Transcript: Art & Crafts Live: Behind the Scenes on 'The Wild Robot'
Michael Goi, ASC, breaks down the DreamWorks Animation blockbuster with composer Kris Bowers, VFX supervisor Leff Lefferts and supervising sound editor Jeff Budsberg
Elaine Low: All right, next up, we’ve got a panel on a film that my kids, my whole family loved, The Wild Robot. Please welcome to the stage our moderator, Michael Goi, former president of the ASC, executive producer, director, cinematographer for Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix, and the cinematographer and director of American Horror Story for six seasons.
Michael Goi: Thank you, Elaine. And I am so jazzed to be speaking about this movie in particular, because this is one of my favorite movies of the year — such an amazing accomplishment, The Wild Robot.
Please welcome to the stage from The Wild Robot, composer Kris Bowers, visual effects supervisor Jeff Budsberg, and supervising sound editor Leff Lefferts.
Welcome, gentlemen.
Kris Bowers: Thank you.
MG: Leff, let me start with you, because people tend to think of sound editing as making sure that each individual sound can be clearly heard. But there’s so much more to it than that. There’s all the texture, the nuance — you’re telling the story with the way the soundtracks are built. So talk to me a little bit about what was involved with this movie.
Leff Lefferts: You know, the thing that’s so interesting to me about the soundtrack is figuring out what we don’t play in a lot of situations. So we do tend to try to cover a lot and really work with Kris and Mary and Jeff to figure out what story we’re telling. But so much of it is figuring out when we’re gonna, for example, hear Roz or not hear Roz.
I think it’s really interesting because that’s really my favorite part is when we’re all together, and we’re mixing, and we’re finding out what aspect of all of the soundtrack is giving us the story. So there’s a lot of moments in this movie where you don’t hear Roz at all, and then there’s other moments where we really focus on the sound of her movement or her voice ot what have you. So it’s as much figuring out what not to play as it is to what to play.
MG: Well, one of my favorite scenes in the movie is the conversation that happens between Roz and Fink on that cliffside after Brightbill leaves.
LL: Mine too.
MG: And it’s a very subtle scene, but you know that the sound editing, the design of that is contributing a huge amount to that scene. What was involved with that?
LL: You know, we come out of that cue, the migration cue, which is so beautiful, and you need a moment to really kind of process that Roz is left behind and that Brightbill’s gone. And one of the things I love about this film in general is that we have lots of ups and downs, we have lots of big moments where we’re telling a lot of emotion and a lot of story, and at the same time, we have to kind of take a minute and process it all and breathe.
And Roz sees her task is complete, and she’s lonely, she’s hurt, she misses him. And really, so much of that is the performance of the actors, and just that wind. You know, when you get up there, there’s a little bit of a time cut, and winter’s coming.
And I think that’s the moment, and there’s a great little squeaky moment when she’s falling apart up there by herself, and then they’re there.
MG: Yeah, it made me really feel like I knew what silent snow sounds like, or most importantly felt like, in that moment. It was really beautiful.
And Jeff, let’s talk a little bit about the visual effects in this movie.
Jeff Budsberg: How many hours do you have?
MG: All the time in the world, buddy! It has such an organic feel, but not necessarily, I would say, like, a realistic feel. It contributes really immensely to the story, and all the effects seem very wedded into the character and gives us a fuller sense of the environment.
I just want to know what your prep process was to develop this.
JB: So, we’ve been spending maybe the last 30, 40 years in animation and computer graphics just trying to achieve some sort of photorealism. And I think that we’ve lost something that’s endearing about the hand-craftedness of animation.
And my earliest conversations with [director Chris] Sanders and Raymond Zibach, the production designer, were, like, how do we get back to just feeling this really endearing — you know, like those artists that we love from the early Disney movies, right? So Tyrus Wong’s paintings in Bambi, or Eyvind Earle, or even Studio Ghibli’s work with Miyazaki.
All of those have some sense of seeing the world through the artist’s eyes, and how they crafted it, and they’re removing a lot of superfluous information. They’re not drawing every single blade of grass or every leaf in a tree, right? Things are more seen in silhouettes. And what it allows you to do, as an audience member is to kind of really embrace the world as your own and fill it in in your own mind, right?
