1. anımatıon charactor art: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation.
domınatıon Sure, Greenwich is home to plenty of famous people
All rights reserved.
but recently we met a group of truly colorful characters.
Step inside the whimsical world of Blue Sky Studios
The minds behind Blue Sky: Brian Keane, chief operating officer, Carl Ludwig,
62 MOFFLYMEDIA.COM by timothy dumas photographs by visko hatfield october 2010 greenwich 63
chief technical officer and Chris Wedge, VP creative development

2. The “Lost Boyz” of Blue Sky
L
ast year’s computer animat- the competition, or b) ruining the carefully timed
ed feature Ice Age: Dawn of drumroll leading up to a major release. But you know
the Dinosaurs took in $888 what? Blue Sky said to come on over. So I drove out
million at the worldwide to that tiny cluster of hills just north of Interstate 684,
box office, making it the parked beneath a single fleecy cloud, and rode the
third most successful ani- elevator up to the airy third floor of the Greenwich
mated film ever, behind American Center.
DreamWorks’s Shrek 2 and Blue Sky, though owned by 20th Century Fox,
Pixar’s Finding Nemo. The remains a steadfast East Coaster, aloof from anima-
only thing odd about that, if tion’s California nerve centers. (Connecticut lured
anything’s odd, is the rela- it here from White Plains in January 2009, using
tive anonymity of the film- tax incentives as bait.) Perhaps Blue Sky’s isolation
makers: Blue Sky Studios. contributes to its subtle mystique. In any case, sur-
You have heard all about DreamWorks and Pixar and prisingly little has been written about the studio,
Disney; you can even picture their trademark images: given its huge grosses and perfect batting average.
the boy who fishes from a crescent moon, the hopping All five of its feature films have been hits, begin-
desk lamp, the Cinderella Castle lit by fireworks. ning with the original Ice Age in 2002, in which the
But Blue Sky Studios? Well. In a land not so very far oddball trio of Manny the mammoth (voiced by Ray
away—northwest Greenwich—there stands a shim- Romano), Sid the sloth (John Leguizamo) and Diego
mering glass building that is like a palace of dreams. the sabre-toothed tiger (Denis Leary) try to return a
I asked to be invited there, imagining the dream human baby to its tribe. Blue Sky followed with Robots
makers would politely decline to raise a curtain on (2005), Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006) and Dr. Seuss’s
their movie magic. Animation studios are famously Horton Hears a Who! (2008). Last year’s Ice Age, a
secretive. They spend years making a feature film, monster hit, received good reviews, but critics seemed
and they don’t want some interloper a) spying for surprised that it raked in so much cash, since 2009
proved historic for animation excellence. Still, neither
Monsters vs. Aliens, nor The Princess and the Frog, nor
Coraline, nor Fantastic Mr. Fox, nor even the Academy
Award-winning Up approached Ice Age: Dawn of the
Dinosaurs’ popular appeal as measured in ticket sales.
Blue Sky’s front desk was vacant, all except for a Coming to a Screen Near You Keane says. “The people that are working on this
large stuffed Scrat—the squirrel-rat from the Ice Age Brian Keane, Blue Sky’s chief operating officer, was film absolutely love it, the vibrancy of the colors, the
films—staring at me with those great buggy eyes of the most formally attired person I saw. He wore a birds, the exotic dance and the music (composed by
his. I am sure he wanted an acorn. Anyone with kids casual button down shirt and faded blue jeans. He Brazilian jazz legend Sergio Mendes and will.i.am of
will recall the hilarious opening sequence of the first appeared to be in an excellent mood, no doubt owing the Black Eyed Peas).”
Top Left: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.
