Disney's secrets to creating living volcano Te Ká in 'Moana'

Gotta go through a whole notion of bad. Ever defeat a lava monster? No. Have you? Okay. Talk to the bad guy. If you seen [UNKNOWN], [UNKNOWN] has an emotional range of anger somewhere. On a scale of one to ten, Take our fall somewhere between like an 8.5 and a 12, like all the time. So we have these things at our fingertips to kind of help, support how angry take all us at any given time. We've got fire coming from our head, we've got lava drips, we've got splashes, we've got lightning. Very often volcanoes have their own little micro climates. So all these little queues also Let us know how complicated or angry to. Cuz they're also kind of roots the character to what people have experience when they see volcanoes. Hopefully not to a close. [LAUGH] So just wanna attach will take this same shot apart, break it down and you can see all the different levels that we have. And this shot all the lava, the drips, the lightning, water. Foundation effects were also very helpful in making shots that were very complicated; Little more durable. So you can see this water splashes where the lava hits the ocean and their steam coming up. These are foundation effects. These were Effect that we did early on that the effect animator could then place this as a soft fit throughout throughout this shot.>> For generations. Fifty full islands had been home to our families. But beyond our reach a great danger would come.>>Again with the foundation effects this is what the K cachet would look like They are often coming into our department. What looks like a pixel eight bit animation here is unrendered foundation effects of plooms of smoke. And the layout artist could place these. The character animator, she could place them around to try to compose around Ta-Ka And this will very often, we would start off with. Now here's the same shot with effects specific for the shot. All the lava coming off, got [UNKNOWN] hair coming on, flaming hair coming on for the first time. And this is what the rendered foundation effects, along with the effects specific for this shot all kind of look like Now I also heard that you guys use tools and learned about even some of the engines from Frozen were kind of adopted and applied to this, can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, so Dale and I worked on Frozen together as the heads of [UNKNOWN] on that, so just like we did splash for this film, we created a tool called [UNKNOWN] to do Snow. And we did a lot of the sand from [UNKNOWN] with that same tool. And we didn't use it so much on the lab but we really developed it quite a bit, to various thicknesses of larva. Take out in the final trying to do some, does not have, does not super crunchy lava or anything like that. So we didn't need it as much but it's really great sometimes. With splash for this film. Matterhorn for Frozen. The Matterhorn is used to do ice cream in Zootopia too. So we create these tools and they're sharable across all the shows. They all kind of live on. [SOUND] Moana. That goes your back. It's [UNKNOWN] time. This shot is kinda special to my heart because this was actually the first shot that we did [UNKNOWN] all the way to [UNKNOWN] nation. And when we all saw this, we all agreed the collective sigh of relief, yet. After more than a year of actually exploration and development That we were actually gonna be able to get this character on screen. [MUSIC] We're going to the realm of monsters? Don't worry, it's a lot further down than it looks. Wahoo. I am still falling.