Eisner announcing that the studio would move to computer animation in response to a downturn caused by rising competition from Pixar and DreamWorks Animation computer animated features, as well as the unsatisfactory box office performances of The Emperor’s New Groove, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet (2002), and Home on the Range (2004). As some of the animators had worked on Dinosaur (2000), which used live-action backgrounds, the animation team took inspiration for its staging, coloring, and theatrical lighting from Mary Blair's background designs featured in Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Peter Pan (1953). For the aesthetics in the background designs, the background layout artists sparingly use digital matte paintings to render out the naturalistic elements, including the trees and the baseball diamond, but they were retouched using Adobe Photoshop as background cards featured in the film. The lighting department would utilize the "Lumiere" software to enhance virtual lighting for the shading form and depth and geometric rendering for the characters' shadows, as well as use real lighting to create cucaloris. For the characters' designs and animation style, Dindal sought to capture the "roundness" as seen in the Disney animated works from the 1940s to 1950s, by which the characters' fluidity of motion was inspired from the Goofy cartoon How to Play Baseball (1942). Under visual effects supervisor Steve Goldberg who spearheaded the department, the Maya software included the software program "Shelf Control" that provided an outline of characters that can be viewed on-screen and provided a direct link to the controls for specific autonomy, as well as new electronic tablet screens were produced that allowed for the artists to draw digital sketches of the characters to rough out their movements, which was then transferred to the 3D characters. All of the characters were constructed using geometric polygons. For the title character, there were approximately fourteen to fifteen character designs before settling the design composed of an ovular egghead shape with oversized glasses. The final character was constructed of 5,600 polygons, 700 muscles, and more than 76,000 individual feathers, of which 55,000 are placed on his head. Following the casting of Braff, supervising animator Jason Ryan adapted Braff's facial features during recording sessions to better combine the dorkiness and adorability the filmmakers desired. "He's got this really appealing face and eye expressions," Ryan said, adding that he was amazed by Braff's natural vocal abilities. Next, the animators would utilize the