30 years of blue sky studios
Ice Age: Collision Course director Mike Thurmeier reflects on 30 years of animation
Amongst the big US animation studios, Blue Sky Studios stands out from the crowd. While it doesn’t have the budgets of Disney, Sony Pictures and Pixar, there’s a passion, a sense of experimentation and drive that ensures the US East-coast studio a place in our hearts.
This year Blue Sky Studios celebrates 30 years of filmmaking and it’s worth taking a step back to marvel at their journey. From a small advertising and VFX studio formed by friends who met on TRON to global animation house, Blue Sky has married some impressive tech (its proprietary CGI Studio renderer is one of the best in the industry) with a passion for character-driven animation. While Bunny (1998) led the way to feature films, Robots (2005) and Dr. Seuss’ Horton Hears a Who! (2008) impressed, it was the Ice Age series that took Blue Sky Studios into the global territory held by Pixar.
Ice Age: Collision Course is the new, fifth film in the successful series and director Mike Thurmeier, a long-time member of Blue Sky explains his journey which echoes the studio’s: “I came right out of school in 1997 and the industry was blowing up, and Blue Sky was small at the time, around 50 people, but there was a great spirit. It was very scrappy and good fun,” reflects Mike who says the studio continues to have its own flavour despite becoming
Blue Sky Studios was small at the time, around 50 people, but there was a great spirit... It was very scrappy and good fun!
a 500-strong organisation, “We’re the only major animation studio on the east coast, but we’re still close knit and it has a familial feel.”
Ice Age put the studio on the map and Mike says it was a great moment: “Ice Age was a lot of fun, it was the first feature film I’d worked on and not many people had worked on a feature either. It was a great feeling. It was all hands on deck, everyone was pitching in.”
Drive innovation
The next evolution of Blue Sky came with Horton Hears a Who!, explains Mike: “I loved the animation style of Horton, it was so stretchy and cartoony – we made a lot of innovations on that film; rigs were forced to be very bendy and stretchy – it was a big moment in our development, we had never done anything so flexible before.”
The films – Ice Age, Rio, Epic – all look different, but according to Mike, their “connective tissue is the renderer, it has a different look to other studios, like using a different kind of paint… it’s like the difference between oils and watercolours.”
Back in the 2000s, Blue Sky’s renderer stood out – and while other studios have caught up there’s a sense CGI Studio still has a distinct feel.
Technology is only half the story, for Mike it’s about the basics of animation and pushing the art through character, timing and humour, that sets Blue Sky apart from Disney and Dreamworks.
No character epitomises this more than Scrat: “The best Scrat scenes are the ones where you understand his one goal… he wants his acorn. Watching the little guy go through trials and failures to get his acorn is where the comedy comes from, it comes from the simplicity.”
Push the art
It’s no surprise to learn Mike grew up loving Looney Tunes over Disney, “I appreciated Disney’s great artwork, but I responded to the style of Looney Tunes, pushing poses and behaviours and timing, they did stuff that shows what you can really do with the art,” explains Mike.
Pushing that performance is something Blue Sky pride themselves on. Twice a day the team would gather in the ‘sweatbox’ to study scenes and develop the character performances, “I don’t like to personally micro manage a performance – I want animators to bring something to a scene,” says Mike.
According to Mike, there are two notes to good animation: sub text and technical execution. This can be affected by something as subtle as the timing of a blink or the pose on the eyebrows, “something that small
It’s all technology and art driving that process. I like that we’re lean and agile; I don’t want to spend seven years on a movie
can send a different message,” he says. “There are times when you get an instinct for something better for the scene, the boarder artists are great, but the characters come to life when they start moving so we say to animators ‘do your thing and bring us something great‘ – and nine times out of 10 people will come up with something.”
“At Blue Sky we say we need something better; we want to crack it in story, we want to elevate it. That‘s why you do a movie at Blue Sky, Pixar or Disney, because you have people who can deliver it – otherwise the studio’s just a factory.”
Count the cost
Beyond the art of performance, technology means animation now can do anything. Ice Age: Collision Course has more special effects than in any previous Blue Sky movie; from water simulations to electrical storms, fog banks sweeping over wooded vistas and volcano explosions. This is why Mike’s team ushered in ‘simplicity meetings’ where heads of department would calculate the cost of such scenes and brainstorm ways to make them work better or harder.
“We’d be meticulous,” says Mike. “It helped bring man days down and what happened was we had a few extra days, so that thing we had previously cut could now be done. I feel like the film we got up on screen is so much more and looks better than it deserves to, for a budget of $100 million [Pixar films come in around $200 million]. It’s amazing what we managed. It’s all technology and art driving that process. I like that we’re lean and agile – I don’t want to spend seven years on a movie, I like a three-to-four year schedule.”
This kind of thinking is at the heart of what has made Blue Sky Studios so innovative over the past 30 years. The studio offers best-practice approaches for anyone looking to develop animation. You don’t need (relatively) large budgets, instead you should have the agility and passion to find new ways to deliver performance, story and characters. Ice Age: Collision Course is in cinemas now: www.bit.ly/211-ice