# One Coco shot had 7 million lights. So where are the bridge's lamps?

- Series: [How It's Clipped](https://miu.fm/howitsclipped.md)
- Published: 2026-10-18
- Page: https://miu.fm/howitsclipped/one-coco-shot-had-7-million-lights-so-where-are-the-bridge-s

## Story

One Coco shot had 7 million lights. So where are the bridge's lamps?

On Día de Muertos, families lay "flower petals, candles and offerings along the path" (UNESCO), and director Lee Unkrich says the petal paths they saw in Mexico were made "to help guide the spirit of a family's loved one home." It's said the petals "guardan el calor del sol e iluminan el camino de regreso de las almas": they keep the sun's warmth and light the souls' way back. Coco made the path a bridge, in a Land of the Dead where marigolds are the only living plants. But in a computer, light has to come from lights, and every light costs render time: "We've never had a shot with 7 million lights in it before," said Danielle Feinberg, Pixar's director of photography for lighting. Even the render team "initially didn't think the skeleton shading and the Marigold Bridge were going to be too difficult." Hiding big lamps under the bridge would look flat. So the petals became the light: "We have a new kind of light called a particle light that can have many, many points on it." Effects could "automatically know which petals a person is stepping on" and make them glow, and there is a hidden lamp after all: "we track a light that sits underneath the petals that adds the glow as a character steps down" (effects supervisor Michael K. O'Brien). Story artist Dean Kelly remembers the real paths in Oaxaca: "they felt like they were lit up even at night."

The bridge, the path and the walker are our own recreations, not film footage.

Who did you watch Coco with?

Sources: The Walt Disney Company, "Disney Pixar's 'Coco' Uses Innovative Visual Effects to Celebrate Family and Tradition" (22 Nov 2017), with Lee Unkrich, Danielle Feinberg and Michael K. O'Brien; Alex Reif, "The Land of the Dead Comes to Life in Pixar's Coco", Laughing Place (2017), with Dean Kelly; Disney UK, "7 Things You Didn't Know About Coco"; Foundry interview with Pixar's Renee Tam; Mike Seymour, "RenderMan's Visuals for Coco", fxguide (3 Mar 2018), with Renee Tam; UNESCO, "Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead"; Secretaría de Agricultura y Desarrollo Rural (Mexico), "Cempasúchil, la flor de los veinte pétalos" (2018); Vaibhav Vavilala, "Light Pruning on Toy Story 4", SIGGRAPH 2019 (Pixar).
Sounds: our own, made in code (earshot, CC0).

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