The film poster for the upcoming feature Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, out July 1 domestically.

"Believe me, our architects got plenty of input from us. We're rarely the client, so we got a chance to be pretty vocal."

For his part, Keane described how Blue Sky put their new space to work: "We have an in-house theater that seats 70, three separate screening rooms, including a stereoscopic 3-D room, multiple story pitch rooms, multiple design rooms and a sculpting room. We have eight conference rooms; before there were maybe two or three that were truly functional for the same purposes. We standardized them so they're all uniformly designed and laid out, from the projectors and equipment and how the room functions, which makes it easier for groups to transition between them. Now people have the ability to meet within their own teams without having to fight other departments for conference room time. We now have state-of-the-art video conferencing capabilities with Los Angeles, which we've already been using.

"We've been able to more than double the size of our computer room and render farm, which was a huge limitation in our old space. The floor plate there was fixed and we had surrounded the room with people in every direction, so it wasn't as if we could've just expanded it. That additional space allowed us to buy the new hardware and bring some 20 extra people to work on the stereoscopic 3-D version."

According to Keane, Blue Sky's new computer room is equipped with some 175TB of storage space. While the extra computing power gives the studio "the ability to have more overlap and get more projects into development," for the time being Blue Sky's focus will be on having the 3-D versions of its films ready for a same day release as the 2-D.

Not all of the new studio's amenities are aimed at increasing production. For starters, the building boasts a basketball court and an in-house gym -- and according to Keane, the wooded acreage surrounding the building sparks "the crew's creative energies, it provides them with views and foliage year round. Our guys have already been out jogging, they're cross-country skiing, sledding and having snowball fights. These are things we never had in the old space. It's giving back to the employees in a holistic way and keeping them happy and healthy."

While one might expect an animation studio to look as zany and uninhibited as the films rolling out of the building, the overall appearance of the space is relatively low key -- except for the animators who've made their corner of the building "into their own little world," according to Wedge. "They've built all sorts of rooms and villages; they've definitely personalized their space."

In fact, the most unusual design feature of Blue Sky's new studio came from the architect rather than anyone at the studio -- a blue swoop that runs along the ceiling, roughly from the employee lounge near the front to the 70-seat screening room further back in the studio.

"We had to make a concession for the way the HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] worked where we put our theater," Wedge admitted. "We really wanted it near the entrance so people could walk right in when we had a screening, but we had to push it further back into the building. The swoop is graphically related to the Blue Sky logo but it also leads people to the screening room, and it imposes a kind of simplicity on the field of office cubes underneath."

In his office, surrounded by models and memorabilia of Blue Sky's creations, Wedge reflected on the company's long, strange trip. "When did I join Blue Sky? On the first day. Most of us were together at MAGI. A few years went by and we decided to pool some pocket change and started our own company, then MAGI went under and we kind of rose from the ashes and started from scratch. We've grown from six people to 350 -- and more will be coming."

He paused for a moment to inventory Blue Sky's previous homes. "One, two, three, four, five -- oh man, this is the fifth place we've been." An unbelievable progression? "It's all happened so slowly, you can kind of believe it." Wedge looked out his office window at the Connecticut landscape sloping away from the building and back up again in the distance. "It's like watching… the seasons change. You can't imagine it the way that it was and can't really remember how you got here. It's a little surreal, but isn't everything?"

Joe Strike is a regular contributor to AWN. His animation articles also appear in the NY Daily News and the New York Press.