Inside the Mind of 'Inside Out' - A behind the scenes look

Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you could take a peek inside someone’s mind and see what they were thinking, or see what was driving their emotions and thought process? In Disney’s newest movie, Inside Out, set to release on June 19th, that is exactly what you get to do. You see inside the young Riley’s mind as she navigates her way through adolescence.

About the Inside Out ‘Mind World’

I mentioned previously that I had a chance to visit Pixar Studios and take a behind the scenes look at the production process of this film. One of the people we were able to talk to was Ralph Eggleston, production designer, who told us a bit about how the Inside Out world was created.

INSIDE OUT Production Designer Ralph Eggleston. Photo by Debby Coleman. ©2015 Disney•Pixar. All Rights Reserved.

Ralph’s job is to coordinate with the director on how to visually represent the story that is being told. He is one of the first people on the job and one of the last people off. Everything from lighting, sets, costumes, characters, hair, effects, and more. It is not much different than designing a live-action film, other than design is done completely from scratch.

The big challenge on the film was to travel between the real world and the mind world and let the audience know where you are at any given time. They do this by making the mind world a much brighter place with high contrast and high saturation, while the real world has more muted colors yet is very textural with hard surfaces. After watching the film, it is very apparent that the ‘real world’ view outside of the mind is definitely much different than inside the mind.

Another thing we learned about while talking to Ralph was something called a color script. If you look at the picture below, you can see on the boards what some of this would look like. These provide a guide for lighting and staging as well as coloring.

Ronnie Del Carmen, Ralph Eggleston, Pete Docter and Albert Lozano during an Inside Out art review on January 7, 2014 at Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, Calif. (Photo by Deborah Coleman / Pixar)

According to Eggleston, Inside Out was pretty much like making two films at once. The “Mind World” of Inside Out which is inside Riley’s mind where you see all of the emotions, and the “Real World” of Inside Out where you see how the emotions help shape Riley’s actions.

Mind World: The emotions (characters) inside Riley’s mind.

Real World: The world outside of Riley’s mind.

Here is a little clip so you can see the difference between Mind World and Real World.