Klay Hall, Sean Lurie on Influences - Interview
Disney Brings Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure to DVD
Oct 20, 2009
In Part #2 of our exclusive interview with Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure director Klay Hall and producer Sean Lurie, they revealed the process behind making the film, coming to DVD on October 27th.
Here they discuss how they used colour to support emotion, and why the working atmosphere at Disney is different from other studios.
S101: People like Steve Hulett from the Animation Guild have noticed that you’re taking your ideas and storyboards to fellow filmmakers instead of Harvard MBA’s.
Klay Hall: “That’s right.”
S101: Were you around before Lasseter took over Disney Animation–
Hall: “Yes, for a brief moment. But, before then, I had worked at Fox and other studios and it's definitely a different way of working. It is Harvard MBA’s giving notes whereas, at Disney Animation, John came in and set up the structure just like at Pixar. It’s creative-driven, and you weigh in amongst your peers to push the project forward. It was a liberating experience.”
Sean Lurie: “John and the other people in charge have created this environment that allows you to feel safe creatively.”
Hall: “There’s no such thing as a mistake.”
Lurie: “One of the things they tell you is, ‘Get your mistakes up as soon as you possibly can so that everybody can look at them’ and the others can help you find solutions.”
Lurie: “And you don't have to make it perfect the first time because, if you don’t, you’re gonna be fired. The idea at Disney is to seek out the feedback from John and the other guys, and we want their notes.
“John’s great about giving a response. He doesn’t say, ‘Here’s my notes: you have to do everything I say or you’re fired.’ He says, ‘This isn’t working, I have some ideas’ but it’s really the director’s responsibility to figure out the creative solution.”
Hall: “And it’s about understanding the spirit of it all, not necessarily executing it as he exactly wants it.”
S101: What were some of your visual inspirations for Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure? The music has an obvious Celtic influence, and the visuals as well.
Hall: “Yes.”
S101: What else?
Hall: “As far as the camera moves, I was looking at (British epic director) David Lean’s stuff. Lawrence of Arabia was the main one that I kept looking at; also Ryan’s Daughter for the way the camera moves on an emotional scene. It’s very subtle.
“I really wanted this movie to feel big, not just as an action-adventure but I wanted it to have a big scope. Tinker Bell’s only 5 inches tall, so when she’s against that pirate ship, it’s like the Empire State Building. When she’s seeing off into the distance, and the clouds are moving across the sky . . . that was us saying, ‘Let’s make it feel big.’
“I want you to become part of the film, I really tried to pull in Tink’s point of view on a lot of different scenes. In the troll scene, I feel like you’re caught up in the moment, and you’re there with them. You’re not sitting back going, ‘Ho, ho, ho, that’s funny.’
“I also looked at Spielberg and Scorsese on how they filmed emotional moments. When it came to colour, we looked at (Alice in Wonderland concept artist) Mary Blair, (Sleeping Beauty artist) Eyvind Earle, and especially the rich palettes in (Ang Lee’s martial arts epic) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: the way colour hits a scene and supports emotion–“
Lurie: “A hyper-real element.”
S101: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon used the iconography and connotations of colour. Did you get into that at all?
Hall: “I think that’s in there. We definitely discussed what makes this scene work so well. You can even freeze-frame an iconic moment in a movie and examine not only the composition of the film, but where the light hits it, where the colour supports it.
"You should be able to watch this movie without any sound and track it. That was my goal.”
Lurie: “There are actually a couple of scenes in particular that highlight this idea of using colour to support what's going on emotionally. When Tinker Bell is working on the scepter with Terrence, it’s very bright. And, as the scene progresses – where the moon stone is broken with only 4 days left – the colours start to desaturate. And the very last scene in that sequence, where Tinker Bell’s at one of her lowest moments, it almost goes monochromatic gray.”
Hall: “Early on in my career, I worked with Brad Bird. One time, over dinner, he talked about the emotional colour breakdown of Pinocchio. He says that's one of the best films to use colour to support emotion. That stuck with me and we tried to use that in Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure.
"Blaze the Firefly serves the same purpose as Jiminy Cricket did in Pinocchio. I definitely looked at that movie, scene-by-scene.”
Lurie: “So many great films have come out of Disney and Pixar. We looked at A Bug’s Life pretty closely, because Pixar did a great job with the bug’s perspective. What makes you feel these creatures are super-small?
“It's so easy, in CGI, to get your characters looking plastic and doll-like, and we really wanted to avoid that. We looked at a number of movies to figure out how technically we could–“
Hall: “We looked at how The Incredibles handled the realism of the main characters while still being really cartoon-y, how they shot it, how they lit it. We were really influenced by some of those key scenes in order to make our film feel a little more realistic.”
Lurie: “There were a couple of key scenes that we looked at in Ratatouille, with Anton Ego. There are some very dramatic scenes with him, so we actually took stills from the movie and looked at the lighting on his face. Because that movie really doesn’t have that plastic-y feel.”
(In Part #4 of this interview, Hall and Lurie talk about how they hope Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure will change audience's perceptions of Disney direct-to-DVD animated films.)
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