How the cameramen of Inside Out 2 staged Riley’s anxiety attack

SPOILER WARNING: This story reveals important Spoilers for “Inside Out 2,” in theaters now.

In Inside Out 2, Riley enters puberty. Her five basic emotions – joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust – are joined by boredom, embarrassment, envy and fear.

Teenager Riley is spending the weekend at a hockey camp when his emotions hit the hardest. Before an important game, Riley is determined to impress the hockey coach and get on the varsity team. The dominant emotions are fear, jealousy and embarrassment. The other emotions have been pushed to the back of Riley’s mind and have become repressed emotions.

Meanwhile, Riley is under enormous pressure when she is put in a time-out box, where she begins to suffer a panic attack.

But how would this be reflected visually in the story?

Cameramen Jonathan Pytko and Adam Habib sat down together for diversity‘s Artisans Inside the Frame and discussed how they got inside Riley’s head for this sequence. “We wanted to show an image that was compelling. It’s not just something you want to throw away,” Pytko said.

Even though Riley and her emotions are fantastic characters, they needed to be grounded.

The cinematography of Inside Out 2 was no different from that of a live-action film. “We try to approach cinematography from the physical principles of light and camera. In the human world, we try to recreate a cinematic world. We use cinematic cameras. As far as lighting goes, we try to approach it from a very physical standpoint, complete with flare and grain, and try to give the human world a real cinematic look, and we contrast that a little bit with the heads as well,” Pytko explained.

During Riley’s panic attack, Anxiety on the console escalates into madness. Habib explained: “We started doing a lot of things, like reducing the shutter angle. Suddenly everything is much sharper. The concentration became much deeper as the game went on and Riley put more and more pressure on herself. When the panic attack hits, we suddenly turn almost everything upside down.”

The focus becomes extremely superficial and the world around you disappears.

While Riley’s panic attack becomes more severe and Anxiety becomes beside herself, Pytko and Habib discuss the idea of ​​making the background vibrate.

“We refined the lighting of the image quite a bit and then added that element,” Pytko explained. “It felt like the images were really going in this beautiful direction, with this flare, a lot of depth of field coming into the camera. We really overexposed the light and flooded that light around Riley as she goes through that moment. And then adding that element really brought across what was happening.”

The more anxious she became, the stronger this overexposure became. But as the panic attack subsides, she becomes calmer and gentler and the warmer she becomes.

“We start changing the color from a cooler to a warmer tone to bring the joy back into the frame,” Pytko said.

Color was an important factor in decoding fear.

Pytko noted that in the final hockey game, the colors were initially dull and somber to reflect the pressure Riley has put on herself. She’s at a point where she needs to score. “On the hockey field, she also wears an orange jersey and we worked with the art department to find ways to bring some emotional colors into Riley’s environment to tie the two things together,” he said.

But in the headquarters, Pytko says, the console is so consumed by fear. “We removed all the other lights and let the orange console take up the entire space of the headquarters. We wanted this to be the moment when the audience knows we’re in the headquarters. We made a connection to the original film. Now we can use new visuals and explore the space in more detail. And by highlighting the orange, it became something completely different.”

The back of my mind was now a deep purple, murky space.

To keep the world grounded, the cinematographers did camera tests to make sure what was shown on screen looked realistic. Habib said: “The mind world lenses have a lot less distortion, a lot less character, they’re a lot flatter – they’re like an ultra prime lens. And the human world is anamorphic, and so there’s a lot more barrel distortion.”

Habib wanted to use a visual reference, so he turned to Olivia Wilde’s Booksmart. “It was a comedy set in a high school and it was anamorphic. I showed the team the sets and said, ‘Hey, look, the barrel distortion is pretty severe, and yet the audience laughed and didn’t run out of the theater screaming.'”

Watch the video above.