date because some of them were based on old technology, Like, oh, we never do that, and then.
We never do that because you had because previously the technology had not allowed that.
Yeah, it looked terrible, but maybe now with the technology it wouldn't look terrible. Or I'll give example. So I was doing some looks tests early on before a lot of people were on, and we were trying to get this this really this the lighting look in there, the sort of if you think about light to dark, there's not a lot of dark stuff in that movie. In the first act of it or something. It's very the mids are very lifted kind of. So I'm trying to figure out how to do that without doing a lot of like you know, photoshop type work on it.
And that was like a particular creative sort of storytelling desire is to have the color palette be in a certain way.
Yeah, to mimic sort of the main character May's sort of world, and then it changing to be much more saturated, much more contrasting, and getting kind of crazy when kind of.
Like Kansas being black and white, but in a more subtle way. Yeah.
Yeah, And so I I did some stuff, but the way I was doing it was like not working. I'm doing ten other things while I'm doing it. And then we got our director of photography for lighting. He comes on and he sits down, he's doing some tests and he shows something. I was like, that's awesome. What did you do. He's like, oh, I put a light from camera on everything. So a light blasting straight into camera, which we would never do because it looks flat, it flattens everything out, looks kind of stupid. But in this world and in this way, he totally made it work. And it isn't how we ended up doing it for the movie, but it was that was the moment where I was like, oh, I think I'm going to have to let go much more than I thought I did in order to like really find the ways that we can push stuff to find a new look.
As you realize that in fact, there were a bunch of things that you did the same without thinking about and there were other ways to do it that didn't even cross one hundred.
Percent, And so then it was that really was the sort of pivotal moment where I then was like, Okay, anytime your reaction is like, yeah, we don't do it that way, or there's good reason, you have to reconsider that and decide whether that's actually still relevant. Ory just it's just sort of this long held thing.
In a minute, with video games getting better and movies using more and more CGI, are we heading to a world where more or less everything is computer animation? Now back to the show. You know, you've talked about all these ways over time in which you, Slash Pixar have solved technological problems to allow you to do more things creatively. And I'm curious now about that particular dynamic, whether it is for purposes of stylization or for purposes of just going into a world where computer animated films have not gone. Are there things where you all you Pixar are trying to figure out to solve technological problems so that you can do new creative things.
You know, right now we have conversations about like, well, that's a lot of hair, that's going to be hard general final image, or oh glass is expensive, or that translucent thing could be hard, or that animation is going to be really tricky, like Hank the octopus in Finding Dory very hard. Eight Tentacles turns out very hard doing a room challenge. Yeah, and so so there's these things where they're like, it's not like you couldn't do it, but they're annoying to do, so you don't see them very often, and so at a.
Certain and expensive basically.
And kind of tedious and like. And so at some point a lot of that hopefully is not tedious anymore, and so that opens up different stories in different worlds, and maybe it opens up that, you know, like now everyone has a camera, they could shoot anyone can shoot videos. I mean TikTok is proof of that, right, maybe anyone can make you know, animated films in a totally different way. I don't know. You still have to tell great stories and so that's that's still going to always be the main building block of it. But faster and easier is always the thing we are always sort of going after that.
So that's this sort of there's this sort of bottom up convergence, right, I mean, there's another convergence that's interesting to me when you're talking about, like, you know, this sort of arc of first trying to make films that look more like reality and saying, oh wait, wait, that's not actually the business we're in. Let's make things that are you know, beautiful and interesting and look like nothing you've ever seen. I feel like, to some significant degree, over the decades you've been working at Pixar, live action films have started to look more like animated films, right Like, I mean, if you think of Marvel, which is probably the most important thing to happen in movies, at least on a commercial level and in some ways on a creative level over the last whatever ten years, Like you know, there's like whatever, a talking raccoon and a person, right Like, they are not going for reality and they are live action films, but they are you know, CGI is basically computer animation, and so right like, maybe there is some convergence where it's everything's made with a computer. So whether we're calling it animation or like live action, like Marvel movies aren't exactly live action, right It's like a dude doing motion capture in front of a green screen.
Yeah, yeah, it's everything is overlapping and that, you know, and a lot of the live action stuff they're using all of the same stuff we do. There is no difference except that they're shooting some live action plates that they're matching it to, you know, in a lot of ways, or they're doing virtual production.
Avatar maybe even more so, right, Yeah, Avatar is kind of a computer animation movie. Yeah.
Yeah. And so you think about things like the Academy Awards, the animation category that's getting hazier and hazier, like what is animation and what is live action? And you know, especially with some of the things like live action Lion King or Jungle Book or different things like that where there is really a huge mix. And you talk about games and that same thing and those the visual level of games has increased coming towards us. It used to always be that we were we would spend a lot of time on our renders to make them look beautiful. Games had to be so fast that there's no way that they could approach sort of the look we had. And that's coming together and live actions coming together, and so everything's becoming much more possible, I think, on all those fronts. And so maybe at some point it all is just one one pie that everyone's pulling from.
Does it make you sad? Is that a sad ending for you?
