"Mirror's Edge" deliberately makes use of strong primary colors, with outdoor environments predominantly featuring white and distinctively lacking in green. According to senior producer Owen O'Brien, this stylistic choice grew out of the gameplay, as it allows the player to focus on the Runner Vision guidance. It also serves as a health meter because the colors become less saturated as Faith starts to take damage. A new lighting solution, called Beast, was developed by Illuminate Labs, a company based in south of Sweden, in association with DICE. This technology is able to reflect colors and create a lot of soft shadows, giving the game a unique art style. Getting the lighting right was a difficult process for the development team, as it involved a lot of hand tweaking and a considerable amount of time to render each level. To speed up the rendering process, DICE invested in around 400 CPU cores, which were kept cool in a separate room by a very big air conditioning unit. The storm drains in the game's third level were inspired by Tokyo's Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel. The game's animated cutscenes were created by an external agency because DICE had no experience with 2D animations, while some of the game's art assets were created by a company based in Shanghai, China.