FMX 2014: "Frozen" - The Art of Lighting

FMX Tuesday 22nd 2014
"Frozen": The Art of Lighting by Mihit Kallianpur (Disney Animation)
The next talk was probably one of the one interesting of the day which was the the art of lighting in Frozen by Mohit Kallianpur who is the director of cinematography and lighting at Disney Studios. Altogether there were 7 lighting supervisors, 68 lighting artists, 1 producer supervisor, 3 coordinators and 2 assistants just in the lighting department alone to be able to create this masterpiece.

The first stage of the production was picking a colour scheme for the scene, and the one which we looked at was the one were Elsa is building the Ice Palace. In the first scene of the film they wanted the ice to be the centre of everyone's focus so made it glow slightly to attract the attention of the audience towards it more, showing how important it is and giving a clue that it might serve a bigger purpose later one. This theme was then continued into the ice palace scene as the ice looked grand and majestic and kept the audiences attention.

A really nice part to this scene was the use of lighting to convey the different moods that Elsa was feeling during the parts where she's there as they had exhausted every shade of blue already. So they changed it up slightly, using warm light for when she is happy and colder light for when she is sad. This then linked in with her emotions in the scene as the lighting changes depending on what is happening. There is even one scene that uses yellow as the primary colour in the scene when she is being captured, and this was a surprise due to the fact that they had been told to stay away from yellow as its too warm.

With the ice palace, its very cold and dark blue in most scenes but as she transforms into the Snow Queen we see her step onto the balcony and the palace change to a more purple tone to bring in that sense of happiness that she is feeling after being free and you get the feeling that this is the start of a new beginning.

We then see the scene were Anna first goes to see her in the palace and what the director wanted to do was portray her as this 1940s, 1950s glamour model with a light coming from the sky and illuminating her, this was actually a fake light as there were mo windows here, but they managed to get away with it due to how it made Elsa look and how mesmerising she was, it managed to draw attention away from the light coming down. During this scene as well the lighting department added a lot more light coming from upstairs so that it made it look more sparkling and gave it an awe that makes you feel happy looking at.

We see Elsa then hit an emotional state where she doesn't feel proud and happy in the palace anymore and we see the lighting become more red to show her anger and we see how much she has changed from when she first created it.

During the research part of the lighting process they did a lot of tests and experiments on ice so that they could add light onto it and see how different textures would produce different results so that they could see how it reflects. They also visited an ice hotel to get inspiration from there carvings and the general structure of it so that they could imagine how they would build a palace out of the material. A lot of the rooms had compressed snow on the floor and then the room was accented with these panels and columns of ice so that it stood out more from the pressed down plain snow. Then when illuminated at night the colours became much more saturated and they were illuminated in places where it looked very boring before.

They then began to create there own ice palace, using what they had learnt from there research, but they found that they created too many textures and it was just too overwhelming and didn't look like they wanted. So after a few more tests they decided to use colour instead to bring life too it, but then found they had too much colour. So they compromised on using a few different textures in the walls going up and then using the compressed snow on the floor so that it provided a good base and didn't draw attention away from the ice! Before finally injecting just that little bit of colour only when Elsa's mood is changing to give it that something that was special.

Overall the talk was incredible and I have actually found a new likeness for lighting and how much it can actually do to scene that I didn't think was initially possible. The way that the lights int he ice convey what moos she is feeling gives us more insight into the character and this was we can learn a little bit more about her in every scene.