The soul world
I only did a tiiiiny bit of work on the soul world. All the heavy lifting was done by other amazing artists in the department. Kyle Macnaughton spent a lot of time here and did such beautiful work... You wouldn't believe the amount of beautiful work. Here are a few of my contributions in which I tried to assemble a lot of the ideas that were being discussed. My pitch here, based on the wonderful research Dave Strick had been doing, was to sell a world that functioned with different physical visual rules. Whereas things in the real world work in a "subtractive" way, meaning incoming light is absorbed by objects, I thought it would be interesting to try to the opposite here, using an "additive" behavior. What you see is the result of light building up on top of itself without being stopped. I tried to put this to the test with this style of painting which became very technical, starting with pure black and building up the image exclusively with the addition of coloured energy. The "trees" do the opposite, removing energy like some sort of spectral shadows. I really like where this was headed, but we didn't want things to become too abstract and solemn. This was supposed to be more of a comforting, innocent nursery for baby souls, so the more "vaporous" approach you see in the film was ultimately more successful than this "spectral"one.