Ice Age, directed by Blue Sky cofounder Chris Wedge, to the film Rio, hurtling toward completion as we Christina sat me down in a screening room to watch
in which Scrat tries to bury an acorn for safekeep- spoke. Scheduled for release in April 2011, it’s about (in 3-D) the just-completed two-minute trailer for
ing but instead makes a little crack in the icy tundra a rare blue macaw (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg) living Rio, in which our Minnesota macaw, Blu, tests out
that brings down a mountainous glacier. As I was a restful, flightless caged life in Minnesota—until he his wings by leaping off a Brazilian cliff. It doesn’t go
patting my pockets for acorns, Christina Witoshkin, gets wind of a female counterpart (Anne Hathaway) well. Blu flops onto a passing hang glider, whose pilot
Blue Sky’s marketing and communications manager, down in crazy Rio de Janeiro. Road trip ensues. At proves equally inept at flying, and together they swoop
alighted, and took me behind the figurative cur- Blue Sky, there’s a palpable sense that the studio is down onto a crowded Rio beach, knocking umbrellas
tain. Wow. Light poured in. Scooters flitted past. sitting on a blockbuster of Ice Age proportions. “It’s about like bowling pins. The visual detail is never less
Guitar chords sounded in the dim, cubicled distance. amazing, amazing,” Keane says of the film, directed than stunning. You see wind riffle the fine feathers on
Everyone was dressed in shorts and T-shirts, as if for a by Carlos Saldanha. “Visually, it’s about flight the way Blu’s neck and chest as he falls, just as if he were a real
softball game. The ridiculously talented young people Finding Nemo is about underwater.” bird. “In this movie, you’ll see some stuff you’ve never
in the animation department labored away in a make- Saldanha directed the second two Ice Age films, but seen before in animation,” Keane says. His clear blue
Animator Chip Lotierzo in shift treehouse, with a Lost Boyz sign hanging over Rio is his baby, the film he was born to make. “Carlos eyes sparkle like the company logo. “The bar never
his Mayor of Whoville office the entrance. Clearly, this was a realm of unfettered is from Rio, it’s the culture of his childhood, and he goes down. It always goes up.”
creativity, free of the usual corporate strictures. grew up with an absolute love for tropical birds,” Animation is in the middle of a new golden age. »
64 MOFFLYMEDIA.COM october 2010 greenwich 65

3. Though all three major animation techniques—hand- and Dr. Eugene Troubetzkoy, a nuclear physicist,
drawn, stop-motion and computer-generated (CG)— wrote a software program called CGI Studio that
are breaking new ground, it is the latter category that gives Blue Sky films their distinctive look—a rich,
has really driven the business since Pixar put out Toy luminous look that derives from projecting virtual
Story in 1995 and upped the ante with superb twenty- light rays onto a digital scene. How dense or trans-
first century films like The Incredibles, Ratatouille, parent is an object? How reflective is its surface?
WALL-E and Toy Story 3. CG animation tends to have a How does the reflectivity change when a cloud passes
certain look: smooth, rounded, heavily sculpted char- over, or when the object gets dirty? These are the
acters who exist in settings with great depth of field. sorts of problems that Ludwig studies. “This way of
But CG animation has its detractors. They claim that rendering light, which we call ‘radiosity,’ was some-
digital imagery lacks the warm, painterly qualities of thing that Carl was passionate about putting into our
Disney classics like Pinocchio and Bambi, that it can’t technology,” Wedge explains. “It’s a way to make the
match the visual poetry of present-day Japanese master lighting much, much more natural than it normally
Hayao Miyazaki, best known here for Spirited Away and is in computer rendering. But it was very comput-
Howl’s Moving Castle. Blue Sky is a full-tilt CG studio, to ing intensive.” (And still is: “About once a week, the
be sure, but one with a record of pushing the science of R and D team releases some new version of the mil-
animation toward anthropomorphic warmth. lions of lines of code they’ve created,” Brian Keane
had told me minutes earlier.)
