Rango is an ordinary chameleon who accidentally winds up in the town of Dirt, a lawless outpost in the Wild West in desperate need of a new sheriff.
ILM took a unique approach to the animation of Rango by focusing on creating a photographic look for the world and its characters. With constant awareness of the light in each animated shot ILM was able to create a special feel for each scene appropriate to the storyline.
Being responsible for every shot from inital previs and blocking through to the final pixels in Rango was a new experience for ILM. To cope with this enormous workload ILM developed a new pipeline tailored to the needs of an animated feature. A breakthrough that stemmed from this pipeline was sequence-based lighting: a way to take a whole series of shots that share a similar lighting setup and work on them as one big group, rather than approaching each shot as its own individual project. Using their new animation pipeline ILM developed more than 90 unique characters for the film, giving each its unique quirks and emboding them with an enormous level of detail.
