“There are some awesome performances in ICE Age 2, that I’m amazed we were able to achieve in such a rushed schedule”
With a BIG success of ICE AGE 1 what were the really terrifying challenges and fears of making Ice Age 2?
I think anytime you make a sequel, you have to have a reason to revisit these characters, and come up with something fresh instead of just re-doing jokes from the original film. I think Carlos Saldanha, the director of the film, came up with an exciting but sweet story that gave us a chance to enjoy Manny, Sid and Diego again.
As for fears, I would say that I wasn’t really scared from an animation perspective: we had the experience of the first film to draw from, but there was definitely a desire to improve on our own work. We didn’t want to go back and just stay with what we already know – we tried to take these guys to new places in terms of movement, always going for something funny and endearing, while maintaining the character traits we established in the first movie.
As an animation supervisor, I was expecting the Scrat to be the toughest character for our team (made up mostly of new people who had only worked on ‘Robots’) to get the hang of. He definitely wasn’t easy, but it turns out that Sid was the toughest for us to keep in character. We’ve gotten better technology and better animation tools, and the animators want to stretch their muscle, but so much of how we animated Sid on the first film was about design constraints and limitations of the technology. We had to hold ourselves back, just a little bit. We still pushed it and went for good stuff, but we were careful to veer to far off the beaten path because we wanted him to feel like he did in the original ‘Ice Age’.
How did you manage to get such fabulous performances and acting from Sid and the Possums?
The Possums and Sid are great characters to work with, because they have equal parts physical comedy and funny dialogue. For the dialogue, it all stars with the writers and actors, and they did some amazing work. John Leguizamo is great at giving the animators awesome performances to draw from, and Sean William Scott and Josh Peck did some really cool stuff as the possum brothers. Animators take their initial cues from the actors reads, and then amplify and invent performances around them. We shot a lot of reference footage of our animators acting out different ideas, and we studied footage of the actors during recording sessions to help with subtle nuances. But the animators deserve a ton of credit for creating the appealing, likable traits that these characters have; we have a very talented team of passionate, funny people who bring so much energy and enthusiasm to the project – these types of movies need people like that to create characters that people remember.
Ellie thinks that she is a possum. Why did u choose a possum…Which other animals had u listed before u finalized on a possum….?
Well, I’d like to say that I had some involvement in that decision, but that idea belongs to the writers and director. But I have to admit I was scratching my head when I first heard it, and wondered how we’d be able to pull it off. But I think it worked out great!
Which are your favorite scenes from both parts of ICE AGE, please elaborate on them?
From the first Ice Age, my two favorite parts are the opening sequence when we first meet the Scrat, and the sequence in the caves where we learn about Manny’s past. The Scrat is a fun character to watch and we really broke the mold when it came to what people were expecting out of a computer animated movie. No one had gone as cartoony or wild with character movement before Ice Age, so it was a breakthrough moment. And I’m a sucker for emotional stuff, and the cave sequence was all done through Manny’s eyes, and subtle movement. We got inside his head and really felt for him.
In Ice Age 2, my favorite sequences would be Scrat in Heaven, and Sid and the MiniSloths. Scrat in Heaven was just such a crazy idea, and turned out so beautifully. Sid and the MiniSloths was a sequence I supervised and it was a lot of fun to work with Carlos and the animators to build the dance performances and Sid’s ‘call and response’ moment.
Besides living up to the expectations created by part 1, what were the most daunting creative challenges for you as animation supervisor on ICE AGE 2?
Mostly I just wanted us to improve our craft, and show people what we’re capable of. We spent a lot of time working with the team to make sure we had characters that moved like they did from the first movie, only better. We’re better animators now than we were four years ago. We cringe when we watch our older films because as artists you tend to focus on what you could’ve done better. I wanted this film to be as close to perfect as we could make in 8 months, and I think we came really close! There are some awesome performances in the film that I’m amazed we were able to achieve in such a rushed schedule. So consistency and schedule were probably the toughest elements of the production. The creative aspect of animation; getting the animators to help us come up with good ideas, jokes, etc, was easy because we have such a good group.
Since ICE AGE 1, technological advances that have they impacted the work flow in context of the feature being completed in a short time of just 8 months?
Movie making hasn’t changed that much in four years, I think. We have faster computers, but then we make more complicated characters and environments, so it sort of cancels itself out. I think maybe as a studio we’ve learned a few things from our previous two movies, and we had great production management on this film. Carlos and Lori Forte (the producer) worked out the story so tightly before we got to animation, mostly because there was little room for error. But their solid leadership probably had the biggest impact on how we were able to make it as quickly as we did. I hope it doesn’t become the standard! As an animator I would like a slightly longer schedule to allow for a little more creative searching while we’re working on performances, and the ability to finesse the work to a highly polished state. But I think that’s stuff only the artists really notice – the general public probably won’t judge the animation as harshly as we do!
Were the animators involved in character development and story meetings (like Disney used to) or simply handed scenes to animate?
Not as much as our previous films; most of the story work on ‘Ice Age 2’ was being done while we were finishing up animation for ‘Robots’, so we were really too busy to be much use. But the crew was invited to several studio screenings to give opinions and notes to Carlos and Lori about the film, and I think it definitely helped them find out what was working and what wasn’t working.
In terms of character development, the animators absolutely helped develop the physical nature of the characters, but not as much of the story-driven elements of the characters. All of that work was done in the story department.
What was your daily schedule while working on the movie?
As a supervisor, the first part of my morning is spent in sweatbox with the director reviewing work from the previous day. We give the animators notes, suggestions, and help to get the director what he needs for the film. After sweatbox it’s usually a long day of meetings which can be anything from looking at layout for sequences coming into animation in the next few weeks to scheduling shots for the animation team, and about a million other things animation-related. When I’m not in meetings though, I’m usually out on the floor working with the animators, looking at shots on their desktop and offering suggestions or direction.
Please share some of the guidelines and style-sheets you had for animating some of the main characters?
In Ice Age-1, you have used a different modeling technique, have you used the same technique for this time or is it something innovative again?
I wish I could speak more intelligently about the modeling of the Ice Age 2 characters, but honestly I’m not familiar with the newer tools they used for the film! My expertise is limited to character performance I’m afraid!
The backgrounds in Ice Age 2 are beautifully detailed…some comments
I don’t have the knowledge to get into how so much of the environments were created, but I can say this: For the first film, we were a small studio trying to make a good film on a tight budget, so stylistically I think Chris Wedge and the design team had to make things as simple as possible, which dictated a lot of decisions in terms of simplicity. For the new film, we have a more experienced crew, some better technology and a little more money, so Carlos and the designers were probably afforded a little more flexibility. But stylistically the two films are actually very similar; the trees and rocks and sets have the same quirky feeling to their structure that was used in the first film. I think they just took it to a new level (and there was more of it). Also, the first film was about a frozen world. The new film is about a world unthawing – lots of greenery, grass and water. It needs to look lusher than the first movie. I personally love the look of the backgrounds, they don’t necessarily look photo-real, but they definitely feel real, which is much more important in my opinion.
