‘Lightyear’ designer impresses with Pixar Easter Egg and inspires NASA

“Lightyear” by Pixar, an origin story based on beloved astronaut Buzz Lightyear fromToy Story,” the series takes to new galaxies with a fleet of NASA-inspired spaceships. Chris Evans plays Buzz, a human astronaut who inspired Andy’s favorite toy in the movie set years before the events of the first “Toy Story.” Buzz is in theaters June 17, as he travels through time and space as he sets out on his first mission from Star Command – the peacekeeping organization made up of Space Rangers.

Head coach Greg Peltz spoke with diverse As Pixar unveiled a new trailer for the animated movie, it explained that the idea was to draw from the movies and keep the work that had been put in before, but he also wanted to create a more specific look for that movie. “Our films are very much inspired by technology and our childhood films of the 70s and 80s,” says Peltz, citing “2001: A Space Odyssey” and even “Interstellar” as inspiration.

The idea was that the movie would be one that Andy saw as a child. “It’s like his Star Wars. I didn’t get to see it in theaters, but it was still a big movie to me when I was growing up because it was so huge,” Peltz says. He thought it would be “funny to make something like a love letter to that era of filmmaking, in this age of technology.”

Peltz worked with production designer Tim Evatt and cinematographer Jeremy Lasky as he designed ships and vehicles with distinctive silhouettes that would record as brilliant and cinematic. “We also wanted to achieve a level of detail that would allow those lighters to perceive those images. When you do exciting lighting like that, you need that level of precision and realism in working with it to create these amazing images.”

In designing Star Command, Peltz began by looking at the purpose of the planet. “Stranded on this planet, they have all this equipment aboard their colony ship, they’re trying to leave the planet, and Buzz is on this mission to discover the formula for hypersonic fuel. Ultimately, Star Command becomes an enterprise but it has a scientific and military side to it.”

To build it, Peltz worked on adding hangars for ships, perimeter walls to defend themselves from insects, silos for launching ships from, as well as an assembly room. But not before looking at their real-world counterparts. “We looked at the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA, that huge structure where they build giant space rockets,” he says.

Details were important to Peltz’s design – he wanted a mechanical reality for Star Command’s aesthetics. “Take the car crawler, it’s a railroad car and it has these giant clamps that grab it and hold it in place. When you’re ready to go, steam comes off of it, and you see these moving parts,” he explains. This level of detail was essential in enhancing this level of reality for the film.

And while Peltz teases that all of the Pixar Easter eggs appear in the movie, the thing to give him is where the famous Luxo lamp was discovered. “During the first mission, look at the stars in the sky. In one shot as the ship leaves orbit, look at the constellations—you might see a silhouette of a Luxo lamp there.”