The ideal is to make films that Wedge is wearing blue jeans with more holes in
them than fabric. His longish hair is sort of wild, as
strike a note of wonder in children if jumbled in the throes of creativity. If Ludwig repre-
and adults alike, he says. sents Blue Sky’s scientific brain, Wedge represents its
artistic soul. “When we first started Blue Sky, the first
“ I guess the big thing is, this is still CG feature film [Toy Story] was almost ten years off,”
Wedge says. “In my experience, vision is like head-
a business. And it’s a business lights. It only shines so far down the road. You can’t
where you roll gigantic dice. see exactly where you’re going, you just see a little bit
ahead. We were more excited about the potential for
There’s a lot at stake what we could do—more a ‘Let’s put on a show.’ You
for each of these films. ”
know, ‘My dad’s got a garage, we can use it’ kind of
thing than a ‘Oh, here’s a business plan. Here’s how
—Chris Wedge, VP creative development our money will be invested, here’s how we’ll raise
more, here’s how we’ll build a company.’ There was
“To think that it all started in a little three-room nothing like that. How we’ll keep the lights on was
office in Briar Cliff,” says Carl Ludwig, a Blue Sky the business plan.”
cofounder who heads its research and development Blue Sky’s two sides—science and art—merged
group. I encountered the soft-spoken computer genius seamlessly in Wedge’s gorgeous Bunny, winner of
in a back corner of the building, outside the office of the 1998 Academy Award for Best Animated Short
Chris Wedge, who was coming into view down a very Film. In seven wordless minutes, we are told of an
long corridor. Wedge and Ludwig are CG imagery pio- elderly rabbit baking a carrot cake in her pleasantly
neers. While working at an early CG animation studio old-fashioned kitchen. It is nighttime. There is an
called MAGI, they created effects for Disney’s cyber- old photograph hanging on the wall: a young Bunny
fantasy Tron (1982), the first feature to extensively with her dapper husband, whom we understand to
use computer graphics. Today Tron is seen as a sort be dead. A bothersome moth flutters forth through
of Manhattan Project for a brilliant new generation of an open window. Bunny, in hobbling pursuit, makes
animators. Though MAGI eventually failed, Wedge, havoc of her kitchen, but finally dunks the moth in
Ludwig and four others who were true believers in batter and throws the cake into the oven. Bunny naps.
CG’s potential—even if those early images looked a Then something odd happens. The oven rumbles and
little sterile—went on to create Blue Sky in 1987. shakes and casts out a weird glow. Bunny opens it to Senior Sculptor, Vicki Saulls
At Briar Cliff, Ludwig, a former NASA engineer, find the moth suspended there like a humming bird. » working her magic
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4. Bunny crawls in, mesmerized, as the oven’s speckled that movie.” One reason they did so: “Blue Sky
interior becomes a starry night, into which she rises, conquered the problem of rendering humans in CG
up and up, surrounded by cosmic moths, her apron animation. There was a real struggle with how to do
strings coming loose and flapping like wings. (You can this in those years. You think about the humans in the
find Bunny at YouTube.) original Toy Story. Pretty funky.” While CG animation
Where on earth did Bunny come from? “Oh, in created realistic-looking worlds, the humans who
moments driving. Or in the shower,” he says. “I think populated them tended to look disturbingly unnatu-
the visual ideas came a lot from childhood memories, ral. “But Blue Sky found a direction that made sense.
cabins where we’d spent our summers in upstate New They kind of cartoonized the humans,” Beck says.
York. And then the narrative just came together as Blue Sky and the other studios have built upon that
I was designing it.” Wedge praises Ludwig and the strategy ever since. These days, according to Beck,
other light-rendering scientists for Bunny’s visual the great animation trinity is “Pixar, DreamWorks
distinction. “Up till that point, computer imagery was and Blue Sky. And in some cases I would put Blue
kind of electronic and vacuous. This was one of the Sky ahead of DreamWorks. What they’re doing out
first moments where it really looked natural.” in Connecticut is right up there with anything else.”
“I think there’s a healthy competition there,” Keane
The Little Studio That Could says. “But we don’t compare ourselves. Because if we
It could be said that Blue Sky was built upon Bunny. did, we’d think we’re better.”
