Illuminated Pixels: The Why, What, and How of Digital Lighting – Book Review
When film lighting is brought up, one might think of movements like film noir, or films like Lawrence of Arabia, and most film buffs have no problem rattling off the names of the cinematographers — Karl Freund, James Wong Howe, Kazuo Miyagawa, Jack Cardiff, Néstor Almendros, etc. But for much of its history, lighting has not been a major concern for animation critics and historians, though animation filmmakers, especially those of the stop-motion persuasion, have far from ignored it. After all, who among us can name those responsible for the all-important lighting in Byron Howard and Nathan Greno’s Tangled? (Answer: Art directors David Goetz and Dan Cooper along with lighting director Mohit Kallianpur.)
This seemed to change with the release of Jurassic Park (1993) and Toy Story (1995), and the subsequent rise of all things digital. Today, lighting is a key part of the digital animation pipeline. Nevertheless, much of community of practice that is animation still tends to focus on the centrality of the animator, as we often refer to a director as an “animator and filmmaker”.
In teaching animation history at the Savannah College of Art and Design, in Atlanta, I try to touch on the importance of lighting in films like Lotte Reiniger’s silhouette feature, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), with its origins in shadow theatre, as well as the use of dramatic lighting by director David Hand in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) in the scene where Snow White flees into the forest, or the silhouetted battle for Faline’s hand in Bambi (1942).
My feeble efforts in this regard were recently bolstered when Virginia Wissler started teaching courses at SCAD in digital lighting, which visibly perked up the interest some of my students. Wissler has now come out with, Illuminated Pixels: The Why, What, and How of Digital Lighting, aimed at providing an alternative to Jeremy Birn’s standard work on the topic, Digital Lighting and Rendering, which is now in its third edition. As a colleague of Wissler, any opinion I might put forth might seem tainted, so I would like to concentrate more on the topic of lighting itself, including its use in so-called “traditional” animation, along with a brief look at the book itself.
Early 2D animators rarely seemed to concern themselves with lighting, given the pen-and-ink nature of their work, based as it were on a comic strip aesthetic. Sure, you could spot the occasional use of shadows, but it was not usually a primary visual element. This was not the case with such pioneer stop-motion artists like Reiniger, Ladislas Starewitch and Willis O’Brien, where their physical characters and sets had to be lit rather than drawn and painted. Reiniger’s films, despite their two-dimensional nature, were very much about light, as was much of German cinema of the 1920s, which provided the context for her work; Achmed also pioneered the use of the multiplane camera, which seems to have enabled her to provide for a greater range of lighting effects.
Puppet filmmakers, such as Starewitch, in films like The Tale of the Fox (1930-37), used dramatic lighting much in the manner of their live-action counterparts. And O’Brien, in The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933), obviously had to deal with a different set of lighting issues in blending his stop-motion monsters into live-action environments. The introduction of various permutations of the multiplane camera to the world of 2D animation in America by Max Fleischer, Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney in the 1930s helped introduce greater possibilities for the use of lighting in cartoon animation. After all, the Fleischer setback camera system used actual three-dimensional sets against which characters like Popeye could perform in films like Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor (1936). Also, consider the spectacular opening tracking shot in Bambi where the Disney multiplane camera greatly enhances the picturesque forest scene.
By the dawn of the digital age, it was not uncommon for 2D movies, such as Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira (1988) and Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant (1999), to clearly exploit the use of dramatic lighting. And when Pixar started to ramp up production on its first Toy Story film, the studio apparently sought out the services of an experienced lighting cameraman to help create a more “realistic” environment. Today, it is recognized that the digital environments can be lit in very much the same manner as a director of photography lights a set on a live-action shoot. Digital studios continue to call upon the services of such cinematographers as Guillermo Navarro, known for his work on Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), who acted as a consultant on DreamWorks Animation’s Madagascar films. (Del Toro later came to DreamWorks to direct an animated movie at Navarro’s suggestion.) More recently, renowned cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki made his digital debut in Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, which for all intents and purposes is an animated movie.
What differentiates digital animation from live action, of course, are the tools. Live action uses real lights in a real environment, while digital animation uses virtual lights in a virtual environment, with digital visual effects artists have to work in both worlds — hence the need for texts like Wissler’s and Birn’s. Both authors have strong professional backgrounds — Birn at Pixar, Wissler at Sony Pictures Imageworks — and both tackle the same issues.
Example showing how lighting can show times of day. From Illuminated Pixels.
Wissler has designed her book as much as a reference work as an introductory text. After providing a basic, software agnostic introduction to the technology, she delves into areas such as using lighting to establish setting, creating a mood, directing the eye, creating the illusion of depth and ways to provide cohesiveness and visual interest; she goes on to analyze the properties of light and explain techniques such as three-point lighting and rendering.
She also highlights important concepts by frequently rendering them in boldface; at first, this seemed like a gimmick, but I soon found this to be very helpful in quickly getting a sense of what she was discussing. The text itself is profusely illustrated with images from paintings, classic live-action films, from Nosferatu to Blade Runner, and animated movies from Bambi to Tangled, as well as special effects films that mix digital and live-action, including Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Avatar. And when necessary, she even uses student films to illustrate specific points.
The book concludes with three useful interviews with Rob Bredow, CTO, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Mohit Kallianpur, Look and Lighting Director, Disney Animation Studios, and Andrew Whitehurst, Visual Effects Supervisor, Double Negative. All in all, a useful and very welcome addition to my bookshelf.
Items mentioned in this article:
