I’ve been deep in the wilderness of pre-production for the last year and a half at Blue Sky, so I haven’t had much artwork that can see the light of day (for the time being), but for anyone who is interested in character design and the 3d animation process, I wanted to post a link to the panel discussion I was involved in at the Society of Illustrators in Sept 2009 that I mentioned in my last post – a year and half ago (how embarrassing!). Peter de Sève (Character Designer), Michael Defeo (former head of sculpting at Blue Sky), Tony Maki (former Story Artist from Blue Sky), Galen Chu (Animation Supervisor and co-director of the short Surviving Sid) and myself gave a talk about the creation of the character Buck from Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. We discuss the character design process, the sculpting process, the fur, materials and animation processes, as well as the storyboard process that helps shape a character, and finally I go through the entire process of creating a sequence involving Buck from an art direction standpoint. It gets pretty in-depth, but provides a rare look inside our work and thought processes.

Here’s the link:

http://www.societyillustrators.org/VideoArchive.aspx

Just scroll down to September 24, 2009
A Blue Sky Evening: Creating Buck, Star of Ice Age Dawn of the Dinosaurs

There’s a treasure trove of other lectures there as well by the likes of Bill Plympton, Gary Baseman, Seymor Chwast, and many many more. Check it out!

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is now the third highest grossing film of all time overseas!!! It’s at #17 on the worldwide all time list (that’s U.S. domestic plus overseas box office).

Box Office Mojo’s article (click here)

Absolutely incredible… It must have been the beautiful set dressing. That always packs ‘em into theaters. Yep – ground cover. Can totally make or break your movie. Just a tip for the aspiring filmmaker. That one’s free.

In related news, Peter de Séve, Galen Chu, Tony Maki, Michael Defeo and myself are doing a talk at the Society of Illustrators in NYC tomorrow night – Thursday, September 24, 6:30 to 9:00 PM – about the development of Ice Age 3′s new star Buck. We’ll be talking about how his character came to be, what motivated his design, personality and performance as well breaking down the sequence which tells his backstory. Probably my favorite sequence in the film, and definitely one of the most fun challenges I’ve had the pleasure of working on in my artistic career.

We’ll be showing tons of artwork, animation clips, and examples of how a character moves through Blue Sky’s pipeline. This will be a great rare opportunity to peek behind the curtain of how Blue Sky works. Here’s the link: http://societyillustrators.org/upcoming/bluesky.cms

A month ago, Steve Mersky – one of the writers from Scientific American – came to Blue Sky to interview our R&D department regarding how science influences our artistic and technical processes at Blue Sky. Ironically, he also spoke with me about how our creative thinking and research is impacted by science. The first two episodes feature some of Blue Sky’s smartest and most brilliant minds explaining the history of the studio, and the amazingly diverse backgrounds they all came from.

In the third episode, IA3′s co-director Mike Thurmeier and our Head of Lighting Andrew Beddini chime in on their experiences, before which you can listen to me try to sound like I have any idea what I’m talking about. So sad…

Click here to check it out.

Thanks, Hugo, for pulling this thing together and for inviting me to take part. It was fun even if I was ridiculously outgunned.

Man it’s been quiet around here. 

Well, I’ve got a pretty good excuse – I swear. Other than being completely addicted to spending time with my one year old daughter and just being completely baffled at how quickly kids develop, I’ve been pretty all-consumed with getting through the rush phase of pre-production on Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. We’re still in the middle of it with about one solid month of pure insanity left for my design team, but I wanted to come up for air and say hi to anyone who still checks this blog occasionally. 

This particular Ice Age has just hit a major milestone in that our first official trailer has just been released on Apple’s website, and – Yay!!! – it is a classic Scrat trailer. I won’t spoil anything, but you can see it here… 

We still have months of work to go to get the film finished, but the movie’s coming along nicely and I’m really excited for it. I think audiences will have a lot of fun with this one. For me, the design process of a film is the most grueling (it’s kind of like drawing, algebra, sprinting, and chinese finger traps all mixed into one), and as that phase nears its end I hope to update the site more often and get back to my own personal artwork as well! Provided I have any energy left, that is.

Oh well, that’s enough run-on sentences for one night. Until next time!

- Mike