Danielle Feinberg helps bring the art of science to Pixar films.

“Toy Story,” “Monsters Inc.,” and “Coco” could not be possible without the help of coding. Physics and math help bring these lovable films into the light.

Harvard graduate and Pixar coder Danielle Feinberg discussed how the animated movies from the childhoods of many, are created by using science and math at the lecture Thursday called “The Art of Science: Bringing Imagined Words to Life.”

In 1997, Feinberg was hired at Pixar Animation Studios to help code for “A Bugs Life.” She soon discovered her passion for coding in the lighting department, and went on to code for many of our childhood favorite animated films like “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles.”

In the lecture, Feinberg discussed the real difference lighting makes in an animated film. Feinberg said lighting is “what makes the world comes to life.” The director of “Coco” told the Pixar crew Feinberg was working on, “create a world like no one has seen before.” They help create those worlds using three techniques; points and physics, lines and math, and heart.

Points and physics in animated movies comes from particles and movement of these particles. Particles are used to create fireworks, smoke, water and more. An example of manipulating particles is the marigold bridge in the film “Coco.” In the film, the marigold bridge is what connects the living world with the dead world and is made out of marigold petals.

To make the petals look realistic, physics is used to create fluttering motions of falling petals, while also creating a clumpy look of stationary groups of petals. Feinberg says the director wanted “organic features that make it feel alive and magically connected between the two worlds.”

An example of how lines and math are used to create these worlds is shown in the film “Brave.” There is a significant amount of artistic detail involved with creating the beautiful Scottish landscape in each frame of the movie.

“Brave” is the first Pixar film that spent as much time on vegetation as they did, creating the “wonder moss.” Feinberg says this effect was meant to give the moss on the trees a realistic feel, but was so successful that they used it for all vegetation in the film.

The process of creating the “wonder moss” involves drawing thousands of lines, bending and coloring those lines and then creating a look of realistic bushes and grass. They code in gravity, bending the lines to simulate earth’s gravity which creates a wilted effect for longer grass and color variations differentiating between new and old patches of grass.

She discusses the fact that computers do not know the difference between old leaves on the ground and leaves on a tree, so all of that is created through code. One thing that stuck out to her about this process was when creating detailed and beautiful images, ”the math and art all [come] together,” Feinberg said.

Feinberg said heart is something Pixar has always put into the characters of their films. In “Wall-e,” the main character, Wall-e, is a robot with binoculars as eyes, and giving this character a soul was difficult for Pixar staff.

The detail of Wall-e’s eyes as cameras makes the character difficult to portray emotions, and that is something this character has a lot of, especially towards Eve. The use of lighting to create the look of realistic eyes through these camera lenses, Feinberg says was “a happy accident” by the lighting department.

By lighting the inner ring of the camera lense gray, the eye of the character portrayed that of the iris of the human eye. By then adding a glimmer to the eye, the staff was able to give an abiotic creature a living characteristic.

The worlds in these movies are built from nothing but an idea put into a coding system. It is a constant trial and error pattern full of accidents that bring the world together. Using physics, math and biological studying, a blank canvas (or computer screen) becomes the home of all the characters we love.