February 6, 2018

Danielle Feinberg, Director of Photography for Lighting at Pixar, spoke to a very crowded house about her journey from programming as a young girl to helping to build magical worlds in several Pixar movies. She walked the audience through how she and her colleagues use physics and basic geometry to create complex scenes like the marigold bridge to the Land of the Dead in Coco, showing how the animations evolved from their initial conception to final animation. Lighting is often the key in setting the mood of a scene, guiding the audience’s attention, and injecting life into characters. Feinberg finished by discussing how amazing it is to use science and art to create worlds that no one has seen before, and how special it was to work on Coco, which was so well received by people from the Mexican culture the movie tried to capture. To learn more, see this article for Feinberg discussing Coco and TED.com talk discussing some of her pre-Coco movies.