Let’s put some saber teeth on that guy, and the story is obviously that he’s trying to store his nuts for the winter and the glacier won’t let him do it.įrake took the afternoon to storyboard the opening sequence, which had Scrat ultimately getting squashed by a huge mammoth foot. Peter went through a stack of drawings that he’d been working with characters we hadn’t used yet, and he pulled out this sketch of a squirrel that he had made at the Museum of Natural History. Well, who should it be chasing? It should obviously be the smallest character we can come up with. What about the ice age would be a character that we could use? We thought a glacier could be chasing somebody. I wanted to start the film comedically, and I thought maybe to get some ice on the screen at the beginning we should make the environment itself into a character. It was fall and Manny’s going north, against the grain, and we weren’t gonna see any snow until act two. In the script, there was a migration happening. It came from my wanting to start Ice Age differently. It was a meeting that took on a life of its own and took over the afternoon, as I remember. Ice Age, which had five theatrical installments, originated Scrat-the character who eventually became their studio mascot and corporate logo.Ĭhris Wedge, Blue Sky Studios co-founder and director: The very first day of Scrat was me, Peter de Sève and Bill Frake. The company reoriented towards making CG features: From 2000 to 2019, Blue Sky Studios released 13 theatrical CG animated films (taking in more than $5B at the box office and earning a pair of Oscar noms for Best Animated Feature) and a myriad of shorts and television specials, all produced inside the unassuming walls of a bland corporate park building in Greenwich, Connecticut.
However, the trajectory of the company changed when Bunny, by co-founder Chris Wedge, won the 1998 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. They retained the creative team and had them build complex VFX shots for a host of Fox movies.
Chris wedge bunny full#
Since the close of Blue Sky Studios happened so quickly, Paste reached out to the creative team behind Ice Age: Scrat Tales-including Chris Wedge, Anthony Nisi and Michael Knapp-to get the full story of how this Scrat-focused entry, which was supposed to signify a new chapter for the company, became its coda.Ĭo-founded in 1987 by a collective of tech orphans after the shut down of MAGI, an early computer visual effects company that worked on Tron, Blue Sky Studios was conceived to be a turnkey operation that would produce creative visuals for their clients in-house, using their proprietary software CGI Studio.Īfter making a name for itself creating computer animation for clients like M&Ms and MTV, Blue Sky saw 20th Century Fox’s VFX company, VIFX, acquire a majority interest in 1997.
Chris wedge bunny series#
The six-short series is a bittersweet swan song for Blue Sky Studios, as it features Scrat, the tunnel-visioned, saber-toothed squirrel who opened their very first film, Ice Age, and now brings the creative entity to its close. Ironically, the last endeavor produced with its creatives under its own roof, Ice Age: Scrat Tales, premieres April 13, almost exactly a year later, on Disney+. But its entire history came to an unexpected, grinding halt on April 10, 2021, when the studio’s new owner, The Walt Disney Company, closed Blue Sky forever. But for 34 years, Blue Sky Studios was also part of that vanguard of technology and creativity, operating as both a pioneer and an outlier in the computer animation world.
When you think of the founding studios of modern CG animation, Pixar and DreamWorks Animation immediately come to mind.
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