Learn how the Pixar team approached the production of its last feature, Soul, and worked on volumetric characters and environments. 

On December 25, 2020, Pixar released its new animated movie, Soul, on Disney+.

Supervising technical director Michael Fong and effects supervisor Bill Watral joined SIGGRAPH to share some details of the production process and talked about the art direction, key challenges, and applied solutions to create such a unique vision of the movie. 

One of the biggest challenges for us was actually discovering what the look was for the astral world. Normally, we try to find these designs for our sets inside the art department, but in this case, we had to share the responsibility. The art department said we can only go so far with 2D, and we said we’ll try to do 3D, but we can only go so fast. We tried to put these two teams together to figure out what these different worlds were.

Michael Fong via the interview 

Read the full interview on the SIGGRAPH blog post. Don't forget to join our new Telegram channel, our Discord, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.