Lights, Camera, Action: The Cinematography of ‘My Little Pony: The Movie’

‘My Little Pony: The Movie’ © 2017. All images courtesy of Hasbro/Lionsgate.

In theaters this Friday, My Little Pony: The Movie is the animated musical fantasy film MLP fans from all around the world have been waiting for. Based on the television series My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which was developed as part of the 2010 re-launch of the My Little Pony franchise by Hasbro, the film is directed by Jayson Thiessen and based on a story and screenplay co-written by Meghan McCarthy, both Friendship Is Magic veterans.

My Little Pony: The Movie follows the “Mane 6” --  Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy and Rarity -- as they embark on an epic journey to save Ponyville from a dark force. In addition to the series’ regular voice cast of Tara Strong, Ashleigh Ball, Andrea Libman, Tabitha St. Germain and Cathy Weseluck, the film also features guest performances by Emily Blunt, Kristin Chenoweth, Liev Schreiber, Michael Peña, Sia, Taye Diggs, Uzo Aduba and Zoe Saldana.

Brought to life using hybrid 2D/3D pipeline employing Toon Boom Harmony and Autodesk Maya, My Little Pony: The Movie is produced by Allspark Pictures and DHX Media. It premiered in New York City on September 24, and arrives in the United States and Canada on October 6 from Lionsgate.

DP, animator and previsualization artist Anthony Di Ninno recently served as the cinematographer on My Little Pony: The Movie. He has uplifted a plethora of award-winning projects, including Life of Pi, which took home the Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects in 2013, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which received a nomination in the same category the previous year. Di Ninno is currently working on his 23rd feature film, The Ark and the Aardvark, as the cinematographer.

-- IMAGE GALLERY: The Cinematography of ‘My Little Pony: The Movie’ --

Di Ninno is no stranger to Hollywood, having worked with directors such as Zack Snyder and Gareth Edwards, and studios including Sony Pictures Imageworks, The Moving Picture Company, Aardman Animation and Pixel Liberation Front, in addition to Hasbro and DHX Media. Other credits include work on Warner Bros.’ Godzilla and Man of Steel, Disney’s The Lone Ranger, Universal’s Fast Five, and Columbia Pictures’ Sausage Party.

In the burgeoning field of cinematography for animation, Di Ninno is a pioneer, crafting a language of photography for his projects by balancing creative vision with technologies that he develops. He uses camera moves, staging, light and shadow to support the characters, the emotional intent, and the story arc of a film. These elements help create intent and motivation that carries through the entire production process, and ultimately elevates the visuals of the final product.

AWN spoke with Di Ninno about his work on My Little Pony: The Movie, delving into virtual cameras and staging, the advantages of a hybrid 2D/3D pipeline, and the differences between cinematography for animation versus live-action. Read the full Q&A below:

How is cinematography for animation different than for live-action?

Creatively, the jobs are very similar. Just as in live-action, the director/cinematographer relationship varies depending on the project and on which particular strengths each director brings to the table. In animation, because of the nature of the process, there will be are a few other key people whose jobs bleed into each other’s to varying degrees on each different project. On MLP: The Movie I was responsible for the language of the camera and staging the movie. Lighting design on the film was very much a collaboration between myself, the art director, Rebecca Dart, and the compositing supervisor, Marc Fortin.

Technically, we obviously use very different tools to create the same intent. What is very different in animation is that the process happens over a much longer period of time. Take a single frame of footage in live-action as an example. Think about everything that is captured and preserved in 1/50th of a second on set. How you have framed your subject, the actor’s eyeline, your lighting, your staging, etc. In animation you take that 1/50th of a second and expand that moment into two years or longer. Within that time, dozens of artists need to then work on that shot, and if I have not communicated my intent very clearly, and I am not there to maintain it, then those artists have the ability to change that intent.

From L to R: Anthony Di Ninno, Director of Photography; Patrick Nash, Camera and Staging Artist; and Jordan Vanderzalm, Camera and Staging Lead.

For example, an animator can change the eyeline, or they can block out a very broad action requiring you to change your framing from a close up to a medium shot, thus changing the language of the scene. A lighting artist can light an area of the frame you had intended to keep in shadow, or out of focus. The job of a cinematographer in animation is to create intent and then shepherd that intent through all of these different departments to make sure the integrity of the cinematic vision is not compromised, but that it is only built upon as it reaches each new artist in the pipeline.

