During a trip to San Fransisco to visit Pixar studios, we had a sit down with the set designers of Incredibles 2, including Ralph Eggleston, who is the Production Designer on the film.
So much production had to be crammed into a short period of time on Incredibles 2, a Disney*Pixar film that only took 4 years to create.
Incredibles 2 picks up right where the original film finishes off with the Underminer attacking Municiberg. It’s a perfect jumping off point for the movie, even 14 years later. I love and appreciate that nobody has aged, nothing has changed. It’s a family that doesn’t really know what life is going to look like now that they’ve publicly showed themselves as Supers.
Nobody knows their real identities, though. It’s just known that Supers do still exist.
Despite the fact that the creators had a basis for the film, there was a lot of work that needed to be done on the movie, including creating an all new home for the Parr family to live in.
Production Designers and Art Designers create the whole world inside the film. The set is as much a character in the film as the human characters themselves. They decided on setting this film in the early sixties, around 1962 or so, so the clothing , sets, textures, cars, etc. all had to match that time period.
Inspiration for the film was Midcentury Mundane.
Not the really cool buildings, which we would also have, but the boring buildings between the cool buildings.
The world of the Incredibles is not about small details, but about big and medium.
The hotel the Parrs wind up staying in before they move into their fabulous new dream home, reminds me of the motels we’ve all seen rundown on the side of a cracked highway. It’s a motel that is in its current heyday in the movie, but that we all have a certain emotional, nostalgic connection with, even if we’ve never stayed in this type of hotel.
When they moved on to creating the house the Parrs move into which is like my absolute dream home, the designers originally wanted to make it look like an arrow, but it had too much of a 40’s vibe. They eventually settled in on a home set in the side of a mountain that looks like a paper airplane and was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright.
They tried to bring the outside indoors like designers did in the 5os by bringing water and plant features into the home. The developers visited and toured 30 different homes in Palm Springs, CA for inspiration.
These talented artists are like builders but their medium are pixels instead of concrete, wood, and brick. Everything happens from the ground up. They spent 6 months building the original home for this film, but a story change necessitated they scrap that house and start fresh.
Imagine building a house then having to bulldoze it and replace it with a completely new, fascinating home in only two to three weeks.
That’s what they had to do with the Parr home for Incredibles 2.
The PreVis team does the rough sketches for the whole film. They allow the rest of the people working on the film to get everyone on the same page so to speak. They build quick models for everyone to have something to react to after storyboarding is done.
The Elasticycle
Helen Parr takes on a bit of a different role than we’re used to her having in Incredibles 2, and she has a new mode of transportation called The Elasticycle.
The creators had to find believable ways for the Elasticycle to move with Helen’s Super abilities and in ways that a normal motorcycle wouldn’t be able to move. This presented many challenges, but the creators finally designed a bike that is so dope. Helen looks like a complete bada$$ on this cycle. She is able to use it to control a runaway train *and* evade police. I can’t wait to see more of the Elasticycle in the movie.
[…] The truth is, the film is set in the 60s-ish. […]