Hi, I am Enrico Casarosa, and I'm the director of La Luna.
I'm Kevin Reher, the producer of La Luna.
The basic story, it comes a little bit from my childhood.
We lived with my grandfather,
and my dad and my grandfather never quite got along,
so I was the little kid stuck between these two big personalities,
and I thought that would be an interesting core
to build the story around.
Because, of course,
trying to find your own way and trying to find your own fate
is something we all can relate to.
The film has such a watercolor look to it.
Yeah, I kind of write with images at the beginning,
in pencils and watercolors,
we call them image boards or beat boards,
and, at first, I really did like, 20 images that were watercolors.
And everybody seemed to react to that.
So, that gave us something to aim for.
I thought also, we had a story that is very much like a fable story
that would support a more illustrative stylized look,
so we really brought this feeling of texture.
For example, the moon glow has this texture
that's given by a watercolor paper texture.
So we tried to give it to objects, to glows, to the characters,
and especially to the backgrounds.
What you see in the background,
they're pastels, done by Bill Cone,
our production designer.
It was really fun to put actual media,
actual artwork made by hand, on the screen.
I think that that gave a different feel to the short,
which is really what I was after.
How about your trip to the Genovese boat yard?
Oh, yes!
We wanted a boat that felt old, centuries and generations.
I went back to Italy close to where I grew up
and I found this wonderful, old Cantiere Navale Topázio,
which is the... They're just masters at making old wood boats.
And the characters in there were amazing.
The old boat maker was a lot like Grandpa.
He was very opinionated.
It felt like, "If you don't make a boat with wood,
"then it has no soul," you know?
And it's so painstaking, the way that boats are made.
So we kind of took that upon us
and we really watercolored, board by board,
of this wooden boat,
so we felt, in our own way, in our own digital way,
we really took the time to build this boat.
Pay homage to what they do, and the craftsmanship.
When we went to John Lasseter and we talked about the score,
and he said, "Well, you know, we have this Italian guy
"who's worked for us on a couple of movies,
"what about Michael Giacchino?"
Oh, it was so wonderful to work with Michael.
We really made him reach for his roots.
He was excited to listen back to Fellini old scores,
Nino Rota, and a lot of, also, folk music,
simple guitar music from Naples.
He was really inspired by what had inspired me in making the movie,
and he really captured something that feels almost Fellini-like,
and that was the most I could really hope.
And he's such a collaborator, he's a real storyteller.
He really understands how to support the story with his music.
You have gibberish through the whole thing,
- why do gibberish and not do... Yeah. - Why gibberish?
Yeah, I felt there was a little bit of texture, again,
that I wanted in there,
something that could be a little more pointed.
Gibberish is hard to do,
and it took us a while to find the right tone.
I felt that it could still be very Italian
and work with characters that were gesturing a lot.
We wanted to capture an Italian flavor, and still be very universal.
That's the wonderful thing about gibberish.
No translation is needed.
So there's this wonderful thing of the very specific
that becomes kind of, still, very universal.
And we found two amazing performers, that really embodied the characters,
that what we found was important.
One is Tony Fucile, who is an amazing animator.
He's been in the animation industry for many, many years,
but he's a real big daddy.
And we also found a great grandpa,
in a storyteller here in San Francisco, Phil Sheridan.
And he was wonderful, and very much the character.
Before then, we always had someone who was trying to sound old
and that never quite worked.
And the best part was when he said,
"Do you want me to do it with my teeth, or without my teeth?"
And then he set his teeth down on the table
and proceeded to do all the gibberish with no teeth.
With no teeth, yeah, everything you hear is without the teeth.
We were kind of half scared and half excited about that.
Talk a little bit about the sound effects.
Justin Pearson, our sound designer,
he went through so much trouble
to really try and get the stars to feel simple.
I really wanted contrast in the way that the stars appeared
when Dad and Grandpa were dealing with it,
so tile-like, pebble-like, something very mundane,
because, to them, it wasn't important,
and then, go with a slightly more magical feel
when he knocks into the big star.
We wanted it to feel like
there's hundreds and hundreds of stars in there, with their own tone,
and that took us a while to get right.
Talk a little bit about how you found the star,
the reflection, the glow.
The glow in the stars.
Yes, the stars were... From the beginning,
I imagined them to be like, almost like, a frosted bottle kind of feel,
you know, a little candle inside a frosty glass,
and we had a lot of pastels of glows,
so, again, I was looking for texture that was imperfect and man-made.
And then we overlapped a lot of them,
and one of our actually Italian artists, Davide Pesare, did the star shading,
and he added all these wonderful, on top of the glow,
all these wonderful scratches and little sparkly bits.
I wanted these stars to feel like they were as old as the universe,
- so that they'd gone through a lot. - They traveled.
Yeah, they had different glow, different age,
some were brighter, some not as bright,
and it's smoky.
I love that, I want a keychain of that.
- A nightlight. - Or a nightlight, yes.
The credits were a lot of fun to do,
'cause I storyboarded the whole show kind of in this style.
And in the credits, I was kind of able to just put it right on the screen.
We also want to thank the crew who've gotten behind this show
and really embraced it,
and been these Italian wannabes who have just loved the movie
- and have done a great job. - Absolutely.
I want to thank each one of our lunatics.
We love the lunatics.
They put so much work, and they really are the ones
that made La Luna possible.