And I think it allows a greater connection to the world. So that was one of the driving forces behind it. The other one is actually story-driven. So if you watch the film, at the start of the onset of the film, Roz is kind of this Roomba that’s dropped in the forest. It doesn’t make any sense.
She’s a fish out of water, but stylistically, she doesn’t fit, right? She’s this precise machined robot in this loose, deconstructed, painterly world. And incrementally, if you’re paying attention, what I’m doing is deconstructing her appearance, right? So I’m giving her a little brushed highlight, you know, perturbing the shadow terminator, you know, giving a little bit of kind of like red ochre in her undertones, smearing the highlight across kind of these rings on her arm, you know, brushing the normal light response on her body — and sequence by sequence, we’re making her more and more painterly, embracing the world around her. So she’s making this big impact on the animals and the island, but the island is actually having a big impact on her.
So when you come into contact with the robots at the end of the film, now there’s this jarring juxtaposition, again, that Roz now fits in the world, but the robots do not. So this is what’s really critical to the stylization of the film is it actually helps motivate the story.
And one thing that’s really fascinating is we do this in a number of different ways. So stylistically, she’s also breaking down, right? She’s getting dirtier, beat up, scratched, worn, moss is growing on her, her locomotion is changing, right? She starts as something that’s very efficient and almost robotic, for lack of better nomenclature, and then she starts to be a little bit nuanced and more, kind of, expressing more of an animalistic or fluidic behavior with her motions.
So we’re trying to reinforce the fact of her change through the film through a number of different ways. And the style is the one that, I think that, to your point, the audience really reacts to because, because they feel it, right? Even if it’s a visceral reaction that, you know, it’s just something about it that you’re able to connect to, because it feels like an artist really thought about how the image was deconstructed.
And I think the difference that we made coming from previous films, like Bad Guys or Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, is that you’re not trying to do everything in post. We’re not trying to do it all in lighting, compositing. We’re actually thinking about the deconstruction of the island in every department.
So in modeling, you’re not making a realistic bush and trying to filter it to make it look painterly. You’re actually drawing the bush in 3D. In lighting, or in surfacing, you’re actually thinking about how does the texture change from the lit side of the tree versus the shadow side of the tree, and what information are you removing, you know, as if you were a painter deconstructing the tree?
You’re not building a tree with leaves, you’re building it with brush strokes, and shape silhouettes, and splatters, right? So, I think every artist in the process felt really connected to the final result because they’re all thinking about it like an illustrator with the final result in mind.
MG: Well, I’m so glad you brought up Bambi, because I personally own three 35 millimeter prints of Bambi. Don’t tell Disney. But you know, it’s amazing — the transitions when Bambi is fighting for Feline, and the way the artwork changes and the way it seamlessly goes into these very different looks.
And while I was watching The Wild Robot, I had that same feeling like, this really kind of echoes moments of character and story that will resonate for decades and decades.
JB: And we wanted to be true to the world. Like, we wanted our animals to be animals, right? We wanted the camera language to feel like nature photography.
We wanted it to be something that was earnest and impactful and I hope, it feels like it resonated with everyone. And I think that’s what is so rewarding.
MG: Well, great job. And Kris, so you put a couple of dozen pop tunes into the movie and that’s it, right? No, no. Obviously, the music is such an important part of this, and I’m kind of curious about where, where you found the basis for it.
Like, where did you find the voice, basic musical voice for Roz and Brightbill, and how did that develop?
KB: Yeah, I mean, it started, trying to find that balance between the synthetic and organic and wanting to — taking a lead from how much the animators are looking to the past and looking to the preservation of this artistic, human, hand-drawn style.
Also, for me, that era of animation is really special for how music functions in it and how much music is intricately written to picture and the orchestrations are incredibly detailed. And so wanting to honor that and not write something that felt too modern that it lost a lot of how much that music, to me, keeps you engaged even on a subconscious level.
