The web site for Animation World Magazine has an interview that they did with Andrew Stanton, the director for Disney/Pixar's upcoming movie WALL-E. The movie opens on June 27th.

In the interview, Stanton related some of their experiences with making the movie, and how they approached the making of the movie to make it more realistic from the perspective of how film cameras capture scenes, and replicating that effect in the digital realm. He is quoted as saying,

"We actually hired Roger Deakins, the famous cinematographer [No Country for Old Men], to give us a crash course in cinematography and then liked him so much that we asked him to stay for another week or two because what we do is so foreign in our approach. We just want to get to the same result. And it happened to coincide with us deciding that we were going to rent actual Arriflex cameras and 70mm [film] and shoot a stand-in WALL•E, three-dimensional with a grid, in the Atrium here and do all the things that we wanted the camera to do -- lens flare and all that stuff. And then we would make a virtual set of exactly the same thing in our computer and compare and prove that they didn't match. And that's all our computer engineers needed to see to get challenged and frustrated and start to fix things. And so we've been able to now play a much more accurate grammar of what we've all unconsciously been used to seeing in a lot of our favorite sci-fi films."

I found the article fascinating to read, and it makes me want to see the movie even more than before. It also sets my expectations that this may not be a knock-out hit of Ratatouille and Toy Story proportions, but it should be enjoyable nonetheless. Pixar has always succeeded in telling wonderful stories, and then backing them up with incredible animation and sound design, which is an approach that many live-action filmmakers would do well to follow (and too few do).

Click the Read link below to read the full article.