With the first trailer for Elemental now online, we were recently able to preview 30 minutes of exclusive footage from the film and then caught up with VFX Supervisor Sanjay Bakshi (Onward; The Good Dinosaur) to learn more about the extensive process behind creating the film's leading lady Ember (Leah Lewis) and the world of Element City.
Elemental tells the story of Ember, 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.
Bakshi, who is also the son of immigrant parents, tells me about how relatable he found this story and his past twenty years working at Pixar. Then, he gets into creating the visual appeal of Ember, Wade, and the other characters, before telling me more about crafting Element City, working from home during the pandemic, and a whole lot more!
Read on for our full interview below and please remember to SUBSCRIBE to my channel!
ROHAN: I grew up in the U.S., as a son of immigrant parents, so I found the story extremely relatable, and I'm assuming you may have had a similar experience growing up in Canada. How much did Pete Sohn's initial pitch resonate with you and/or what did it mean to you to be able to work on a project like this?
SANJAY: Yeah, I think Rohan, maybe we have similar experiences, my family moved from India to Canada, and I grew up in a town where there weren't a lot of Indians. So, that resonated with me. And Pete and I talked about that early on, and he had a similar experience, and so, that idea of being caught between ntegrating into a new place and preserving culture of, you know, all of those themes are powerful for me.
ROHAN: You've been with Pixar for over 20 years now, but this is your first time being the VFX Supervisor? Can you tell me more about how you're responsibilities have evolved over the years to get you to this point of working on Elemental?
SANJAY: Yeah, I started out on the technology side, writing software for computer graphics, and then got involved in the characters. So, I was working on characters, specifically, and working on that team, and then, eventually ended up being a VFX soup, which is like supervising all of those departments, and the departments involved in a movie at Pixar are like, everything has to be built from scratch. So, the sets, the locations, the characters, the lighting has to be done.
So, these are all really artistic people, but also, they're using technical tools, and so the job of the VFX soup in this case, was to really be the bridge between Pete Sohn, the director, and the technical folks, and really helping that communication happen. So, if Pete is asking for something that is really hard, and maybe not that important, story wise, my job is to speak up and to understand where it's really important to spend the resources and how much work that is, and really help them understand how to kind of make the compromises where he should or really where this is important for this story, and it's hard visually, let's really like go for it here, because it's worth it.
ROHAN: I saw you retweet something on Twitter yesterday about creating the visual appeal of Ember. Considering all of the iconic characters in Pixar's lineup, can you expand on that? How does Pixar create these appealing, instantly likable characters time and time again?
SANJAY: Yeah, that was one of the biggest challenges, Rohan, on Elemental, and it was there from Day One in the storyboards. Ember is fire itself, and fire itself is really seductive. I don't know about you, but I love watching fire, it's so dynamic, it's always changing, and it's kind of mesmerizing. But then we knew that Ember, our animators knew, there are some emotional moments in the film, and our animators are used to subtly controlling the expression of the face and just changing how on the mouth, the lips separate, or the eyes, squint a little bit, there's all this subtlety to be able to convey emotion.
But Ember is also a fiery character. So, getting that balance right, and so the fire isn't so distracting. So, in these emotional moments, you're really with Ember and feeling Ember, that was a really big challenge for us, and kind of the whole trick of making an appealing character is getting that balance right, Rohan, and I hope we did. We feel good about it, but we'll see. It's just going into the world now.
ROHAN: You're working with four distinct elements in this film - fire, water, earth, and air - was there one that proved to be more difficult than the other?
SANJAY: Yeah, the first project we worked on was Ember, to get that right, because we knew that would inform the world itself, even how realistic that fire was on Ember would inform how the fire in the world is going to look. And then, we worked on Wade to get the water.
Then, we talked a lot about sentient water versus non-sentient water, like Wade, is alive and made of water, but there's a lot of non-sentient water in the world, like the transit system in the city is water based, and so, we talked a little bit about what makes water that's like Wade, you know, sentient versus not sentient water. Then, we had a lot of fun with just like putting - there's different districts in Element city, for the different elements.
So, the fire town used to be where Earth characters used to live, and then, they moved on to other parts of the city. So, you see some remnants of what that looked like before, and then the fire people adapted it, because that's what happens in cities, you know, waves of immigrants come in to a certain region. Yeah, and then we just had fun with making sure that the set felt elemental, that you felt like the air district felt like air-influenced and water district felt like water-influenced.
ROHAN: How long were you actually working on Elemental? I imagine you were working through the pandemic and everything. What kind of challenges did that present?
SANJAY: Yeah, I've been on the movie for around three and a half years, so you're right. I started right before the pandemic, and then, we had to build the team when the pandemic hit, and it was hard. It's hard when you work on really hard problems, and you can't be in a room with them, and you don't necessarily know them very well, but you're trying to build a team, and it's challenging, and we're all going through the world collapsing or it felt like it then.
That brought us together too, in retrospect, but yeah, it was a scary time. If I think about all the things that happened in the world while we're making the movie, there are a lot of big events. I'm thinking of the pandemic, like you said, and George Floyd, and the Capitol riots, that all happened while we're making this movie.
I'm glad I had something hard to work on to distract me from all that, to be honest, because the world felt like so chaotic, and then, I had this really hard problem that I was working on, with people that I really liked, and so it was almost like a refuge, so you can not worry about those things and have a distraction.
ROHAN: We were able to watch about 30 mins of the film in advance, would you say there's a standout sequence in the film that you're particularly proud of?
SANJAY: I think the opening of the movie, it's really ambitious, like that first scene where it's like the Ellis Island kind of moment, but you see a glow in the distance, in the fog, and then, you see, oh, there's fire. It looks like a boat is on fire. And then you say, oh, no, that's not a boat on fire. Those are characters. Oh, they're made of fire, like getting all of that storytelling right is challenging.
Then, you quickly go into them getting off the boat, and hopefully, you're overwhelmed by like, oh, there's air people and this is how they kind of get around the city, and then there's water people and this is what they're like. There's a bunch of visual storytelling to establish the world in those first opening shots, that were a lot of work, and I hope are really fun and immerse the audience right away in the rules of the world, so that they can enjoy the rest of the story and not worry about how the world works.
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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.