Norwin grad adds color, detail to the world of Pixar's upcoming 'Lightyear'

A scratch on a box. A tiny oil leak on the side of a spaceship. The telltale signs a concrete floor has seen plenty of wear and tear over time.

Those are just a few of the subliminal details 2015 Norwin High School graduate Alyssa Minko has added to the Pixar film “Lightyear” in her capacity as a set shading technical director.

“I’m responsible for color and material,” Minko said. “When a set comes to me, a modeler has sculpted everything on their computer, and it looks appealing. But it might be gray or just basic colors. And I’m the one who takes a first pass at making it look ‘real.’ ”

In “Lightyear,” Minko has done that work for the assembly room at Star Command, one of the main settings in the film.

“The floors of Star Command are metal panels, and I get to think about what kind of history these floors have gone through. How much time has passed? That might mean adding scrapes or dust or making things more matte or more shiny.”

Minko assigns a color to every object on the set and works with color properties and how materials respond to light to give it all a realistic feel.

“If it’s metallic, it should be shiny. If it’s rubber, it should be matte and maybe even a little bit translucent,” she said. “My first pass is to make sure things are accurate for the next department, which is lighting.”

Lighting directors make their first pass then send it back to Minko for some of the granular details many filmgoers take for granted.

“It’s a lot of things that you don’t necessarily notice, but subliminally it makes you think, ‘Oh, that looks like a realistic spaceship.’ Launch tubes have these dark stains on the bottom from smoke and oil and take-offs. You don’t notice it, but those are the little things that make it more real.”

In the film, titular hero Buzz Lightyear does quite a bit of time traveling, including return trips to Star Command.

“The base is getting older and older,” Minko said. “The assembly room ages over time. I’d change the number of tire tracks on the ground, or I’d make it dirtier and dustier. Maybe there’s an oil stain now, from a leak that’s been dripping out of a spacecraft for a long time.”

Minko said Pixar’s emotionally-charged 2009 film “Up” is what firmly set her sights on one day working for the animation company.

“I loved the emotional intimacy that came from watching a movie like that with your family,” she said. “I went on Pixar’s website and read that some of their artists would travel to these exotic countries and study rock formations, and they’d sketch them and take photos and then come back to Pixar to see how they could could inform the more-adventurous parts of ‘Up.’ I thought that was just the coolest thing when I was younger.”

From her start at the Pixar Undergraduate Program in 2018 to beginning work on “Lightyear” in fall 2020, Minko managed to reach her goal in less than five years — and has come a long way since she was being commissioned to create pencil-drawn family portraits in eighth grade.

“From a very young age, I’ve been inspired by the world around me. And making that connection and being able to put it into my work is a big part of what got me interested in becoming a shading artist,” she said.

“Lightyear” will premiere in theaters today.