1. Color

Disney / Pixar

Pixar movies are not dull. They burst with color, and masterfully use each hue to tell stories.

Feinberg points to "Wall-E," a movie about a lonely robot that finds love. The movie doesn't use dialogue in the first 40 minutes of the film, so Feinberg had to find a way to communicate where Wall-E lived without words.

"We realized very quickly that if we let things go too red — the clouds, the dust, the atmosphere — it began to look like Mars," she says. "We all seem to have this ingrained notion that red equals Mars. So I had to be very careful to keep the colors of that monochromatic version of Earth in the whites, yellows, and oranges but never let it get too red."

Here are a few shots, known as progression images in lighting designer lingo, that show how the various color schemes for "Wall-E" changed over time. What begins as gray and overcast, but otherwise ordinary, ends up as a smog-filled wasteland.

The final result is clearly dystopian, but still suggests that Wall-E is living on Earth.

"Every department is helping to tell the story," Feinberg says, "but here just small changes in the color of the lighting could have ruined everything" by confusing the audience about something as basic as which planet the story is set on.