In Elio, production design and visual effects aren’t just technical tools, they’re essential to storytelling. While character design conveys emotion, it’s the sets and lighting that shape the world around which helps create a believable and immersive atmosphere that deepens the audience’s emotional connection with the characters they see.

Elio follows an imaginative 11-year-old boy obsessed with space and dreaming of alien contact. Inspired by director Adrian Molina’s childhood on an Air Force base, the film grounds its sci-fi premise in a relatable story about feeling out of place and longing to connect. When Elio’s dream unexpectedly comes true, he’s mistakenly whisked away to the Communiverse — an intergalactic council of alien species — and declared Earth’s ambassador. Thrust into a world of eccentric aliens and unfamiliar responsibilities, Elio must navigate new challenges while discovering what it truly means to belong.

Bringing this emotionally resonant and visually ambitious story to life required a deep collaboration between departments at Pixar.

During a visit to Pixar Animation Studios in Emeryville, CA, we got a behind-the-scenes look at how their College Project was the creative collaborative model for shaping both the grounded world of Elio and his Aunt Olga and the fantastical alien realm of the Communiverse. We also saw how cutting-edge VR tools helped artists build immersive environments that feel both otherworldly and emotionally grounded.

VR technology was one of the most impactful tools used in crafting Elio’s immersive settings. Set Supervisor David Luoh explained that VR allowed artists and filmmakers to “be in there all together,” even when working remotely. They could construct environments such as Olga’s modest home, the overcast beaches of Earth, and the dazzling expanse of the Communiverse. The sets crew could even adjust lightning placement and scale aliens to ensure their silhouettes and emotional presence felt authentic and visually compelling.

“A lot of it depends on the preference of either the director of photography or the director making the decisions,” Luoh said about VR technology vs using a virtual camera. “Moving an iPad around in physical space can be way more intuitive for some people than trying to grab a virtual thing in VR.”

As Elio’s emotional journey unfolds across two contrasting worlds, lighting and set design play a crucial role in expressing his inner state. Earth’s muted tones, stark architecture, and overcast skies create a sense of confinement and isolation, mirroring Elio’s feelings of not fitting in.

“The Earth sets were rooted in stark, fruitless architecture,” Luoh said, pointing to the Air Force base and Olga’s modest home. “Even the natural elements we see on Earth provide this unwelcoming feeling for Elio.”

In contrast, the Commuverse bursts with radiant color and visual wonder. In this place, bioluminescent landscapes, coral-inspired structures, and origami-like geometry evoke the sense of boundless possibility that Elio longs for.

“We looked to harness lighting keys to show us what parts of the set might be glowing, twinkling, or catching light in a certain way.” Lighting artist Ernesto Nemisio agreed, noting how set elements often sparked new ideas for illumination.

“There are things I’m doing in a painting where I need specific lights, and David would suggest new ones,” Nemisio said. “We were always inspiring each other and adding things like twinkling stars, fluorescent glows, and soft bioluminescence that made the Commuverse feel like a living, breathing organism.”

Lighting and set design play a crucial role in grounding Elio’s emotions and atmosphere, providing a strong foundation for both the characters and the world they inhabit. But the meticulous design work and groundbreaking visual effects make the Communiverse feel alive.

Audiences will see a grounded, familiar Earth contrasted with the ethereal, organic beauty of the Communiverse. Inspired by bioluminescent marine life, coral and fungal structures, and the elegant geometry of folded origami, the intergalactic realm of alien ambassadors is fantastical and emotionally resonant. The visual elements reflect Elio’s emotional journey from loneliness to connection. Nemisio explained that the visual storytelling was guided by two key goals: supporting the emotional arc and emphasizing the contrast between worlds.

“There are two parts to this. One was making the Communiverse feel like the most appealing place—like Elio’s every wish and fantasy come to life,” Nemisio said. “The other was making sure the universe felt like its own thing. It connects with Elio. It’s everything he loves.”

“Contrast that with what Earth feels like for him, where it’s not as inviting. He doesn’t quite feel like he fits in,” Nemisio continued. “So the idea was to keep those two worlds visually very different — using color and light in the actual environments, and then tracking that contrast through the color script and lighting performance to reinforce that sense of not belonging on Earth.”

