Going Inside the Mind With Production Designer Ralph Eggleston #InsideOutEvent

As the date gets closer and closer (June 19) to the release of Pixar’s Inside Out I still have to pinch myself that I was able to attend a behind the scenes event and get the scoop about how this adorable tale was created.  Over the next few weeks I will be posting a lot about my experiences last month in San Fransisco.  Today I am taking you Inside the Mind, the control center, with production designer Ralph Eggleston.

How do you create a world that no one has ever seen before? When talking with Ralph Eggleston I learned that this movie takes place in the mind, not the brain.  This distinction is important because its a place we have all been to but never seen.  Creating the mind was one of the biggest undertakings Pixar has ever attempted in fact it took over 5 years to create while the average Pixar film will take 3.

Ralph Eggleston gave us the inside scoop on how difficult it was to create the emotion characters. The characters we modeled after sparklers.  They have their own light source which makes them very unique from an animators standpoint.  Animators actually reference champagne bubbles and spent months developing what they thought the emotions should feel like.

The real world and the mind world had to look very different from each other. Pixar wanted to portray the difference visually so you will see a lot of bright colors and high contrast in the mind and darker colors and shadows in the real world.

The lighting in the film reflects Riley’s (the main human character)  emotional state throughout the film.  When Riley is comfortable and happy in Minnesota they used pastel colors and when she moved to San Fransisco and was struggling they changed the colors to more dull hues. The lighting in Inside Out was influenced by Disney Land.  Lighting the characters was challenging because the emotions are made of light.  Ralph Eggleston said that he wanted to do a version of the Wide World of Disney for the birth of Joy.

The characters weren’t the only thing Eggleston talked to us about.  He talked about what it was like making the inside of the mind feel like a conceptual world. In the movie there are several islands that Riley has in her mind.  The islands in the mind world are foundations of the personality in each individuals mind. Eggleston said that your islands of personality are the core things you are interested in and they change.  The one constant…. Family Island.  Honesty Island was the hardest island to create.

The two worlds that Pixar was able to create in this movie will astonish you.  Stay tuned this month and next as I share more about my amazing interviews and screenings during my Pixar press day.  And be sure to mark your calendars for June 19 when Inside Out hits theaters everywhere!

A huge thank you to Disney for flying me out to SF and covering my hotel during the #InsideOutEvent!