The film announced a rare combination of technical
innovation and narrative heart. Recognizing this, 20th
Century Fox handed Blue Sky its first feature film
project: Ice Age, developed from a concept by Fox pro-
ducer Lori Forte. How did that film’s massive success
change things? “It just made life a lot harder,” Wedge
says with a weary chuckle. “It really did. It got us more
attention. It put pressure on us to succeed even big-
ger than we had.” Back in the shoestring days, when
Blue Sky was creating special effects for films and TV
commercials—flying cough drops, levitating electric
razors, talking coffee beans—“we weren’t interested
in success. We were brain dead, I think.”
“But making a feature film was something we’d
always wanted to do,” Ludwig adds helpfully.
If Wedge can seem equivocal about Blue Sky’s Animated feature films are designed to hit that
massive success, it’s because of that artist’s soul of sweet spot where broad appeal and artistic achieve-
his, which wants to wander freely beyond the jokey ment intersect. If Ice Age hit dead center, most observ-
right: Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.
conventions of American animation. “In our culture, ers would say its follow-up, Robots, just missed—
animation is for children first,” he said. “We don’t though I happen to think it’s Blue Sky’s best film.
take it seriously.” The ideal is to make films that strike “You know, it was our smallest success,” says Wedge
sketch by Peter de Sève , twentieth Century Fox Film
a note of wonder in children and adults alike, he said. (though “smallest” means it made a mere $260 mil-
“I guess the big thing is, this is still a business. And it’s lion on an $80 million production budget). “It was
a business where you roll gigantic dice. There’s a lot at a film I’d been trying to make for a long time. But
stake for each of these films.” after the success of Ice Age, there was just so much
Corporation. All rights reserved.
Ice Age, the only Blue Sky film nominated for Best pressure to make another blockbuster. Robots didn’t
Animated Feature, guaranteed Blue Sky’s viability as a quite become the movie I wanted it to be. There are
big-league studio. Jerry Beck, an animation historian people like you who like it a lot, or people who never
and operator of the CartoonBrew.com website, spoke heard of it.”
with me by phone from Los Angeles: “The fact that Wedge’s special challenge was to invent from scratch
this little studio made a mega-blockbuster—and a a world populated entirely by robots. We see that world
really great film—I mean, the people at Pixar saluted in its head-spinning futuristic splendor when idealistic
An early sketch of Scrat and Scratte from Ice Age 3
october 2010 greenwich 69

5. young Rodney Copperbottom (Ewan McGregor) arrives in
Robot City from the hinterlands, determined to make his way
as an inventor. Instead of being allowed to follow his dream,
however, he finds the kindly industrialist Big Weld (Mel
Brooks) ousted and in seclusion, no longer believing his own
maxim: “You can shine no matter who you are.” The glittering,
cruel new leader of Big Weld Industries is forcing the lovably
eccentric, old robots into obsolescence—er, death. Rodney and
friends, built of increasingly scarce hand-me-down parts, will
be doomed to this fate if Rodney fails to restore the soul, as it
were, of this mechanized world.
One might see humorous irony here. Robots loves the
charm of old ways, but Blue Sky is thoroughly state-of-the-
art, as much science laboratory as animation studio. “There’s
constant invention going on here,” Keane tells me. “Things
we have in the digital toolbox at the end of a movie are things
that didn’t even necessarily exist at the beginning of it.”
Nothing But Blue Skies
A tour of Blue Sky’s movie assembly line dazzles the mind
almost as much as Robot City does. Scripts, storyboards and
character sketches are just the beginning. Senior sculptor
Vicki Sauls takes 2-D character designs (many of them made
by acclaimed New Yorker artist Peter DeSeve) and sculpts
them into 3-D models. For Rio, she says, her great challenge
was the feathering: “You have to make the feathers behave
like wings, but also like hands.” Lead character modeler
Shaun Cusick lays a computer mesh over a digital image of
the sculpture to create a sort of topographical map. Next, in
the rigging department, Todd Hill infuses that map with an
anatomy, a workable physics. “Think of it as clay,” he tells me.