“He makes friendships, and he learns what friendship means and what it entails,” Nemisio said. “We’re always trying to use color to help support that. So when he feels sad, we definitely try to tone down the colors and do the opposite of what he’s doing. When he’s with Glordon, it’s always celebrating his joy and happiness. And so we try to make everything feel like it’s a celebration, like he’s in Disneyland or his birthday.”

“Of course, the use of color as a storytelling tool shifts depending on the situation, especially when the stakes are raised,” Nemisio said. “We play up different colors—like oranges and yellows, or oranges and reds — when Lord Grigon is in the scene to help support those feelings.”

The designs for Elio’s sand graphics to communicate with aliens are inspired by the designs of Midwest farm crop circles. The team even took their amphitheater into consideration. For the army base, the teams wanted Montes Base to feel like a very regimented, monochromatic place where all hard edges were very uniform and had repeated muted tones.

The regimented, monochromatic tones of Montes Base stand in direct contrast to the vibrant world of the Communiverse. This colorful interplanetary space station is devoted to maintaining peace and security across the universe, housing 16 member planets with embassies for their ambassadors and delegations. Its design features four distinct ecosystems represented on rotating discs: a volcanic hot disc, an icy cold disc, an aquatic disc, and a verdant blush disc. Each embassy is placed on the disc that most closely matches the climate of its home planet and is often backlit like colorful stained glass, enhancing the Communiverse’s radiant, otherworldly feel.

Even the transportation systems are in direct contrast, with Earth being more structured and the Communiverse being more organic. Space vessel shapes are inspired by origami sculptures. At the same time, their shading is derived from natural organic textures, and there are subtle energy lines moving on the space vessels and in many of the settings.

Building on that vision, production designer Harley Jessup strived to create a unique, dazzling version of space that hadn’t been seen in a film before. “The basic construction of the four parabolic disks starts with topographic layering similar to 3D computer-generated relief maps,” Jessup said. “This precise, sculptural quality adds a sense of technology to all the Communiverse sets.”

Jessup’s inspirations weren’t limited to structure — he also drew from macro photography of deep-sea plants, which influenced the embassy’s glowing, translucent flora and the colorful blossoms found on the lush garden disc.

To capture the vaporous nature of Questa’s embassy, Jessup extended his visual research to the undulating forms of lava lamps, which informed the fluid, morphing movement of the clone clay effect and other experimental tests like backlighting bits of coral in a water tank to simulate an alien landscape, recording a sideways shot of a drinking glass at a Pixar party, and photographing oil and water swirling inside a bowl set atop sequins and glitter.

Even an array of colored yarns helped inspire the Communiverse’s vibrant palette.

That visual ambition extended beyond concept art into the technical heart of production.
“I remember being eager to make a concept come alive at Pixar,” visual effects supervisor Claudia Chung Sanii said. “I think our whole industry—I truly believe that what is feasible in computer graphics is limited now only by our imagination.”

However, their early tests of the Communiverse proved visually overwhelming. Their approach to visualizing this layered world often went sideways, sometimes leading to outright failure.

“Looking back at some of the designs Harley just talked about, a lot of them actually emit light- sometimes animated light,” Sanii explained. “And in past shows, materials, shading, and lighting actually happened at the last steps of production. It’s kind of odd — not like real life. This is particularly not great when everything you’re building is made of luminescent and translucent materials.”

Fortunately, around the same time, Pixar was working on a very early prototype of a new toolset called Luna, which would bring RenderMan [Development], Pixar’s proprietary rendering software, to interactive workflows across our pipeline. With RMD, Pixar launched a short but pivotal experiment that would get the desired results.

“Luna allowed us to quickly use both illumination and camera at the same time to figure out how to guide your eyes and tell a story,” Sanii said. “With these results, we can see the potential where Harley’s original painting would really take us.”

During production, the Elio team reviewed scenes with lighting and materials applied—even when the renders were full of errors or incomplete. While some shots might appear finished to the untrained eye, Sanii and others were striving for something more.
“All I see is horrible, broken geometry crashing into itself,” she said. “But Harley saw something else.”

That turning point came when the Communiverse finally began to take shape beyond concept art.

“There was another key moment when we began to see the spectacular promise of the Communiverse model. It was amazing,” Jessup said. “Moving from concept art and research to seeing this environment realized in the computer.”

