"There’s Lightning’s racing story, there’s a disguised Mater infiltrating a casino where the villain and his henchmen are coming together for a secret meeting to discuss their devious plot, and of course Finn and Holley are trying to stop them.
"It was a huge challenge to work this all out structurally and cinematically so that the action could unfold, and we could go back and forth from all these different pieces and make them flow seamlessly. It feels exciting, and the tension mounts as you realize what’s happening."
For the first Cars film, Lasky and his team consulted with Artie Kempner, Fox Sports’ leading expert on capturing the excitement of live racing, to get an understanding of his methodology for placing cameras in his broadcasts.
In the virtual world of computer animation, the camera can be placed anywhere without concerns about injuring camera operators or breaking equipment, so the possibilities are unlimited and more interesting.
Lasky adds, "We wanted the cinematography on ‘Cars 2’ to have the feel of an actual street race or an F1, but at the same time, we also wanted it to feel like something you’re not going to get by watching these races on TV. We wanted it to feel as if the audience was really racing with the cars."
At Pixar, the director-of-photography duties are split up into two distinct areas - camera and lighting. Lasky’s counterpart in the area of lighting, Sharon Calahan, has collaborated with John Lasseter on three previous features.
"This movie has lots of incredible international locations," says Calahan. "It takes place in Europe and Asia, and we really wanted it to have sensibilities from those areas and not have it feel like we were still in Radiator Springs.
"We wanted Mater to feel out of his element. These worlds don’t look anything like Radiator Springs - they’re glossy, they have cool colors, they’re really hip. We wanted Mater to stand out like a sore thumb in these environments, and lighting helped us achieve that.
"Our approach to lighting is constantly evolving and changing," she continues. "The scope of this film testifies to that in all departments, not just lighting. We’re always figuring out ways to do more.
"Everything on this film was more than we had ever done before. We used more master light setups, more lights and more reflective surfaces than had ever been done."
For the scenes in Paris, Calahan paid homage to Ratatouille, using a similar soft warm broken lighting approach. To add authenticity, Julien Schreyer, the master lighting artist who worked on those Cars 2 scenes, is actually from Paris and had worked on Ratatouille as well. "I told him that he wasn’t done with them until he started to feel homesick."
Similarly, several British members of the lighting team worked on the London scenes, which were overcast but not dreary, according to Calahan. "The Brits on my team said, ‘Oh, sure, you had to make it overcast.’ I was, like, ‘Well, yeah. What would you expect?’"
Among the most challenging sequences for Calahan and her team were the night scenes. The film’s action-filled spy opening set in the middle of the ocean with all sorts of practical lights reflecting on the water, and the scenes in Tokyo with all the glowing neon signage, required optimizing and combining light rigs in order to achieve the desired effect.
Adds Calahan, "The scope of this film testifies to that in all departments, not just lighting. There were more crowd shots than we’ve ever done before. The thing I like best about ‘Cars 2’ is that we have so much visual variety to it.
"The spy train looks different than the spy plane; we’ve got a lot of interiors and exteriors; we’ve got night, day and changing weather. It is so visually rich and colorful, and yet there are scenes that also use a quieter, more limited palette.
"John is such an amazing filmmaker," she adds. "He always has a pretty clear vision in his head of what he wants to see.
"He knows how he wants things to read, what his story points are, and what’s important to him and what isn’t. So there’s that crystal clarity that really helps the whole production process and can really inspire people to go beyond what they thought of doing otherwise."
Cars 2 is released 22nd July