00:00Oh
00:18Guys, this book's a big one. The art of Blue Sky Studios
00:24Hey guys, this is Morgan with Roy Scopers and today I'm bringing you another art book review. This time
00:33It's a little different. It's the art of Blue Sky Studios. So immediately what's really cool about this book is that it's an art book for the
00:41entire studio. Mason actually reviewed the art of DreamWorks animation
00:46So that was similar because DreamWorks was having their anniversary and it made sense to put that out and Blue Sky has done the same.
00:52Now Blue Sky is one of the big four animation studios. We have Pixar, we have Disney, DreamWorks, and Blue Sky.
00:59Now Blue Sky is smaller than the other studios. They have less films, but nonetheless their films are still great.
01:05They're known for the Ice Age franchise, the Rio franchise. They've done other cool films like Robots and Epic.
01:11So I really enjoy Blue Sky. I would definitely, you know, if I ever got into animation and wanted to work there
01:16I would be into working at Blue Sky. So with your traditional art books about a movie
01:21they really focus on the making of a particular movie. But what I love about this book is it really focused on the studio
01:28and the way the studio evolves through each of their pictures. So it starts out and it gives you just a little history about how the studio started.
01:36Many animation studios start out doing commercials and that's how they get their credibility and then they do bigger and bigger commercials
01:42until finally they're able to do shorts which leads them to feature film. And that's exactly what happened with Blue Sky.
01:49They started doing laxative commercials and prescription medication commercials and then they started moving up.
01:55They slowly started adding characters in there and then they put the short together called Bunnies and it won the Academy Award for Best Animated Short.
02:04So that right away, they had a slight relationship with Fox, who's their distributor, and once they won the Academy Award, Fox said we're all in.
02:14And the Blue Sky Future Film Division was born. So that's just a little history that you learn in the first few pages of the book.
02:20And then it takes you movie by movie. Now I mentioned that short Bunnies. I thought it was a little sad that that was really like the launching pad for the studio.
02:29But they didn't include any art from that, which was kind of disappointing because I was interested in checking that out.
02:34But it's okay because we jump right into Ice Age. So in each section talking about each movie, it talks about not only how they
02:40developed the concept of the movie, but what technological challenges they had to overcome or what new computer program they had to develop to do that.
02:48Blue Sky from the very beginning was known for their computer program, which allowed them to have really realistic lighting.
02:54Other studios had to go in and manually paint in the shadows and the highlights, but their program was able to just replicate physics.
03:02And that really gave them an upper hand, and gave their films a really unique look.
03:06So each movie has about 30 to 40 pages dedicated to it, and that is the reason why this book is so big.
03:14You see this? It's so thick. It's probably double the size of your normal art book.
03:19So they didn't skip at all on this. They didn't just kind of brush over less popular movies.
03:25They really gave time to honor each individual film.
03:28So the art in this book is amazing. There's actually a pretty good variety between concepts, sketches, color keys, storyboards, all sorts of stuff.
03:35And every once in a while you get a two-page section that tells you about a different department in the Blue Sky Studio.
03:40So there's one about the animation department, and you get a read all about that, and so on and so forth.
03:45And every once in a while the film is broken up because it tells us about different departments in the making of a movie.
03:51So we have the animation department. We have a section about music.
03:54And I thought that was really cool because maybe you don't have time to speak to that for every single film,
03:58but just talking about it collectively is pretty interesting.
04:00So in each section, like I mentioned, we're going to have a variety of art.
04:03There's actually a lot of full-frame paintings, which I really enjoyed. I thought it was rather beautiful.
04:08Blue Sky's style, I mean, I know there's individual artists, but collectively as a style, it's very kind of wispy,
04:15and it's not just very concrete lines. It's more freeform.
04:20And so you'll see a lot of that in the book.
04:22So each section focuses on how they came up with the idea for the film, or hatched the idea to take it from the Rio section.
04:29Different characters, so if we have a new character that's brought into the movie, or a really key integral character,
04:34they'll spend a little time talking about that. They'll talk about technical improvements and different things that they were able to overcome,
04:40and any other random tidbits that would be interesting to know.
04:44So I absolutely love this book. I was blown away with the detail.
04:48I thought there was a good balance between text and art, and I could not put this book down.
04:53I'm kind of an animation history buff, so I love learning about different studios.
04:58And you may have known about some of these things about Blue Sky before, but it's nice to have it all in one place.
05:03And it's really nice to just have a chronology of the Blue Sky Studios films all in one place.
05:09So one reason that I really liked this book is it was just completely different than the other art books that come out from movies.
05:15You know, I love animation art books, but after a while they sort of get to be the same.
05:20It's kind of, oh, here's how we came up with the idea, here's how we developed the world, and here's the characters.
05:24And while it's interesting, it tells you so much about each individual film,
05:29I thought that taking this from a studio perspective was really smart.
05:33And so, if you're an animation fan, buy this book.
05:37I don't normally say, like, flat out and buy it.
05:39I usually give qualifiers, like, if you're a Pixar fan, buy this book.
05:43But for this, if you love animation, you have to own it.
05:46It's a little more expensive than your typical art book, but it's so worth it.
05:50It is one of the big four studios, and they are going to be doing some really cool things in the future,
05:54so you gotta own it.
05:56Yes, it may become dated after a year or two when new movies come out,
06:01but, eh, it really doesn't bother me.
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