“It’s very much a back and forth,” Nemisio said. “There are things I’m doing in a painting that need certain lights, and David suggested things to help make things feel more animated by adding lights for us. And then there are times where they would add lights, and I’m like, Oh yeah, that’s a great idea. I love the idea of there being light stars.”

“I feel like we’re always kind of just inspiring each other to add things, to sprinkle all the really fun light sources, and lot of twinkling lights and bioluminescent lights, fluorescent stuff, and things always kind of like moving so it feels like an inorganic organism anyway,” Nemisio said about the benefits of collaboration through the College Project.   

While the interplay between lighting and sets added emotional texture to Elio, it’s the collaboration between production designer Harley Jessup and visual supervisor Claudia Chung Sanii that grounds the film in a fully immersive universe. Jessup’s imaginative design language, paired with Sanii’s innovative use of technology, brings tangilibity to the screen and merged something familiar with something wondrous.

“I appreciate having Harley as a partner. He always saw the potential in our experiments,” Sanii said. “His positivity and ability to see the beauty in our work, even the broken and odd results, kept us streaming in the what-ifs.”

Bringing a tactile approach to the Communiverse led to some bold experiments. In one case, lighting DP Jordan Rempel placed a Pixar camera inside a tube of water to explore how Elio and the aliens would travel in bubbles. The phenomenon they captured is called total internal reflection. “It’s the effect that happens when light is trapped inside a material like water or glass and bounces endlessly within the surface,” Sanii explained.

Jessup and Sanii also drew inspiration from the natural world at a microscopic level to better understand the scope and scale needed to make Elio’s universe feel grounded and believable. “We were looking at microscopic organisms and fungus and undersea creatures, and then using them at a different scale and creating different textures,” Jessup said. “We were using a lot of translucent surfaces on it, and some characters glow. So we tried to stay based in the natural world, but just see it differently.”

With Elio unfolding across Earth and the Communiverse, the production and effects teams had to ensure that their visual work remained cohesive with the story, without overwhelming the emotional journey of its title character. “Everything is always driven by the story,” Sanii said. “We always kick off with the directors quite early on, on what they’re trying to tell, and then we tune and we refine.”

Because the College Project approach fostered collaboration, those different departments that would work on things individually could now see what was and wasn’t working for the story. “One of the things that’s special for me about Elio is that the teams reviewed almost everything in the same room together,” Sanii said. “So we had our effects artists, motion graphics, art, lighting sets, and building all at the same time.” By having everyone in the same room, the different departments could see what is and isn’t working.”

Sanii said the College Project was a healthy way to collaborate creatively. Still, it requires participants to be much more vulnerable and flexible than they are accustomed to in traditional pipeline production. Despite that, she believes this novel way to collaborate produces results. “In a traditional sense, it can be presentation-based, where you do all this work, and you’re like, ‘Oh, what do you think?'” Sanii said.

“Seeing things much earlier together, it would spark all kinds of ideas that I think would not have occurred to us if we weren’t brainstorming at the same time,” Jessup said. “At a certain point, you can see the most promising directions. And that’s one thing where I would try to guide things. There’d be unexpected things that would pop up that might be a mistake, considered a mistake, but oh my gosh, that is brilliant. Let’s use it, and we would incorporate it.”

“You could feel the energy in the room,” Sanii said about the collaboration. “I remember when in some of our reviews, Harley’s team would show some artwork, and we’re like, ‘we don’t know how to build that, but we want to versus’ we don’t know how to build that, please, no.’ And so that was just the culture on Elio. It was, yes, please more.”

While Elio shines through its own unique narrative and visual style, it is undeniably influenced by the filmography of Harley Jessup. The legendary production designer behind some of the most iconic worlds in animation was inspired by the likes of  Aliens, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., and even The Thing and Hayao Miyazaki’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to help inform the visual language of Elio. “We felt like Elio was in the tradition of those sci-fi adventure films from the ’80s,” Jessup said. “And you know the fact that it’s coming out in June. I hope that it’ll be a fun summer film for families to go see.”

Sanii echoed those sentiments. “Elio could be the Close Encounters for a child today, right? And that is so exciting, this gift of wonder and exploration. We could give the audience a fresh take. I think that’d be such a gift.”

Elio opens in theaters on June 20, 2025.