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www.postmagazine.com 29 POST NOVEMBER 2015 hree years ago, the team at Blue Sky Studios (blueskystudios. com) was just finishing up work on Ice Age: Continental Drift, when it was approached by the family of "Peanuts" creator Charles M. Schulz. "Craig and Bryan had seen our work on Horton Hears a Who!," recalls Blue Sky director Steve Martino. There wasn't a specific story in mind, but the team recognized the incredible opportunity that would come in turning the beloved characters from the famous 2D comic strip — and cel-animated holiday spe- cials — into more contemporary 3D/CG representations. "Everyone has a connection to these characters," says Martino. "There was a tremendous amount of pressure to not screw it up!" GOOD GRIEF! It had to be done right, he says of the 20th Century Fox film, knowing the first images would fall under incredible scrutiny. While Schulz died back in 2000, his work lives on and is celebrated at the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, CA, which his wife Jean opened up to the studio, giving them access to more than 50 years of "Peanuts" archives, including a digital library. A lot of time was spent in Santa Rosa, developing storyboards and a script for what would ultimately become The Peanuts Movie — an entirely-CG, stereo 3D film that opened in theaters nation- wide on November 6th. Martino says development was done in a traditional manner, using markers and paper, rather than the Wacom Cintiq tablets Blue Sky would normally employ. The script and storyboards would be refined out west, and then at Blue Sky in Connecticut, they would be cut into story reels. The car- toonist's son, Craig Schulz, even came out to Blue Sky, where he shared stories of his dad — lovingly referred to as "Sparky" — with the studio's team of 400. In taking the strip's familiar characters — Snoopy, Woodstock, Charlie Brown, Sally, Lucy, Linus, Pig Pen and the little red-haired girl, among others — into the 3D world, Martino says the directive was to "find the pen line." "The on-going mantra," says Martino, was that the look had to have "a hand- made quality, even though they were using different tools." Charles M. Schulz, says Martino, was a master of his format, and knew how to manage it both beautifully and aestheti- cally. Blue Sky would be challenged with designing the 3D characters, their move- ments and props, as well as the world they reside in, which ultimately resembled the simple Minnesota town where Schulz grew up, including its indigenous trees. Nash Dunnigan is an art director at Blue Sky and says the 15 human charac- ters designed for the film were based on known angles from the print comic strip and animated holiday specials. "If it feels wrong, it feels wrong imme- diately," says Dunnigan of the cast's 3D representations. "So many people loved Charlie Brown," adds Sang Sung Lee, lead character designer. The studio, he says, did numerous tests to get attributes as simple as Charlie Brown's single line of hair to look correct. "We never focus on a character from an unfamiliar angle," adds lead set de- signer Jon Townley. CHARACTERS With more than 18,000 strips for ref- erence, the team was able to look at character variations from throughout the 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s. Snoopy received considerable scrutiny, and ultimately the team put together a "per- fect assembly of the character" — one that the team at Blue Sky unanimously agreed represented his most pleasing proportions: a perky tummy and loaf- of-bread feet. Audiences, they believe, should have the same nostalgic reaction when seeing him on-screen. Blue Sky character development supervisor Sabine Heller lead a team that created models and rigs. "The design," says Heller, "was set by Charles Schulz." Their task "was to interpret" how the 2D would be represented in 3D. Models, she says, were much harder to rig than one might initially have thought, considering the characters' simple shapes. For example, if a character were to be shown in a profile, with their hands raised and mouth open, viewers should not see the arm through the space of the open mouth. Instead, the rig would have to be routed behind the character's head and out of view, making the model more complex. Character heads also connect at different points to the neck, based on the angle the head is turned. A study of Schulz's work showed he used six different character views throughout the course of the comic strip. Keeping the hand-made feel was also a challenge, as computers often eliminate natural inconsistencies. And for motion, the jitter often illustrated in the comic T The artists at Blue Sky were able to reference decades of material created by Charles M. Schulz, helping them to develop Peanuts' contemporary look.