Like it’s always fascinating when I study those orchestrations, and you hear an ostinato that continues to develop every four bars and changes instruments and things like that. And so, for me, it felt like that was the bar for what the score needed to do musically, but wanting to find this way to, again, bring in some modern elements for the synthetic and organic.
And so, for the two — for Roz it was developing this suite of synth sounds that were, you know, specific to her, but also looking to devices in our everyday world to see how those things sound. We talked about creating this theme for her and like a little chime that would play in these moments where she’s kind of advertising herself. And then the chime at the end is kind of like how our washing machine makes a little chime when it’s done or things like that.
And so she has this little, you know, eight-note chime at the very end that is kind of mirroring that idea, and it plays when she gets a task. So those sounds were really influenced by how much devices have a certain aesthetic these days, especially now, as they’ve gotten softer and rounder and interesting.
And then on the organic side, I was interested in representing the wild in a way that was different with scores, and I didn’t want to use ethnic flutes or these things that feel like they are not only kind of expected, but also they, to me, connote a culture — and if I hear an ethnic flute, I’m curious, like, what does it say about where we are, or the culture that’s associated with this space? And so I ended up going to percussion, because it felt like it removed that curiosity of culture.
But it also was inspired when I found this organization or this group called Sandbox Percussion Ensemble, because they approach percussion like foley artists — they build these percussion stations and each one has like glass bottles and teacups and slats of wood and tuned metal pipes and all these things that you would find in a hardware store, and they find a way to build this intricate percussion with it.
And so I wrote with them in mind as this like ASMR layer that’s almost like inspired by the animals skittering through the forest and things like that. And that exists on top of the orchestra and the synths and choir only used in moments where Roz is stepping beyond her programming and becoming more human.
And then the other thing I’d say is that Chris [Sanders] and I talked in the very first meeting about how much score was gonna be a character in this film, and there’d be these sequences where there was no dialogue and music was carrying a lot of that emotional narrative — and needing music that had not only clear emotion, but also very clear melody and theme and, to me, going back to that era that I’ve always been inspired by.
I’ve always been inspired by music where you can sing the theme outside of the context of the movie and it still makes you feel all the same feelings you felt watching the movie, and I feel like that’s something that’s vanishingly rare for a composer, to have that kind of opportunity to write these melodies.
And so I was excited to find ways to write these themes that could embody the emotional ideas in the film, and then also be these things that hopefully when people hear it outside of the context of the movie, they still feel those same feelings.
MG: Well, it’s a real delicate balancing act in the movie, because one of the things I loved about the film is that the music was brave enough to let an emotional visual moment play without stomping on it too hard.
And it was just tenuated just right, to make the audience feel this way as the progression of the drum went forward. It’s an art form, as you say, we’ve lost a little bit of it from music, we’ve seen. And I would say, especially in animated films — because I’m a huge animation fan — but a lot of times we see music that says, “You will feel this,” spoon feeds you this. And this movie does not do that to you.
JB: Well, this one’s really interesting because there’s probably about 50 percent less dialogue in this film than typical animated films.
But then the way that Sanders works is that he tries to leave room for these moments where you let it breathe. And I know Kris, we talked about, like, for that moment specifically with the migration, we had it boarded, we had an idea of where it was going, but then I know you took it and then we actually worked our process back to the music, right?
So I don’t know if you want to fill in with that.
KB: Yeah, it was when I first wrote my second version of the migration cues, my first version was kind of a fail — honestly, primarily because I wasn’t capturing the complexity of this relationship and the emotion. And it was interesting to kind of go a bit deeper into that.
And so when I wrote the second version, Chris was so excited that he actually encouraged me to write away from picture, and said that they would kind of work the sequence to the music. And I feel like that’s, like Jeff said, something that’s really rare.
MG: That’s a huge compliment, too.
KB: Yeah, definitely.
And it also goes back to the early days. At Disney, the director’s room was called the music room. And I feel like there was so much more of this relationship between music and picture that was fun to embrace.
MG: Well, I could talk with you guys for hours, but we’ll save that for Wild Robot 2. So, thank you so much for being here.
