The Pixar team quickly realized that Mother Nature is a terrific artist. Early in the process, production designer Bill Cone crawled on his stomach with a camera for a closer look at the vegetation that would become the film’s architecture. Art director Tia Kratter spent a year painting natural objects. Their efforts came together in “The Leaf Bridge Test,” a scene that used sophisticated lighting to capture the translucence of a leaf and served as visual inspiration for the film.