![]() “We sent Bill Frake, one of our veteran story artists, home with it over the weekend. ![]() ![]() “It was on a Friday afternoon that we were trying to crack this thing,” adds Wedge. How ‘bout, he’s just trying to bury his nuts and the glacier won’t leave him alone? And maybe by digging a hole for his nut he starts a cracks that actually gets the glacier moving!” “So what’s he trying to do? we asked ourselves. That’s the way Scrat was born.” Other character sketches.įrom there, Wedge and his team delved further into Scrat’s existence. Peter drew some saber teeth on it so now it looked like a prehistoric creature. “He had reams of drawings,” says Wedge, “and one that we hadn’t used was this little squirrel. The director scoured animal designs that character designer Peter de Sève had made so far during production. OK, if it’s a huge glacier let’s have it chasing the smallest animal we can think of!” ![]() So I thought, let’s come up with a way to use the ice age as a character itself – let’s make a glacier a character that is chasing another character down a hill. “The story started in the autumn at the turn of seasons while animals are migrating. So all those ingredients were going to mix in a certain way and we had fun writing that.”īuilding on the relationships between Manny, Sid and Diego made the movie more fun, but Wedge soon realized that despite the title being ‘Ice Age’, there wasn’t actually gong to be any ice seen until about half way through the film. And we have this saber-toothed cat Diego (Denis Leary) who has malevolent intentions. We have this guy who is striving for attention in Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo), so they make a fun pair. “He wants to isolate himself from society. “We have this reluctant hero Manny the mammoth (voiced by Ray Romano) who turns out has a dark past,” outlines Wedge. So when the project came to Blue Sky Studios, the director looked to help infuse it with more fun and detail, starting with the main characters. “There was no comedy in this first draft, I promise you,” says Wedge. Ice Age has become one of the most popular CG animated comedies of all time, but the film, about a prehistoric mammoth, sloth and saber-toothed cat who find a human baby, was not always intended to be in that genre. With Ice Age now celebrating its two-decade anniversary, befores & afters went back to a past interview with Wedge about the film to present to you now. It was more driven by the look and the feeling I wanted than any story – in fact I didn’t really have a story until we were half way through on it.” “I thought if we can make the shadows soft enough,” says Wedge, “if we can put enough detail into the scenes, it would look like a dream or a memory – that’s what I wanted Bunny to be. ![]() Wedge’s Bunny, a film about an elderly rabbit living alone in a cabin, would capitalize on Blue Sky’s ray tracing rendering technology and its ability to deliver a realistic but also painterly look. This period was still early days in the history of CG, with Blue Sky making its name working in commercials and later film VFX, before transitioning into a powerhouse animated features studio. But Blue Sky had, in fact, been operating since 1987 when a team of computer graphics and visual effects artists who had earlier worked on the seminal effects film Tron established the studio and quickly developed advanced rendering software (CGIStudio). When director Chris Wedge’s Bunny won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1998, it seemed as though the director and the studio he co-founded, Blue Sky Studios, had only just then burst onto the animation scene. That situation doesn’t sit well with Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo again provides the lateral lisp), who, fearing there won’t be any room for him in the new dynamic, decides to create his own family, making off with several enormous eggs he discovers in an underground cavern.īut when they hatch into a trio of rambunctious baby dinos, it isn’t long before their birth mom - a mighty displeased T-Rex - goes on the rampage, turning Manny’s world order upside down.ĭespite the Jurassic perk, returning director Carlos Saldanha, co-director Michael Thurmeier and a herd of writers - including founding scribes Michael Berg and Peter Ackerman along with longtime “Simpsons” writer Mike Reiss and newcomer Yoni Brenner - manage to bring precious little in the way of charm or inventiveness to the generic plotting.Looking back at Blue Sky’s first feature film and the art and tech behind it. Ray Romano returns as the sardonic voice of Manny the woolly mammoth, and he’s trying paternal instinct on for size since his wife, Ellie (Queen Latifah), is very much in the family way. ![]()
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