I just grabbed the mic and made some sounds. “We were about a year and a half into Ice Age and I ran into editorial and they said they needed some sounds for Scrat. That role would ultimate fall upon Wedge himself. Scrat might never speak but the squirrel did need to utter all manner of exasperated sounds during his nut-related (mis)adventures. We’ve been able to do it in each film and in shorts, too.” Then, it’s always his nut that he’s after, and thirdly, he can never get his nut. “Firstly, he never speaks – it’s all pantomime. On Monday he came in with three walls of drawings he had done that pretty much represented what our first Scrat sequence ever was going to be – that Scrat would try to bury his nut, start a crack that would start a glacier falling, and all that action would escalate so that Scrat got away with his life and little else.” Watercolor studies.įrake’s pitch also set up some of the rules of ‘Scrat-ness,’ as Wedge explains. “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. 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.”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. “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. Looking back at Blue Sky’s first feature film and the art and tech behind it.
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