When director Peter Sohn and producer Denise Ream got to work Elementary, they started with the idea of elements coming to life. This led to the creation of Element City, a sprawling metropolis filled with denizens of fire, water, earth, and air. The story follows Ember (Leah Lewis), a firefighter who works at her parents’ market, whose fiery temper leads her to a chance encounter with Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a juicy water creature who works as a town inspector. Although fire and water don’t mix well, Ember and Wade form an unlikely friendship. As Sohn and Ream worked on the project, they quickly discovered how difficult it was to create fire and water to give them emotional performances without turning them into people. Elementary hits theaters on June 16, 2023 with a new animated short Carl’s date.
DEADLINE: How did you come up with the idea of using fire and water as the main characters?
peter son: It was by drawing and sketching different ideas and then discovering personalities from them. As an animator, you’re always trying to find something that’s really fun to animate, like like flashing flames and all that stuff. And then the idea came to me that I first drew about this water figure coming to a dinner party. And when he ate something, it all boiled in his mouth… and that’s where this idea comes from.
DEADLINE: Did you know from the beginning that water and fire are two very difficult things to live well?
SUN: It was very early. Even when we pitched the idea, everyone said it was going to be very difficult.
DENISE REM: Actually from the beginning. Our boss was very worried about the fire and we have heard a lot about it. We never wanted realistic fire, but we still wanted the character to feel like fire. So I immediately started talking to the tool people and the big R&D heads.
SUN: It’s hard to look back on now because there was nothing before. There were also no real fire figures online. There the Human Torch and Jack-Jack burned. It was – a man on fire and a baby on fire, but nothing is really made of fire like that. So I only had drawings. When we told people it was going to be a fireman and a waterman, there was nothing that people immediately thought of.
BELT: Well, the shot they showed [at the press conference] of the paper airplane flying by Ember became a huge rallying point where people understood what Pete meant when he said, “I don’t want it to be a character on fire.”
DEADLINE: It was something everyone worked on said it’s elements, it’s not human. Cinder is fire, no man burns. How did this realization come about?
SUN: Well, I just knew that I was still not happy with the rigs. I’d love to push the rig even further, you know? I’ve been here so long and we’re done [characters made from] Hard plastic, hard metal, you know cars or toys and people… and we knew how to do it. I remember there was [article] By valve 2 where they made the T-1000, the metal liquid man. And I remember where it was successful and where it was weird, and then I thought about it for our characters… we’ve never done that before. Let’s see what we can do with it and see where it goes.
BELT: From an animation perspective, that was the hardest thing to figure out.
SUN: A friend said, “You should just mocap [motion capture] it and then light it.” But the whole point of animation for us is to do something you can’t do in a human outfit. And that was a weird little back-pocket trick for us – to make it look like you could never do it. We always want that hand-animated feel that’s so fun and sassy, you know?
DEADLINE: You mentioned that you thought fire would be the hardest to live with, but water was actually the hardest. VFX Supervisor, Sanjay Bakshi said that they worked hard to animate the water before they had to pull back.
SUN: Yes, I went into a mania. I was so afraid he would look too human so I kept pushing on the waterfront. Every dial has transparency – its bubbles, its waves, everything. Every time his mouth moved, everything in his head moved and you couldn’t see anything and his performance started to fade. We had to adjust some of the design to match this look, but that wasn’t the hard part. The hardest part was the lighting. What does Wade look like when the light hits him? Wade transforms into any light situation where Ember has no shadows on her. She is essentially the same in every shot except for her movement. But Wade in the basement, or outside, or in daylight in the city, he can easily turn into something very strange. Either he’s too transparent here, or he’s too blue, or he’s craving jello…
BELT: I would say fleshing out the characters is probably the biggest challenge because unlike our previous films we had to have all these setting-based departments adding their roles to bring the character to life. You wouldn’t normally work with the effects team early in pre-production, but because we had to do character effects for the secondary set, this huge team had to work less on paper and more on the computer to try and pull it off. See. So it was a challenge.
DEADLINE: Seems very challenging, especially since, as you said, there is no reference for it online.
SUN: Yes, and it is so expensive. With current technology, it’s so hard to show that kind of volume in both characters. Render performance reflects and reflects Woody’s fabric skin. But for Ember and Wade, it has to show that part and show the hundreds of layers that go through it.
DEADLINE: You just finished working on the final frames of the film, so how does it feel to put all that work into something that’s never been done before?
SUN: It’s very emotional. There’s a strange bittersweetness to ending it, but it just shows how much you really cared about the process. When you’re in the thick of it, just focus on the goal and how hard it is to get there. But once you see what the teams are doing here, there’s this weird build-up of energy that’s going on inside and you realize it’s exciting because they’re doing such cool work. Now that we are at the end, it is so emotional and feels like raising a child. There’s a lot of pride in that kind of parenting, but it just grows as you grow it, you know?
BELT: It feels like it’s been ours for so long and now everyone’s coming for the kid. I also feel emotional because it’s been a long time. It happened throughout our lives, our personal lives and the pandemic. It was just so much work, but when I see what everyone came together for, I’m just blown away.
SUN: And since art reflects everything we’re going through, there’s just nothing you can do about it. The idea for this film was simply to thank our parents for all the sacrifices they made. My parents died doing this so the thought of honoring them became even stronger and suddenly all this stuff became ink. Everyone just puts a piece of themselves into it.
DEADLINE: Speaking of emotional, what’s it like to have the animation short before becoming a movie Carl’s datewith characters off On.
SUN: Oh, I’m very proud. i like bob [Peterson] and I love what he did to keep these characters alive while we were both working on them On.
BELT: It was my first film, so having it with me feels very special.
SUN: And this one in particular, it connects right to the core of the first film and what Carl is going through. So we are super proud.
Click below to watch the Elemental trailer
Source: Deadline
Ashley Root is an author and celebrity journalist who writes for The Fashion Vibes. With a keen eye for all things celebrity, Ashley is always up-to-date on the latest gossip and trends in the world of entertainment.
