In just 10 years, Tim Miller has nurtured Blur from a small beachside vfx house to a high-powered CG facility on the brink of a feature breakout. All images © Blur Studios. All rights reserved.

It’s been a decade since Blur Studio opened its CG facility in the Southern California beach town of Venice. Its founders had left jobs in the high-end Unix business of visual effects to set up a PC-based facility of their own. They set up a 3ds Max pipeline, (a move that was more daring then than it seems now) regularly made contributions to the growing body of Max-compliant software, (like the Brazil renderer) and built a base of loyal clients.

In the last couple of years, success has led to major changes. Blur’s still near Venice Beach — though in a building four times bigger that houses a staff of 75. And Blur’s creative director and co-founder Tim Miller, along with co-founder David Stinnett, are still proponents of Max, running a pipeline that’s optimized for doing full 3D character animation with notable speed. But what’s especially striking is how Blur has parlayed its success as a work-for-hire shop into a place where the art of animated short films is flourishing. The studio’s first forays, Aunt Luisa (2002) and Rockfish (2003) were short-listed for Oscar consideration, and Blur again accomplished this in 2004 — twice — with Gopher Broke and In the Rough.

However, when Gopher Broke landed an Oscar nomination as best animated short film, Miller found himself seated on the aisle of the Kodak Theatre alongside the film’s writer-director Jeff Fowler. It was the culmination of a long-developing effort to position Blur as a creator of original animated films, and Miller, as executive producer, saw it as a big step toward Blur’s ultimate goal of making animated features. Now there’s buzz on the street that Vin Diesel’s company, One Race Films, is partnering with Blur to do a feature version of Miller’s Rockfish, so VFXWorld asked him to explain how Blur has managed its success so far.

Ellen Wolff: You seem to be following a tradition pioneered by Pixar in the 1980s to build animation talent through original shorts. How did you manage to produce two films this past year?

Tim Miller: Those two shorts represent about $1.6 million dollars worth of time at Blur’s rate, so it’s not insignificant. Both required about 800 man-days. Two guys trying to do it in their spare time couldn’t have done it, so we scheduled the stuff. I wondered if I’d have the fire in the belly to turn away paying work, but oddly enough it was never an issue. We had the bandwidth to do two this year. Some of the funds felt like ‘Monopoly money’ because we’d come off our Disney project, plus we had some guys with time on their hands. [Blur created nearly 40 minutes of animation for Mickey’s Twice Upon a Christmas, bringing famous 2D characters into the 3D realm for the first time.]

We also had more character animators than I could really sell without a big character animation project. Some studios would let those people go, but that hasn’t been Blur’s model — and as long as I can make it not Blur’s model I won’t let people go.

Short-listed for an Oscar in 2003, Rockfish may provide Miller with an entrée to the big screen as a director.

EW: How many animators do you currently have?

TM: About 60. I’ve handpicked everyone here. Maybe I pick people who like the same stuff I do, so after awhile it probably gets a little incestuous! But we have virtually no turnover — I think we’ve lost one guy to Imageworks and a couple to ILM. In L.A. that’s saying something.

EW: How do you select the subjects for the short films that you do?

TM: People submit ideas. We get about 33 separate ideas each year — several people put in two, so we probably have about 14 people putting in ideas. We’d like to do two shorts — one comedy film like Gopher Broke and, one sci-fi/action film like Rockfish. The supervisors vote — we have 20 people who’ve earned that title. The reason for that is that I trust them to know if something is achievable. It’s a right that they’ve earned.

So it’s not a democracy — it’s more like a plutocracy. But I don’t worry about favoritism. Jeff Fowler (who made his directing debut with Gopher Broke) wasn’t a supervisor at the time and he won. Jeff has been here two years — we brought him in as a character animator for the Disney project.

If an idea doesn’t win one year, it can be submitted again. The way that our shorts program works is that Blur only owns a film if we actually make it.

After doing four shorts, we know the drill. The goal behind all of this is to have people see that we can tell stories by ourselves — that we can do the whole gamut; from coming up with the story to the character design to the directing and the look of the final piece. Now we have this dual pipeline where we can do the family stuff as well as spaceships blowing up!