Ballers All - The Look of Pixar's Win or Lose

Steadfast celebrates the personal work of our workaday artists. But as today is the release of Pixar's Win or Lose, we simply couldn't pass up the chance to sing the praises of two of our artists who poured themselves into the project - Production Designer Noah Klocek, and sets modeler Jenna Spurlock. 

Noah, who does the most exquisite pastels in his copious spare time, has been at the studio in the art department for a good long while. In his latest role as Production Designer he leads the entire art team and directs the look of the film. Production Designers are in meetings with directors, shepherding designs from sketches to final renders. At every stage they are making sure the directors are seeing the images they want to see, with characters and sets and props designed to tell the story they ought to be telling.

On Win or Lose, a multi-character series about perception, there were many decisions about how to visualize that core concept. Does each character have a different filter for the way they see the world? One of the early decisions was that there should be a 'default world' - a known, cohesive, stable, stylized world and set of characters that would form the foundation of the world. But what would that world and its characters look like? Noah and his team devised a comprehensive style guide, outlining the artistic vision for the series. It outlined not only a set of visual goals - establishing the chunky, simplified shape language, a character based palette, form stylization, a tendency towards a soft tactile feel, but also set up a strategy for how to achieve suck goals by being smart about detail. It answered crucial logisitical questions, most importantly, how would this world feel FULL Pixar, not Pixar-light (despite a smaller team and a much shorter production schedule?)

Noah worked with the Character Art Director (the talented Lou Hamou-Lhadj) to dial in answers to all those questions. They settled on a coherent look where the characters felt at one with their world. It was a world that was soft, chunky, somewhat simplified. And then Noah designed every. single. set. Every single one! There were over 60 sets in the series - and every element in those environments - from the buildings and the cars to a blade of grass - is considered and part of a coherent world, a world where these particular characters live. It is a masterwork in design, it's a push in Pixar stylization, and it's a full, rich world that you want to hang out in.

Jenna's work, as a sets modeler, was to take these designs from their initial 2D drawings and usher them into the 3D world. Her work might involve modeling (building set elements in Maya) or set dressing - which is world-building through placing elements in an environment. Set dressing work might be global (there is always a diamond in the field) or shot-based (eg a tree might be moved screen left to clarify a character's silhouette in a medium shot). It's a detail-obsessed job, and one that makes perfect sense given Jenna's personal art production. Her sets work on WoL can be seen all over the series. She helped model and dress the ball field, the large city shots, Van’s house, Frank’s apartment, the snack shack, the daycare, the pizza place, Yuwen’s heart stages, the cafe where Frank gets his coffee, and several other one-offs. 

The efforts of Jenna and Noah are a masterclass in design and execution. For Noah's thoughts, he's a featured artist in the upcoming doc (directed by yours truly) "Meet the Pickles." That'll drop soon, along with the final episodes of the series, and he has loads to say about the process, design, and philosophy of the show. And as for Jenna, she summed up her experience and the look of the show best:

The fact that both sets and characters were built with a simple, but diverse, shape language worked in our favor and also served the fun and child-like perspectives we see in the series. I think our main philosophy was building a world that uniquely belonged to these characters, felt familiar to the audience, and was realistic for us to build on our timeline :)