The Art of Ralph Breaks the Internet

[–] Jessica Julius Author

What research did you do as you prepared to tackle something as enormous and chaotic as the Internet?

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[–] Clark Spencer Producer

We met with experts in computer science, Internet gaming, cyber security.

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[–] Rich Moore Director

Most of us think about the Internet in a very simplistic, almost magical way. But our research showed us that it’s all hardware. The Internet really is just series of tubes—wires, boxes, giant cables under the sea. And huge rooms with row upon row of servers.

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[–] Matthias Lechner Art Director, Environments

We were surprised at how chaotic the physical Internet is. You could see how it had grown over time. Some wires were neatly bundled together, others were a deeply tangled mess layered with years of dust.

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[–] Jessica Julius Author

How did your research inform your design of the Internet?

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[–] Rich Moore Director

Before seeing One Wilshire, we had a very naïve idea of what the Internet was. After seeing it, we went from almost magical thinking to being super literal. In the end, we wanted Ralph and Vanellope to enter a new universe that’s exciting and entertaining, so we combined the reality of our research with the artists’ fun and fantastical ideas.

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[–] Jim Martin Visual Development Artist

We tried to capture what it would be like if you could really travel to the Internet. We looked at maps of the Internet showing machines linked to different hubs around the world and thought it looked like a planet filled with connected cities alive with color, motion, and light. It depicted how the Internet truly is global, so we decided to design it that way.

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[–] Matthias Lechner Art Director, Environments

We designed our version of the Internet literally from the top down. As you approach it from above, it resembles patterns you would find on a motherboard, with a grid of rectangular platforms and repetitive shapes connected by paths that turn in 45-degree angles. But as you descend, it becomes a three-dimensional bustling cityscape with tall website-buildings connected by energy-roads on multiple levels. And this is just the surface level floating above the industrial structures of the endless deep web beneath it.

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[–] Cory Loftis Production Designer

We used a shape language based on modern smartphones and apps—a square with rounded corners, and a clean, crisp atmosphere with bright white light and blue shadows.

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THE HUB

Cory Loftis, Production Designer

The HUB is the portal to the Internet, where users, email, and data arrive and are then transported elsewhere to sites, apps, and games. It’s also the central depot for heavy freight like ZIP files and large media files.

Matthias Lechner, Art Director, Environments

Users arrive at the HUB as data packages via fiber-optic cables. They are filtered through a prism that splits the flow of data into different colors, and each of those colors goes to a different site. We were inspired by color-coded guiding systems at airports.

Cory Loftis, Production Designer

The first place Ralph and Vanellope visit in the Internet is the HUB. They’re in the Internet but not yet at a website. It’s like arriving at an ultra-modern airport. To go to a website, they have to get down to the ground transportation level, where they can catch a ride to somewhere else.

Cory Loftis, Production Designer

From the HUB, Vanellope quickly intuits how the Internet works—she sees emails loaded into mail delivery trucks, data packets being compressed and sent off, and users jumping into linkcars to go to other websites.

POPULATING THE INTERNET

[–] Jessica Julius Author

How did you decide what characters would populate the Internet?

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[–] Ami Thompson Art Director, Characters

We needed to depict the workings of the Internet, so we created two basic types of beings to represent its constant busyness: users and netizens.

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[–] Cory Loftis Production Designer

Users are the digital versions of us, our avatars when we’re on the Internet. Browsing websites, clicking links, sending emails, doing on the Internet whatever humans tell them to do. Netizens on the other hand are autonomous. We humans don’t actually see them but we feel them when we visit a website. They’re the ones emptying the recycling bin, delivering email, the HTML workers constructing new websites. They’re doing all the things that keep the Internet working.

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BUILDING THE WEB

[–] Jessica Julius Author

How did you approach the design of the websites themselves?

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[–] Cory Loftis Production Designer

The challenging part was trying to design the feeling you have when you visit a website, not the reality of it. For example, at Amazon when you select an item to buy, a real person at a physical warehouse somewhere puts that item in a box and ships it to you. But shopping online feels like a private shopping experience, so that’s what the website depicted in the film looks like.

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[–] Matthias Lechner Art Director, Environments

We thought of the individual websites as buildings within a city. The interior of each building has a style, shape language, and color palette unique to that website. Scale is based on user traffic, so some buildings are much larger than others. High-traffic sites have many roads connecting to them and they stand out on the horizon. Midsize sites, which comprise most of the Internet, are densely packed, with congested roads. Small sites are isolated, usually with only one small road leading to them.

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VISUAL NOISE

[–] Jessica Julius Author

One of the biggest creative and technical challenges of this film is how many screens there are. How did you tackle that?

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[–] Ami Thompson Art Director, Characters

The environment had to look like a big city filled with all kinds of signs, videos, advertisements, and graphics.

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[–] Ernest Petti Technical Supervisor

We’ve depicted screens in films before but never this many. And they’re all different sizes and shapes, all showing different video or images.

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[–] Cory Loftis Production Designer

Artists from different departments created every meme, gif, video, and image. Since we’re trying to recreate the Internet, we didn’t put too many rules on what they could do. It was whatever came out of the artists’ heads.

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[–] Nick Orsi Visual Development Artist

There’s a little bit of everything in there: clips from Disney movies, caricatures of each other, graffitied puns in computer code. There are so many background jokes and visual gags in there. And, of course, cat videos.

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Ernest Petti, Technical Supervisor

The Internet holds an overwhelming amount of stuff—it’s filled with people, data, traffic—and we had to show that on-screen. The number of crowd characters in other films peaks at around five or six thousand. A single test shot in this film had 50,000 crowd characters.

Nathan Warner, Director of Cinematography, Layout

Internet videos are often recorded with smartphone cameras, which have a different motion and orientation than a film camera. They feel handheld, twitchy, vertical. Characters often break frame and the person filming overcorrects and has to come back. Everyone knows what a phone camera feels like because we see it every day, but it’s difficult to recreate that style deliberately.

Ami Thompson, Art Director, Characters

Cats are such a big thing on the Internet, so to provide a variety of design choices we created a basic cat design we could modify for various needs—long hair, short hair, fat, skinny. Mochi, the cat from Big Hero 6, appears.

Cory Loftis, Production Designer

In addition to the smaller signage, there are larger animated holograms that move down streets or between websites. The lighting team helped find the right balance between signs and buildings.

GETTING AROUND

[–] Jessica Julius Author

How do users and netizens move around the Internet?

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[–] Matthias Lechner Art Director, Environments

The roads are light bands that turn at 45-degree angles so they’re reminiscent of a motherboard. Little cars attach to the light bands like electrons—these are the linkcars.

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[–] Cory Loftis Production Designer

A user hops in a linkcar to travel from website to website. Linkcars are self-driving and carry the user straight to wherever she wants to go. They travel at different speeds, so if you’re still on DSL your linkcar goes slower than those on fiber-optic lines.

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[–] Matthias Lechner Art Director, Environments

Netizens’ vehicles represent the sites they’re from, the jobs they do. There are postal vans for delivering emails, a garbage truck for junk mail.

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[–] Mike Yamada Visual Development Artist

We created Internet versions of easily recognizable vehicles from the real world so that audiences could quickly process them and enjoy the joke.

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