Lou Romano, a development and production artist at Disney/Pixar, talks about his early work on "Up". I'm always fascinated by seeing early art and how it influences the final product. I loved this:

A challenge in film is conveying how something feels, not how it exists in reality. Research trips can be a blessing and a curse: the blessing in that visiting an actual place surpasses what you can get from video and photos alone, the curse in being too much a slave to the actual place. Imagination and feeling should dictate everything, not reality.