After catching an exclusive 30-minute preview of Elemental, we sat down with production designer Don Shank (Samurai Jack; Incredibles 2; Space Jam) and spoke with him about what went into creating the vibrant world of Element City.
Elemental tells the story of Ember (Leah Lewis), a fiery woman who's always stayed relatively close to her home in Firetown. However, as fate would have it, a chance meeting with a water elemental named Wade (Mamoudou Athie) forces her to venture out of her comfort zone and explore the spectacular world of Element City.
Shank details creating the whole world of Element City and each of the four very different neighborhoods, what kind of unexpected challenges each element presented, and the whole process behind creating the awesome Cyclone Stadium.
Also, in case you missed them, remember to check out our interviews with director Peter Sohn & producer Denise Ream and VFX Supervisor Sanjay Bakshi!
Read on for our full interview below and please remember to SUBSCRIBE to my channel!
ROHAN: Every scene in Elemental looks so cool and alive and vibrant, and obviously it's loosely based on New York, but when you don't have to adhere to any certain aesthetic - I mean, it's not set in the MCU or anything like that, so you're able to create your own world. When you're tackling a project like this, where anything you imagine can become a reality, where did your first bit of inspiration come from?
DON: Luckily, we wanted a world that was completely unique, and it was never about like, you know, ‘Hey, this should look like - the audience should recognize that this is New York, and that we've just elementalized it.’ But, that was too much of a specific thing. In fact, we weren't even sure we wanted this to feel like it was on Earth.
However, we didn't want it to feel alien either, and so, we would use New York in a general sort of a sense of inspiration for general ideas, but we were also looking at other cities as well, a lot of canal cities like Amsterdam, and some other towns and cities we saw in China, but it was just about like, ‘Okay, we've got these elemental characters, and what would be appropriate for them? How would they live? How could they live together?’
So, we looked at chemistry sets, that seems to relate to all the elements, and I thought, let's just go back in time where they were kind of primitive cave people type characters, and how would they evolve their way of building? And what materials would they use to get new ideas? So, it was really just about serving, like, ‘Okay, how do we make it look unique to where these characters live, in that they have a culture and that it feels like there's an ethnicity, but not one that we're familiar with. W
e had to tackle all these things, but then because Pete grew up in New York, and that was sort of a touchstone, it was an easy way to communicate. Wade's mom is supposed to be an art collector, and so she might live somewhere upscale, like the Upper East Side. That was used as a general sort of an inspiration, and we would look at other sorts of places and ideas for that type of feel, but then we were never sort of hamstrung by - we never felt like limited by like, ‘Oh, people need to understand that that's a specific building that then we've transformed' and don't you get it.'
In fact, in our elementalization, I grew up on the Flintstones, so I love that kind of gag, where it's like, oh, that's a vacuum cleaner and it’s just this animal on wheels or whatever. That was too simple. We were looking for multiple layers to that concept of elementalization, and so hopefully, those layers all show up, and it feels appropriate to the elements.
ROHAN: The world feels so real, and you see Ember's parents immigrating to Element City and moving into what appears to be an old earth neighborhood?
DON: Yeah, it was an earth neighborhood, but the earth people have moved out and left it, and so, the fire people started moving in.
ROHAN: Since every element has its own personality, was there an element - fire, water, earth, or air - that you found more challenging than the other?
DON: Yeah, I mean, every one of them had their own challenges, but what I found was that things like fire and water were easier. They just had a bigger palette of cues to kind of look into because - well, let me explain it a different way. Air is clear, how do you show air? Right?
So, you have a few things, you can show a cloud or you’re really showing things that are affected by air, like little things flapping or propellers moving and stuff. And so, it just felt like we had a lot more work to do to try to find cues that we could communicate visually with the audience that it related to air. And then, earth was maybe not as hard in that same respect, but what we found is the other three elements - fire, water, and air - had a flow and a movement.
And so, that was something we could lean into, whereas earth, it didn't have an elemental flow, right? Earth was sort of a static thing that we're bringing to life. So, if you had say a building, you know, if a building is in the distance, you can sort of see a little movement of flow of water down, and then air, you can see the spiral sort of movement, but earth, it's like, well what are you going to do, shake the leaves a little bit? So, every single element had certainthings that were easier and certain things that were harder but like, yeah, air was a tough one to get enough variety, but, I think we definitely succeeded.
ROHAN: Can you tell me more about that amazing air ball - that cloud basketball - sequence and designing the tornado stadium? Were you drawing inspiration from real stadiums or was that completely original?
DON: Yeah, I mean, the story already had a bit of a framework, meaning that it was like a circular stadium and there was a lot of verticality to it. And then, we didn't know what the stadium should look like, and I was just, again, my forte is doing kind of silly sort of puns, and I was only - I always say, I'm only half joking, ever, and that actually sort of serves me well.
So, during a meeting, when we were talking about the air ballplayers in the stadium, I did a little doodle of like, oh, maybe it's called Cyclone stadium, and it's just a big tornado, and that could be funny. And it was one and done, you know, I sent that little doodle to the director, and he's like, I love it. Can we do this? I'm like,well, okay, I was just being sort of half joking, but like, you know what, that's not a bad idea to explore it.
We did some further exploration and evolved the idea, but yeah, a tornado gave us a lot of the overall shape, and we did look at a lot of different stadiums, but it wasn't about a specific one again, we wanted to get the general cues of the stadium, because if we got too specific with a particular stadium, then that wouldn't really serve us. It might even distract us.
And so, it was more about like, how do we make it feel air so we layered on a big turbine, you know, engines and blades, when you enter the stadium, you've got those blades going around the tube, and everything is sort of translucent with movement, propellers and, swirling shapes, and even where the stadiums are sitting, we put these kind of air flaps that open and shut, we saw in some kinetic sculpture, something that had this sort of movement, and we thought oh, it would be cool if we see light coming through them, but then, they can kind of open and shut and then have like a swirling movement, so that you always had this kind of a swirling movement.
So, it was again, not about capturing a specific stadium, but capturing that sort of spiral movement and making it feel air, aas much as we could.
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Disney and Pixar’s “Elemental” is an all-new, original feature film set in Element City, where fire-, water-, land- and air-residents live together. The story introduces Ember, a tough, quick-witted and fiery young woman, whose friendship with a fun, sappy, go-with-the-flow guy named Wade challenges her beliefs about the world they live in. Directed by Peter Sohn (“The Good Dinosaur,” “Partly Cloudy” short), produced by Denise Ream (“The Good Dinosaur,” “Cars 2”), and featuring the voices of Leah Lewis and Mamoudou Athie as Ember and Wade, respectively, “Elemental” releases on June 16, 2023.