![]() But this is also figuring out the color characteristics to put a real Cooke lens into a virtual world.” “It’s both flattering and a bit intimidating to realize that the ‘Cooke Look,’ which is something we’ve refined over 130 years of manufacturing, can now be recreated virtually,” Zellan adds. “We’re well-accustomed to visual effects companies mapping our lenses for specific distortions for their compositing purposes. So we got on the phone to chat and see where we might be able to work together on something in the future.” “Then, I read an interview Patrick did for IBC, where he confirmed the emulation. “We watched the movie, and we said, ‘Wow, we know that’s computer animation, but if it were live-action it looks like it was shot with Cooke,’” he remarks. Zellan himself was surprised by the visual similarities. The final results were credible enough that the team at Cooke recognized many of the signature visual touchstones of their optics when they saw the movie in theaters. Those were mostly stylistically/by eye vs. “Finally, we observed the bokeh and lens flare. “We also racked focus on each lens to see how it breathed,” he continues. We were looking to make sure the distortion was correct based on each of the prime lenses.” Next, we shot at different distances with different lenses. “It's not as scientific as you’d think,” he observes. “We started with a set of real Cooke primes, and then we put up an eight-foot-wide chart with a grid to study their distortion. To achieve the desired look, Lin followed a process akin to visual effects compositing efforts but with a bit more artistic license thrown in. So it seemed natural to go with Cooke anamorphic lenses, so we could have two sets that we could cut back and forth between.” “On Inside Out, we’d already done tests to simulate Cooke's spherical lenses. “We chose spherical lenses to represent Woody’s perspective and anamorphic lenses for Bo’s,” says Lin. “He wants everything to stay constant while Bo represents change.” “ is about Woody's internal conflict,” Lin observes. After studying the cinematography of many live-action films and considering the story requirements of Toy Story 4, Lin selected the look of Cooke S4/i primes and Anamorphic /i primes as his stylistic goal. With the camera motion well in hand, Lin turned his attention to visual quality. It gives the animation a layer of unpredictability for scenes say when a camera is following along with a walking character. Those movements are recorded in real-time for the animation team to use. “We have handheld cameras we can attach mocap trackers onto, or we can use a tripod to do a pan and tilt. “We have a huge mocap stage with all sorts of camera equipment,” he reveals. ![]() Pixar’s animation style has historically eschewed motion capture in favor of keyframe animation, but Lin has pushed hard to move that axiom forward. First, we set up the camera movement in the computer, then it goes to the animation team for character movement and acting, and finally, we do all the lighting as part of the final render.” “But in computer animation, it's actually camera, action, lights. “In live-action, the order is: lights, camera, action,” says Lin. We also add in imperfections, to make our images feel more organic and have a ‘human touch.’”Īlthough the final look of Toy Story 4 closely mimics live-action cinematography, Pixar’s production process is markedly different. We try not to do anything a real camera couldn’t physically do. “Our philosophy is always to treat our camera as if it's a real camera in a real physical location so that the movements and visuals feel right. “I started working at Pixar in 1997 on A Bug's Life,” recalls Lin. The completed effect was so striking it caught the attention of Les Zellan, the chairman of Cooke Optics. Director of photography Patrick Lin spearheaded the effort to push the visual quality of the movie forward to a level of actually appearing to be shot with specific real cinema lenses and cameras. The animated feature Toy Story 4 employed the look and feel of Cooke spherical and anamorphic lenses in a 2.39:1 aspect ratio for its virtual cinematography as a major evolution of Pixar’s animation capabilities. Emulating recognizable visual characteristics of the well-known optics line was just another step in giving the heartfelt project’s CG animation a real-world flare. ![]()
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