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

Hi, my name's Jonathan Pitko. I'm one of those cinematographers on Inside Out Two. And I'm Adam Hapeeb, the other cinematographer on Inside Out Two. Come on Riley, get it together. Come on, Riley, get it together. I'm not good enough. Inside Out Two is building on the first film. We come back to Riley when she's thirteen years old and she's discovering all these new emotions that she now has. We're just kind of getting into what those new emotions feel like that are a little different from our original folks that we had. Riley has gone away to hockey camp, and she really wants to make the varsity team, to set up herself, to make new friends in high school. And she's putting more and more pressure on herself as the story goes along. And so the scene that we're going to talk about is really where it hits a kind of a crescendo. And all this pressure that anxiety has been helping to create on Riley because she wants the best for her, because she wants her to, you know, make the team kind of goes in an unexpected direction and actually leads to Riley having an anxiety attack. The scene is really about how Joy and the rest of the emotions try to undo some of the damage that they have unintentionally done to Riley through wanting the best for her. One of the things that changed a lot technology wise between the first film in this film was motion capture was a little newer then and we were using that on all the human world shots then, which we did it in this film as well. But we sort of used the motion capture a little bit differently to make it more of a collaboration tool and a way to actually, you know, bring the director and bring supervisors who might work in totally different software like Jonathan does. But we had an iPad that you could walk around the scene or walk around that. The set, if you will, the virtual set for animation, A lot of it is the cinematography is trying to ground this world, which is very unique. It's typically not a scene world, especially when we talk about the emotions in the mind, even though these are fantastical characters, we want to ground them. So we try to come out the cinematography from physical principles of light and camera. And then when we look at what we did with the human world, we actually really try to emulate a cinematic world where doing cinematic cameras, lighting wise, we're trying to approach it from a very physical sense, complete with flares and grain, and trying to give like a real filmic look. A lot of things surprised me about cinematography and animation. One of them is my department. Sometimes we call it camera and staging, which is the name that you'll see in the credits. We are actually responsible for the blocking and the staging of the actors or the characters. So as opposed to a live action set where you might walk on a set and the actors will kind of start walking through some ideas that they have themselves, we're actually building that blocking and that staging in addition to figuring out the shots, the compositions, the camera angles and things like that. You're almost a little bit part actor, a little bit part director. You're kind of wearing a lot of hats at that moment that you're trying to make a scene come together. The beginning sequences take us a long time because the movie is still being sorted out story wise. But also I think there's the visual language of the movie is all coming together. I think there's a big change that happens with the movie. Once you start seeing animation, you start seeing the performances and it starts informing things you want to do in the movie, like visually, like in headquarters, there's all these different light sources to deal with. You know you have. The console glows, joy glows, all the emotions glow, the sense of self glows, memory spheres are glowing, the screen is glowing. You know what is the priority of that image? What's the visual hierarchy that's there? And once you start seeing animation come in, all the sudden you start making really interesting choices. So we have to get a little bit into the movie to actually start seeing all the pieces come together. We're constantly working back and forth with the editorial team. So on a live action shoot, you know, I know sometimes editors are cutting while they're shooting, but maybe more typically, it's like you shoot the scene, you give it over to the editor, they cut it in animation. And in our process, we're actually sending footage to the editor. We look at it together and then we shoot more coverage, shoot, you know, different ideas. And so we're constantly kind of evolving and iterating the scene with the editor. So I fell in love with that process. We had a lot of conversations early on about how we wanted anxiety to feel. And so we started doing a lot of things like tightening up the shutter angle. So suddenly, like everything's a lot sharper, focus got a lot deeper. And then when the anxiety attack hits, suddenly we flip almost everything. Focus goes extremely shallow, The world drops away. And the other thing that we were always interested in was the kind of shaking background effect we had talked about. Like what if we start vibrating the background as Riley gets deeper into this panic attack? It's one of those things where it's like you want to show an image that is really compelling. It's not something you want to just like throw out to the director of like this thing we haven't done before in a really rough image. So we actually refined the image and lighting quite a bit and then we added that element into it so that what we were showing is a pretty finished image with this concept in there. And you know, you want to try and get by off on that kind of thing before you do it because it takes a lot of time to sort of mock that stuff up. But in this case, it felt like the images were really trending in this beautiful direction with this flaring, lots of depth of feel coming in the camera. We overexposed the light a lot, really flooded this light coming around Riley as she's going through this moment. And then adding that element in there, really sold what happened. And then we were able to increase it as she gets more and more anxious. And then as the panic attack dies down, it starts to mellow out, soften, and then starts to warm up. So we start changing the color from like a cooler to a warmer tone to start introducing that joy back into the frame. The camera is virtual. It starts out perfect. And I think the challenge is often how do we bring that familiar language to the audience and start to add basically pile on imperfections that you would get with physical camera equipment into our virtual camera. So as Jonathan was saying, there's, you know, we kind of have these two different worlds that the movie is set in. There's Riley's human world. And for that we took a very physical camera idea or cinematography idea and it's anamorphic in our films. And then the mind world camera, that one we think of a little bit more as virtual or or perfect. And it's almost like a 1930s like studio camera, you know, like everything is very choreographed and the movement is a lot more precise. One of the things that was fun about this film was like, we really early on, we're like, OK, we wanted to feel like the inside out world that people know, but we don't want to stop there and we want to find ways to go farther. One of the things was just right from the beginning of the movie, it's widescreen. Sometimes it drove our animators crazy as they were. There were too many characters. And that that makes it rather expensive to animate. But for me, I would a lot of times find myself arguing like, no, but that's the comedy. You want to see embarrassment and sadness on opposite sides of the screen, both clocking kind of the same moment and having either a similar reaction or different reactions. And it extends a lot to like our film grain. We apply film grain to the images and we have a grain for the human world versus the mind world to sort of further identify towards like a live action kind of human world and then a more perfect mind world of a team of layout artists. And these are the artists who actually are building each shot in the computer. So they're blocking out rough animation and then they might shoot that animation from 456. We figured out every shot in the movie, there was about 6 alternate angles that we delivered to the editorial team to try to find the best one. And then we'll show it to the director or, you know, we'll work with the editor to get passed together. Sometimes at that stage, even, we'll be like, OK, something's clearly missing or these shots don't cut, or you see how they're using it and they ask you for something else. Those story beats and those moments are getting reshuffled on the fly, and you just have to be comfortable with rolling with it. And we just keep generating new stuff. And we might get a call in the morning and have something out by lunch. And then there's a new version of the scene up because we're rendering this imagery. It takes a lot of computing power to do that, and we don't often see the finished images until the last possible moment. Like the highest quality actual done stuff. Everything up up to that point is some sort of rough render. It's broken, hair is going all over the place, characters are intersecting each other like nothing works, and every department refines it and refines it and refines it. And then finally at the end, you see like a finished image. It goes from like down here to up here. You know, it just kind of completes the whole thing in a way that you just don't get to see until like the very end.