When I heard that St. Louis native Jeremy Lasky was the director of photography for the new movie “WALL-E,” my second question after “Where did he go to high school?” was “How could there be a director of photography on a movie that’s animated inside a computer?”

On the phone from his office in Northern California, Lasky explained that his job is roughly the same as a cinematographer on a live-action movie, to advise the director on filming the virtual characters: What’s the point of view? How does it move? What visual information will pull the audience into the story?

On a Pixar production, the job of the cinematographers is actually divided between two people: Lasky, who works with the virtual set designers, and another cinematographer who works with the virtual lighting crew. And on this particular film, Lasky had a hand from the Coen brothers’ legendary cinematographer, Roger Deakins.

“If the director had to worry about every detail, it would take 20 years and his head would explode.”

The director of “WALL-E” is Andrew Stanton, whose other credits include “Finding Nemo” and “A Bug’s Life.” Early in the planning stage, Stanton decided that the futuristic “WALL-E” should look different than those movies.

While it’s not surprising that the visual-design team studied ’70s sci-fi films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” Lasky said that the homework also included the war movie “Black Hawk Down” and the films of indie maverick Gus Van Sant.

“We studied how Van Sant uses focus as a compositional tool,” Lasky explained. “Until now, most of Pixar’s films have had a really deep-focus world. If you look at ‘Cars,’ you can see far, far away in most of the shots. For ‘WALL-E,’ Andrew wanted to use a shallower depth of field to clear out a lot of the background clutter and get the audience to concentrate on what’s important.”

Lasky said he gave some of the scenes the feeling of a handheld camera. “Spielberg often uses a moving camera instead of cutting to a different angle,” he said. “We didn’t want to go too far in that direction and have our film resemble a documentary, because then the audience would wonder who was filming it. Some shots that we tried were a little too wide-angle and a little too high up, like a 7-11 surveillance camera, and the director said he didn’t want to set up a false expectation that WALL-E was being watched by someone. But we wanted to make our movie feel like a photographed event instead of a cartoon.”

I’ve seen the movie three times now, and each time I’ve been more impressed by the work of Lasky’s team–and less able to  explain it. How, for instance, do they simulate the shimmering hot air that rises from the surface of the earth?I supposed they’d say: It’s a computer thing–you wouldn’t understand.

Lasky’s job may be highly technical, but he’s no anonymous programmer. This week, he was one of 105 Hollywood insiders nominated for membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The other invitees included “Borat” actor Sacha Baron Cohen, “Juno” screenwriter Diablo Cody and “Knocked-Up” director Judd Apatow.

Lasky started his climb to this lofty perch at Parkway Central High School. “Central had an amazing art program, and after I graduated in ‘93, I went to the Rhode Island School of Design to study illustration. I always had animation in the back of my mind, but at that time, it was all hand-drawn, and I soon realized I didn’t love that process. What I loved was storytelling. So I took some film classes.

‘Then I saw ‘Toy Story,’ and it blew my away. I had never done anything 3D on computers, but I felt like that movie was made by people I could relate to, because they didn’t talk down to the audience.”

Lasky’s first job out of college was as a layout artist on “A Bug’s Life.” At the time, Pixar was still a scrappy little spinoff of Apple Computer and not a division of Disney.

“When I started in ‘97, there were 325 people in one building in an industrial part of Richmond, Calif., next to a Chevron refinery that would occasionally blow up.”

That all changed as the company produced an unbroken string of hits.

“In 2000, we moved to Emeryville, between Berkeley and Oakland. Now we have 900 people working on five movies at once in buildings that are spread across a cam;pus.

“[Apple Ceo] Steve Jobs wanted Pixar to be more like a Silicon Valley experience than a Hollywood experience. We’ve got a Pixar University, where you can study acting or sculpture or juggling. And almost every office is personalized, whether it’s like a tiki lounge or a Wild West saloon. In the kitchen, there are 25 different kinds of cereal.

“I take people on tours here, and they can’t believe that this is really a business.”