Andrew Stanton wanted WALL•E to emulate the great sci-fi classics that he adored from the late '60s and '70s, but Pixar wasn't set up to create a live-action look. All images © Disney•Pixar.

From the very beginning, Andrew Stanton wanted to make WALL•E (opening today from Disney•Pixar) in the great tradition of sci-fi classics that he adored from the late '60s and '70s. Trouble is, despite Pixar's pedigree, it wasn't set up to make animation emulate the live-action look (rack focus, barrel distortion and certain ovals of light), and so it's probably just as well that this sweet Robinson Crusoe-like space tale was put off as long as it was. Then there was the additional challenge of pulling off an improbable love story between two futuristic bots, with minimal dialogue. But then Pixar has always embraced "reaching for the stars."

Jeremy Lasky, DP camera, who worked in close collaboration with Danielle Feinberg, DP lighting, was eager to break new ground at Pixar. "At the very beginning of preproduction, when I came on, Andrew had a lot of preconceptions of what he wanted for a film without traditional dialogue. All of the staging, all of the shots have to be really clear for the audience to understand the backstory in addition to the main plot of the film. The planet's covered in trash: What happened? So we had to convey it visually. As always, the first pressure is just telling the story right. Only in this case, there's no dialogue crutch.

"So the question became: How can we make this work? Shots have to be so specific that you're always following what's going on. On top of that, Andrew said, 'I want it to feel real.' He wasn't talking about photoreal, but that you believe you're watching a little robot doing what he's doing. To me, that triggered the notion that we have to raise our game a little.

"We have this virtual camera that we've used with variations of the same camera package for years, but we've never pushed it to be more like a live-action camera. So we took it apart and rebuilt it from the ground up to emulate the way a 35mm anamorphic camera would move: how it pivots, where it tilts from, how it works on a dolly. We based it on the concept of how you would shoot a sci-fi movie today with anamorphic lenses.

Because there is minimal dialogue in the film, all of the staging and shots had to be really clear for the audience to understand the backstory in addition to the main plot of the film.

"We rented some equipment and used the live-action DP [Marty Rosenberg] who eventually shot some of the live-action elements. He helped us do some lens tests. Our depth of field, our cameras never look as we expect them to. The focus always feels very deep in our films and we've always been told the math is right by the guys that wrote the software, who claim our depth of field maps are correct and that calculating everything should be fine."

But the filmmakers said it instinctively just didn't look right. So they made a cardboard WALL•E and a foam EVE and shot "wedge tests" with different anamorphic lenses.

"We used a spherical lens as a kind of control to look at depth of field and barrel distortion and the optical breathing you get when you rack from things really close to really far away," Lasky continues. "It gave us a chance to have something tangible. We used an Arriflex camera with Panavision lenses. We looked at lens flares and how to focus lights in the background. There's that shot in the truck [his home] when EVE's looking at the lighter for the first time from WALL•E's POV and you see the bokeh stretched in the background. And this is the kind of thing we discovered doing those tests."