Computer Graphics World

May/June 2013

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CCGI GI Blue Sky Studios pulls out all the stops to create a rousing animated film set in a fantasy landscape that looks real enough to be someone's backyard, if that someone were very tiny The director of Epic is Chris Wedge, a voice actor, director, producer, and the vice president of creative development at Blue Sky Studios, which he co-founded. His film credits trace back to the 1982 Tron, for which he was a principal animator. Computer graphics geeks will know him as the director of the short film "Balloon Guy" (1987) and the animation director for the 1996 live-action film Joe's Apartment. In 1999, Wedge won an Oscar for his short film "Bunny," and showed the computer graphics world they could use radiosity in moving pictures. Three years later, in 2002, he received an Oscar nomination for directing Blue Sky's animated feature Ice Age, which showed people that CG films could be as wacky as Looney Tunes. Since then, he directed the 2005 Robots, has been executive producer of nine animated short films and features at Blue Sky, and has given the Ice Age character Scrat his voice in features and shorts. Wedge's latest animated feature film, Epic, shrinks a teenager and sends her deep into a CG forest where she bands together with tiny characters to save their world – and ours. Here, Wedge discusses Epic with CGW Contributing Editor Barbara Robertson. When did you start working on Epic? It's been in production for almost four years, and before that, I was developing it for about 10 years. We've been working on it for a long time. It was in development hell for a few years because we wanted to push the limits beyond what other people wanted to do. I felt we could have made this movie four or five years ago, but that wasn't the time for it. In what way are you pushing the limits? It's an action/adventure movie. It doesn't roll out like a cartoon. The pace of the story telling and the pace of the cutting, the decision about where to put cameras, is more akin to a liveaction movie than an animated film. From the beginning, it was about this place, the woods we know, but an alien world when you get close. And inside that world, we have a crisp, big, action movie. ■ EPIC 'S tiny characters live in a CG microcosm. And that world is spectacular. What inspired the style? We always try to hide the computer's hand as much as we can – not that we're making apologies for the technology – but we want to make worlds look as natural as we can, to push the look to the limits of naturalism. Radiosity was part of the tool kit we used years ago for 'Bunny' to make that natural look. Since then, we've developed other ways. But, in Epic, it has more to do with the choice of the world and our design approach. We chose to use something more like the illustration style used 100 years ago by NC Wyeth and Arthur ©2013 TWENTIETh CENTuRy Fox FIlM CoRp. BluE Sky STudIoS. 16 ■ CGW M ay / J u ne 2 0 1 3

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