A major animation studio in Greenwich, Connecticut? Who knew? Well, at least some aficionados are well aware that Blue Sky Studios, creators of the Ice Age franchise, is the East Coast's phenomenally successful answer to those California stalwarts Disney, Pixar and DreamWorks Animation. On Tuesday, this writer enjoyed the opportunity to see firsthand what goes on at the lively headquarters of the Fox-affiliated company that has also brought us Robots, Horton Hears a Who!, Rio and this summer's Epic, which debuts on Blu-ray August 20.
Chris Wedge, co-founder of Blue Sky and the director of Epic and the first Ice Age, was there to
Epic production designer Greg Couch, director Chris Wedge and art director Mike Knapp
greet the visiting press and conduct one of the tours of the studio's various creative departments. Housed in the former headquarters of Alcoa, a huge complex accommodating 500 employees and surrounding a rectangular courtyard, Blue Sky gives its workers free rein to decorate their spaces however whimsically they want: from a mini-Japanese tea house to a Dr. Seuss library to the "Drunken Clam" bar from "Family Guy."
Our tour was conducted by the genial producer of Horton Hears a Who! and Rio, Bruce Anderson. Warren Leonhardt explained what the story department does: Even more than other filmmaking disciplines, animation is truly a collaborative process in which many people finesse the story and scripts and contribute ideas for gags, gestures and individual moments. "Our job is to be wrong as fast as possible," Leonhardt said of the trial-and-error system. Ultimately, his department presents a "rough pass" of the entire film, and he demonstrated how by acting out (quite well!) an action sequence from Epic which came magically to life from a series of black-and-white drawings sped up on his monitor. Some 6,800 panels were created for that sequence, "most of which you'll never see," since the finished sequence clocked in with around 1,200.
Interestingly, Leonhardt believes 2D animation offered more opportunities for surrealism, thanks to the unfettered nature of drawing; he cited the "Pink Elephants on Parade" hallucination sequence in the 1941 Disney classic Dumbo as a tour de force it would be difficult to pull off with computer animation.
Next stop was sculpting with lead sculptor Vicki Saulls. The University of California at Santa Cruz 
Vicki Saulls with Chris Wedge (photos by Diane Bondareff/Invision for 20th Century Fox)
graduate joined Blue Sky in 2005 after a successful career as an artist with permanent installations in places like San Francisco's Union Square and Golden Gate Park. Saulls fabricates gorgeously detailed clay maquettes of Blue Sky characters which are then translated to the computer realm.
Germany native Sabine Heller is senior character technical director and oversees a process called "rigging," or as she explained it, " putting the anatomy into the character." Heller provides the ultimately invisible "strings" that allow the animators to manipulate their characters on the computer screen like puppets. Heller showed how that process was applied to Steven Tyler's caterpillar in Epic, a multi-limbed character that took eight months to refine compared to the usual five.
The final station stop was with senior animator David Sloss, who showed us the sophisticated computer tools that allow today's animators to make meticulous adjustments to movements and facial expressions.
Later, in the Blue Sky theatre, Epic production designer Greg Couch and art director Mike Knapp provided an illustrated look at the voluminous research that went into creating the forest settings and character designs for the tiny people, insects and animals populating the fantasy world of Epic. Much of that research, Wedge admitted, happened "right outside our windows" in Connecticut. "We don't get out much," he joked.
Blue Sky's roots are in the 1982 Disney film Tron, one of the first movies to utilize computer animation. In 1986, six people who met on that project, including Wedge, decided to form a new computer animation company called Blue Sky. Their initial coup was the development of a proprietary, highly advanced rendering software called CGI Studio. Over the next ten years, Blue Sky did computer animation for commercial clients like Gillette and Bell Atlantic, and created the CG cockroaches for the 1996 cult comedy Joe's Apartment.
In 1998, Wedge debuted his first short film, Bunny, and won the Oscar. The studio's gamble on its first computer-animated feature, 2002's Ice Age, paid off handsomely with a worldwide gross of $383 million. The three Ice Age sequels did massively better, with worldwide box office of $655 million, $886 million and $877 million.
Looking back on the early days of computer animation, Wedge contended, "If Walt Disney had been alive, there would be no such thing as Pixar... Nobody was talking about computers." The breakthrough for everyone, he noted, was that "Pixar made a great first movie," referring to 1995's Toy Story. Then, "it was a matter of the audience and the business community getting behind what we all knew we could do."
Next up for Blue Sky is Rio 2 in April 2014, and a most auspicious project, Peanuts, in November 2015. Yes, Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus and Snoopy are getting their first computer-animated feature, and Blue Sky's in-house gallery is proudly exhibiting examples of the classic comic strip on its walls. Though the company is generally mum about details, Blue Sky producer Bruce Anderson admitted the craftspeople there are still brainstorming about how to translate Charles Schulz's iconic characters to a 3D environment and reach out to a modern audience while remaining true to the cartoonist's spirit. After touring the cheerful offices of Blue Sky, we're confident its team of artists is up to the challenge.
