00:00To be continued...
00:30Oh
01:00Oh
01:30Oh
01:32Oh
01:38Oh
01:40Oh
01:42Oh
01:46Oh
01:50Oh
01:54Oh
01:56Oh
02:00Oh!
02:30Oh
03:00I don't know.
03:30Ah!
03:46Ah!
03:51Ah!
03:55Oof!
04:00Let's go.
04:30Let's go.
05:00Maybe you're hungry.
05:04I know just the thing.
05:06The story takes place in the Ice Age, but it was shaped in Connecticut at Blue Sky Studios, a subsidiary of 20th Century Fox.
05:16In the third animated Ice Age film, Ray Romano and Queen Latifah are back as mammoths Manny and Ellie.
05:23Ellie!
05:24Talk to the trunk.
05:25Scrat, the prehistoric Squirrel Rat, who was so popular in the earlier films, is taking on a bigger role this time and meeting his lady love, Scratte.
05:35You'll never find...
05:39In Greenwich, animators are hard at work on his story.
05:44Ice Age, Dawn of the Dinosaurs.
05:47The process begins when screenwriters turn over their script to storyboard artist Eric Favela.
05:54The script may say something, a very basic action, Scratte comes out from behind a tree and sniffs, and that may look something like, you know, I have the tree here, I arrange it how I think it should look in the movie.
06:08For a sequence in the film that may last only a few minutes, Eric draws some 500 panels.
06:15We can move things around if we need to, or shrink.
06:19Jake Parker is one of the designers, creating a look for the film.
06:23It's very angular. There's lots of sharp shapes, almost as if it's carved out of ice.
06:30His paintings, some done on the computer screen and some on paper, become the virtual sets for the film.
06:37Say we wanted another mammoth in the foreground here, standing on here, you know, I'll pick a brush, and then I can actually draw this mammoth here, block him in, you know, do a trunk coming out there, and, you know, I'll work in that and just develop it.
06:56While the designers are working on the sets, Mike DeFeo is sculpting Scratte in polymer clay.
07:02When it's drawn out, or you're just sort of speculating on what those poses might work, you know, on paper, when you get them in 3D, you find a lot more that you can finesse it.
07:14This is our little baby dino.
07:16As you can see, he's just kind of like a big old puppy.
07:19He's got a giant head, giant feet, and even though he's got teeth, it'll probably take your head off.
07:24He's looking very, very cute.
07:26But this is not claymation, where a physical character is placed on a real set and then moved slightly in each frame, as in stop-motion animation.
07:36Blue Sky Studios specializes in photorealistic, high-resolution, computer-generated character animation and rendering.
07:43On a live-action set, a cinematographer would lay down the marks for the actors, use the stand-ins for lighting, set up where the camera position would be, plan the lighting, follow production all the way through to make sure all the shots go according to plan.
07:56And that's basically what layout is.
07:58In computer-generated animation, there is no camera, no set, and no actual lighting.
08:04All of that is virtual and complicated.
08:06Rob showed us three versions of a sequence with Scrat and Scratte, each one more detailed than the last.
08:19It's all about camera placement, path of action.
08:28Everything gets final modeled, it gets final materialized.
08:31The effects start to move into place.
08:34Once that's done, all those elements come back together into one place, and the shots get lit, and then they're finaled.
08:42So this is what you're going to see now are the master, final, lit shots with all elements in place.
08:47Brian Keene says the process of making an Ice Age film takes about three and a half years, versus a live-action film which might be shot in six months.
09:08For a 90-minute movie, at 24 frames a second, that's approximately 130,000 frames of individual art that have to be created and digitized and brought to life and rendered with our proprietary software.
09:22If you were to fire a ray of light from a light source, it calculates how many different points of intersection that ray of light will hit.
09:30It might be the way it would bounce within a character's hair to the way it would reflect and bounce and move through water.
09:37Some of it would deflect into the water.
09:39Some of it would bounce off the water.
09:41It's the visual representation of a world that exists only in the computer.
09:47The final version right here, which I'll show you first.
09:50Jim Bresnahan has been an animator for 14 years.
09:53You know, in animation, what we like to do is take those little moments where there are pauses and where actually not a lot is happening and just try to sell, like, perhaps a little bit of a thought process with the eye shifts and things of that nature.
10:08He manipulates Scrat with a computer device called a picker that allows him to control any part of Scrat's anatomy.
10:14When he descends, his eyeballs stretch out, and then when he stops, they squash, and that's an animation principle called squash and stretch, you may have heard of.
10:24It started way back with Disney, but we try to do that in 3D animation wherever we can.
10:29We really follow the old principles of animation.
10:32But in this new medium, math counts.
10:35So we can tell at, you know, frame 210 here, it was, you know, the value was .6.
10:41Meaning Scrat's eyelid was about half-closed.
10:45Here's the scene as it appears in the film.
10:57In 10 years, blue sky has expanded from 50 people to nearly 350.
11:03The need for a building that could house them all on one floor led them from Westchester to Connecticut.
11:09That and . . .
11:10Very, very extraordinarily aggressive tax credit program that is one of the best in the nation.
11:16Their job is to come to work every day and want to make someone happy, cry, make them laugh, and make them forget about what it is that, you know, might be troubling them in a particular day to just go to the movie and have a good time.
11:29Ah, it's way!
11:32That passion is the thing that I'm the most proud of.
11:34A passion for animation at Blue Sky Studios, it's Positively Connecticut.
11:40No, no, stop, you're not me.
11:42I'm doing you.
11:43No, no.
11:44No, no, I'm doing you.
11:50Yeah, no.
11:51I
11:53I-
11:55Yeah.
11:56Yeah.
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