This is a crucial point for filmmakers, such as myself, who are interested in working on animated features that do not have gigantic production budgets because the very fundamentals of what the medium is means that anything is possible, but absolutely nothing is free. Everything has to be created, by hand, from nothing. So if you are not very clear on your vision for any given scene in the film then a lot of the time, and as a result, a lot of money will be wasted.

How do virtual cameras emulate real-world cameras?

This will depend on the medium. In full 3D environments, the sets and cameras are meant to do just that -- emulate real-world cameras. The environments are built to real-world scale, then I choose my film back dimensions and I choose a lens pack that I want to work with. Through those three parameters you will get optics that work within the virtual environment the same as you would in the real-world.

In a 2D environment, the optics of the scene are not rendered by the computer but rather drawn by hand. For this production we wanted to create a new pipeline that sat somewhere between that of a 2D and 3D animated feature. We didn’t have a long production schedule so we had to figure out a workflow in which I would be able to compose and stage the movie quickly, while trying to achieve a number of different things.

First and foremost I needed to find a way to be very clear on the intent of each shot. That meant my camera team and I needed to choose the camera angles, the camera lens, the composition, animate the camera and set the characters eyelines, and I needed to be able to communicate those choices to the crew clearly. So, after diving into the different software packages we were able to develop a hybrid 2D/3D pipeline which allowed me to achieve that by prevising the majority of the movie in a 3D environment.

How do you make lens choices with a virtual camera?

Character is the driving force behind every camera decision. The character in each shot is not just the literal character that is on screen, it is every aspect of the rectangle. My lens choices need to support the emotional intent of the scene. What are we trying to achieve?

Is focus an issue when working with virtual cameras?

Focus is less of a technical issue with virtual cameras than it is with real-world cameras. Out of the box everything is in focus, so focus becomes a purely creative choice from there.

How is lighting accomplished?

Again, this depends on the medium. On MLP the lighting was a combination of it being painted into the backgrounds by the BG artists and the compositing artists fitting the characters into that environment.

Is working with scale an issue on an animated production?

In animation, staging characters together often takes on the additional challenge of exaggerated proportion. How does a three-inch-tall mouse relate to a 10-foot-tall elephant? Blocking a scene often requires a lot of exploration simply to fit characters into the frame together.

Does working with virtual cameras make it easier or more difficult to create different looks within a single project?

It’s all about visual intent; what is the artist trying to achieve? There is nothing physical holding you back in a virtual environment, which is both a blessing and a curse. What language are you trying to create with the camera? How do you want different parts of the film to contrast? Think about the language you want to achieve and then build yourself a box to work in. Sometimes that box is creative, or it could be a note given by an executive, or sometimes it’s about resources, time and money. Either way, you need to find a way of making working within the box a creative advantage, sometimes the shark doesn’t work, find a way.

On which technologies do you rely the most?

When it comes down to it, working on an animated feature is all artist-driven technology. Again, nothing actually exists, it’s all created. For this movie the camera, staging and camera polish were done in Autodesk Maya and Toon Boom Harmony. 3D environments were built in Maya. The 2D build artists, character and FX animators on the movie worked in Harmony. The comp team worked with Harmony and Adobe After Effects and the BG paint was done in Photoshop.

When did you join the production, and how did that come to be?

I joined the production of this movie in January of 2015. Shortly before that I was contacted by the producer, Marcia Jones, about coming to work on the movie. I had worked with Marcia before and she was looking for a few key people to come onboard to really differentiate the movie, visually, from the TV series. She wanted me to meet with the director, Jayson Thiessen, and hear about the movie. At the time, the decision to use some 3D environments in the movie had already been made and they were in the process of doing some 2D and 3D tests for the movie. So, I met with Jayson, we connected on the way we approach material and the rest is history. Jayson put an incredible amount of trust in me on this movie and it’s something I am very grateful for.

Please briefly describe your primary duties for the film. For instance, how involved were you in the layout process?

In addition to what we have already discussed about my process, another thing that prevising this movie in 3D allowed us to do was use our 3D previs files as the basis for our 2D layouts. It allowed for a large amount of freedom in creating the camera angles we used and also allowed me to get the language of the camera lens into the artwork.