“We put the wire inside of the clay characters. We generate
how they can move. Blu, for instance, has more than 2,000
points of articulation.”
Melvin Tan is the senior animator, a Singapore native
nurtured on Japanese manga. “We are like the actors in the
films,” Tan says. “We have the freedom and the artistic sense
to try things out.” On his desk he keeps a little mirror and an
old-fashioned sketchpad for testing facial expressions. The
animators often film one another performing the script in
order to generate human-like physical cues. On the computer,
they block out scenes (the actors have already recorded their
voice parts, audible on Tan’s computer) for the director’s
approval, then do polished, highly detailed versions. It is
laborious work. “Each animator can output maybe three-and-
a-half to four seconds per week,” Tan says. “And that would
be the very most.”
Once animated, the scenes proceed to the fur department
(just what it sounds like), and to the materials, special effects
and lighting departments. Jon Campbell in fur showed me
how feathers are laid in one by one, and how the computer
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6. can fluff them up and smooth them down. Materials super-
visor Brian Hill showed me how he gets a plastic-y looking
scene and applies color, texture and details too minute to
notice but that register as a whole: the plaque in Sid the
sloth’s teeth, the scratches on his claws, the finely variegated
hair coloring. “What we do adds that extra little bit of life
that really makes him pop on the screen,” Hill says. Through
uniquely intensive coding—Blue Sky’s electronic brain is
called a “render farm,” thousands of computers all networked
together—he’ll individualize every rock, leaf, chunk of wood,
whatever you see onscreen.
FX supervisor Elvira Pinkhas showed me how she
makes puffs of dust, sparks, ocean spray and dog drool,
all based on some combination of artistic impression and
hard algorithm. She played a snippet from Rio featuring
a bulldog called Luis, voiced by George Lopez. “See this?”
Elvira says. “There are hundreds of spheres that simulate
each strand of drool.” Finally, lighting supervisor Jim
Gettinger showed me a spectacular aerial scene of Rio
de Janeiro from the film, pointing out how a Rio sunrise
plays upon the water of the bay, the distant mountains,
the Christ the Redeemer statue presiding over the city,
the wispy clouds in the foreground and the hang glider
flying through them. “Our job is to pull together all the
other departments’ work with lighting based on actual
physical properties,” Gettinger says. “It looks realistic,
but it’s idealized to make a beautiful and pleasing com-
position.”
Back in Wedge’s office, we were talking about Blue Sky’s
future: pretty sunny. There’s yet another Ice Age in the works,
to be directed by Saldanha and released in July 2012. Then
there’s a tantalizing Wedge project called The Leaf Men, using
a children’s book of the same title by William Joyce as a take-
off point. “It’s going to be an original story,” Wedge began.
“Oh, am I not supposed to tell him anything?” Christina
smiles ruefully. Okay, so it’s still top-secret. But Wedge prom-
ised it would be fetchingly strange. Earlier, I’d remarked on
“the quality of strangeness” in Bunny and Robots. It’s a qual-
ity that great children’s artists, from the Brothers Grimm to
Maurice Sendak, aren’t afraid to grapple with, one that seems
to be mined from the deep imagination of childhood. Wedge
accepted the remark as the compliment I intended it to be.
“Thanks for my quality of strangeness,” he says as we got up
to leave.
Outside his office, propped in a corner, was a blue-gray
outboard motor of a certain elegant vintage. “That was my
grandfather’s,” Wedge remarks. “My grandfather had it when
we were kids, upstate in the Adirondacks. I’ve gone fishing
with that thing. It would probably start today if you gave it
some gas.” I stared at it with a shock of recognition. A robot
named Rodney Copperbottom stared back. G
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