Sid, Manfred and Diego are the results of years of planning, talent and passion. All images ™ and © 2002 Twentieth Century Fox. All rights reserved.

How does a small boutique studio such as Blue Sky Studios turn itself into a major player in the feature animation world over the course of two and half years and make a successful animated feature on time and budget? On top of all that, do it in New York? The simple answers come in the following key words: planning, talent and passion. These three tenets go hand in hand. A shortcoming in one may be able to be overcome by strengths in the other two. On Ice Age we were fortunate to have strengths in all three.

Planning
Even before the script for Ice Age crossed the threshold of Blue Sky's doors, we were already working on the pipeline and infrastructure, which would allow us to take on a project of this magnitude. The effort that goes into small projects such as commercials or contract work for features is a far cry from the amount of work that it takes to produce a full-length feature. For some perspective Ice Age has over 25 characters, approximately 35 sequences and 1400 shots. The actual length of production (the point at which we started doing animation which ended up in the film) ran about 65 weeks. The film is about 80 minutes in length -- that's a little bit over a minute per week of actual production.

Director Chris Wedge studies the storyboard for Ice Age during production. Photo: Barbara Nitke.

The math alone gets to be overwhelming. A major challenge is to figure out how to be able to produce this much work in such a short amount of time. It became clear early on that we had to convert our way of working to accommodate the scale of the project and crew. On smaller productions, it's a relatively simple matter to keep everyone busy and productive. As the scale of the project increases in scope this becomes a major challenge. It is required that each artist has all of the tools and materials necessary to work through the material quickly. In order to accomplish this, we had to structure the production pipeline to be more of an assembly line. Each department needed to function independently of one other and have a constant supply of work to do (inventory).

On small projects it's possible for different departments to work nearly simultaneously. This is not possible on a large-scale project and requires a different discipline both technically and creatively.

Manfred races to save Diego.	Creating a furry, four-legged creature like Scrat proved to be an animator's challenge.

In order to accomplish this assembly line approach we had to break apart the procedures that are normally done within a small group and redefine them so that they could be reformed into discreet production steps. Each step is sorted into departmental groups. A production manager who is responsive to a single master schedule produces the inventory of each department. This master schedule is designed to allow work to flow from one end of the production pipeline to the other.