I’ve worked with our Layout Supervisor, John Hill, many times before, so we were very familiar with how each other works. John would take our 3D files, analyze the movement of the shot, decided how many pieces of 2D artwork we would need to be able to recreate the shot in our 2D environment. He would then break out the 3D shot into layers for his layout artists to be able to draw over for scale and perspective. Then the layout artists would go in and draw all the incredible detail you see in the final art. These pieces of 2D art were then used to setup the scenes in harmony, in a 2.5D environment. We would recreate the camera moves, place the 2D characters and get the scenes ready for animation.

Another benefit of this hybrid pipeline was that we did have a number of full 3D environments in the movie, so our camera work within those environments could be directly rendered and used in the film. A pretty incredible part of our workflow was that our CG Supervisor, Masaki Jeffery, and our technical director, Diego Stoliar were able to create a pipeline in which we could transfer our 3D environments and cameras between Maya (our 3D software) and Harmony (our 2D software). So our 2D character animators could work with the 3D geometry and camera moves inside of Harmony if they needed to.

During animation my responsibilities included working with our animation director, Nadine Westerbarkey, to make sure the framing and character eyelines in each shot were maintained while the animators worked to craft the performances. After the character animation was done, the shots then moved into an additional stage of camera work where we would polish any camera moves and fine-tune the composition. After camera polish, it was about working with FX to maintain the composition, and then working with compositing to figure out the lighting and DOF. After all the shots left composition we moved onto the DI house where we worked on the final color grade of the film. The director, art director, and I worked with our final colorist, Thor Roos, to deliver the final look of the movie.

What sort of materials were used as references for the film? Was there any reference material specific to cameras, staging and lighting?

At the beginning of any project you always kind of gorge yourself on reference. For this movie, being a musical, we looked at a lot of those. We wanted each song to have a different feel. We looked at a lot of Busby Berkeley sequences as reference for the sea pony song, Capper’s song was more Bob Fosse inspired in the staging and lighting and so on.

How does the cinematography help support the story of My Little Pony: The Movie in terms of staging and framing?

Let’s use one of the key scenes in the movie as an example. There is a scene where Pinkie and Twilight argue on a beach, it’s a huge emotional turning point in the film. Initially that scene was storyboarded to include a lot more of the other characters throughout the scene but as we started staging that scene we ended up removing more and more characters so that we could really focus on the rising tension between the two characters. Compositionally, we wanted to create an arc that would divide the characters more and more, with additional characters dropping away throughout. As tensions rise we compress the space and focus more singularly on Pinkie and Twilight standing alone in frame, and we move more and more onto their eyelines until the breaking point, when we then go wider and bring the other characters back in. It’s not something the audience is going to necessarily notice, but they should feel it.

What are some of your favorite camera moves overall? Are there any films in particular that showcase these moves?

If you are talking about the technical quality of a move -- dolly or crane for example, then I have no favorite camera moves. A camera move devoid of context really means nothing to me. I can think of films in which there are scenes that I think are great. This might be insane to talk about in an interview about My Little Pony but, OK, The Silence of the Lambs. I’m a huge nerd for eyelines; I can talk eyelines all day, and there really is no better example of how effective a static camera and the perfect eyeline can be than that movie. More than any camera move, I focus on eyelines. Even though two characters in any given scene may be talking to each other, they are only ever communicating to the camera. How you choose to relate that in your camera placement is one of the most visceral choices you can make.

And what are some of your favorite parts of your work on this film?

I loved working on Tempest’s song. She is one of my favorite characters in the movie and that is my favorite song in the movie. To say that animation is a collaborative medium is a huge understatement but that scene is a particularly great example of so many different artists coming together and making a scene work. It came out of boards in a very emotionally strong place, we build off of it from there in camera and staging and it just kept getting stronger and stronger through each step of the process.

Animation, environments, and comp all did an incredible job. I remember the first time we got back Emily Blunt’s voice record, and all of sudden that character really came to life for me; I was blown away. She gives a great vocal performance that matched the character so flawlessly that it became impossible to imagine any other actor in that role. That scene is a standout for me.

There was also the challenge of how to open the movie. We wanted to find a way to immediately, visually, set the movie apart from the TV show. The opening shot of the movie was probably the most technically difficult shot we did. It’s a one shot that begins with a spark that ignites the logo of the movie in the stars, the camera then falls from the sky and follows a group of Pegasus through the clouds and continues across the land and right into Canterlot where we find Spike. It was the very first thing I ever planned and proposed on the movie and the very last shot that was completed on the film. A lot of artists worked very hard on the that shot, and did an incredible job, but in particular our compositing supervisor went above and beyond and really made that shot sing. I’m very happy with how it turned out.

Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.