It's not sad to be able to think about being able to work, being able to try anything and have no cost to it, so that you could try this, you could try that, and try this and throw it out and do a different thing and not feel precious or worried about it. That's very exciting.
Uh huh. Yeah, the cost constraint. I mean it's funny. The editor of this show was like, yeah, ask about cost constraints. I was like, no, let's not do cost coinstints. So then you've brought it up, so points to her. I mean it's interesting, right because there is one of the simple and I think underrated things technology does. Maybe the fundamental thing is make things cheaper, right, And you're talking about that from the creative point of view, Right, If it's cheaper to just try seven different things, or cheaper to make an octopus or whatever, then you can try more stuff and make more stuff.
Yeah. So on every movie you look at a thing and you go, okay, am I going to build a system for that that makes it easier to do in a bunch of shots or are we just going to like kind of force it through, right, and we'll just hodgepodge it in every shot to get it through. And so in something like if it's a little bit tricky and it's intense shots, you're just going to kind of make it happen and force it through, you know, kind of.
If it's water for finding Nemo, you're going to build a water.
You're going to build something that is really usable that people can make it look great. And so there's there's sort of always that trade off and consideration of how you're investing your sort of time and money.
And Pixar started as a tool company, right, basically a hard company, and there's this software render Man that is still like there's like a website and you can like pay and use the software that picks our users to make movies. Right, it is at some level a tools company.
It is. Yeah, it's we're a funny place in that where where we have our own studio tools group that write are a bunch of software that we use. We have the RenderMan group that writes rendering software that's used throughout the industry. We make movies, but we're not totally Hollywood. We're not totally a tech company. We're some weird combination in between. And then we're in the Bay Area, so we're not even like down in Hollywood or down in Silicon Valley. And so it's an interesting place that I think has bread a lot of interesting things in terms of the combination of sort of art and technology here, and the interest in driving computer graphics to make our movies to suit the story, and then being inspired by technology to then change the story to take advantage of it. And so there's this really cool kind of feeding back and forth and advancement of technology because we don't put limits on story in the way you might otherwise. So when you know they storyboard a character with long hair and we don't know how to do that, we still go after it and do it. And that's that's an amazing place to be, I think.
And then you not only have that character presumably in that instance, you have now a way that, oh, great, people in these worlds we create can now have long hair. That's another thing we can do.
Yeah, totally, until we got to Brave, and then long curly hair was its whole own problem. We have to rewrite the simulator, So.
Does it have to be curly?
It's always something.
Yeah, we'll be back in a minute with a lighting focused lightning ground. Back to the show. Okay, I'm gonna ask you a bunch of questions. Edith said, you listened to some episodes of the show, so I don't even need to explain that this is the lightning round.
But I didn't prepare it.
Also, Okay, there's no way to prepare the best part of the show. For that reason, I'll start with an easy one that you were totally prepared for. I know from listening to some other interviews you've done that you have often been the only woman in a room full of men at work. What is one tip you'd give to somebody who is in that setting, you know, the only woman in a room full of men at work.
I found when I became a director of photography for lighting for Wally that I was I was generating my own imposter syndrome. So I was getting quieter and quieter because I was suddenly in a room with sort of a new level of people, and I kept thinking, well, would I have known that? Would I have been able to answer that? And there was this moment where I realized that my boss was particularly outspoken, and he suddenly was talking about something about lighting, and I actually knew he was wrong, but he was saying it as if it was fact, and I sort of suddenly realized that just because someone is presenting something as fact doesn't necessarily mean that that's what that is, and that I was sort of like sidelining myself over something that was completely false.
So what did you do? What did you do?
My jaw dropped, and then I spoke up because I knew he was wrong, right, And so I was emboldened in that way to say, wait, wait, wait, that's that's not true, and or I'm sure I probably found some nice way to say it, so I wasn't poking the bear.
But yes, and yeah, yeah, yeah yes. And what's your favorite non Pixar movie? Mm hmm, I'm gonna do another one. I got a better one. Okay, what's the best lighting you've ever seen in a non Pixar movie?
Oh? Uh, you know what? The original Blade Runner I love so so much for many reasons. Lighting is wonderful. The newer Blade Runner is fabulous.
Yeah, it's interesting when you mentioned Blade Runner, I think of the that relationship between live action and animation. And I mean, if you want to like be warm and fuzzy about it. This is the relationship between like what's real and what's not real, what's made by a computer and what's yeah, yeah, thematically nice. What's one tip for my living room?
Oh? I like that? No bear bulbs?
Thank you?
Yeah?
Am I getting interrogated?
Yeah, you know, warm light to me always?
Yeah. You think you'll ever leave Pixar?
It's hard to imagine. It feels like it's my other family. Uh. And I have so much sort of knowledge invested here, and I love this place, and I love getting to work on our films and I love what we do.
Danielle Feinberg is a visual effects supervisor at Pixar. Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang and Edith Russolo. It was edited by Sarah Nix and engineered by Amanda K. Wong. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm. You can find me on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem? MHM.