Blue Sky Studios recently held an open house at their White Plains, New York studio to promote the December 9 DVD/Blu-ray release of HORTON HEARS A WHO, coming December 9 from Fox Home Ent.
Visitors were treated to a behind-the-scenes look at the film's production, courtesy of Steve Martino, half (along with Jimmy Hayward) of HORTON's directing duo. Accompanied by production stills, concept art and animation tests, Martino outlined the film's gestation, from his and Hayward's first meeting with Dr. Seuss's widow Audrey close to five years ago, to its final audio mix. "I'll let you in on some dirty laundry," Martino confided. "In our first animation test, Horton looked ugly," with spiky eyelashes above oversized eyes and a huge trunk that covered the lower half of his face; "we called that version 'Baby Gasmask Horton.'"
Near the end of his presentation, Martino fielded attendee's questions; asked whether Blue Sky had more Seuss adaptations in the works his response was a noncommittal, "Nothing we can announce. I'm not involved with anything, but I'd love to work on more Dr. Seuss."
During his talk Martino often acted out Horton's actions as he described them, an in-person version of one of the supplemental features on the two-disc package. In it, reference video shot by the animators themselves performing as their characters was juxtaposed side-by-side with the finished scenes from the film. "These bonus features let you see the acting process with our animators, the little things that happened during making of movie that I think are fun to share with the DVD audience. I kind of learned about the movie making process watching those sort of things on TV," Martino said, referring to the behind-the-scenes specials Walt Disney once presented on his Sunday night TV series.
"A lot of the things that we found special about this picture made it onto the special features," Martino said. "HORTON's not the first computer-animated movie; we don't have to tell the whole story about how these things are made. We tended to focus on technical challenges and what in this picture was unique for us," like rendering 800,000 hairs on the flower the speck containing Whoville rests upon.
The two-disc version of HORTON also includes a slew of 'how we did it' production features, interviews with the film's creators, educational segments on real-life elephants and pro-environmental activities. Both it and the single disc version feature a new, eight-minute short starring ICE AGE's Sid the Sloth, a promotion for the studio's upcoming ICE AGE: DAWN OF THE DINOSAURS, due out next summer. In SURVIVING SID, the common sense-challenged character leads a group of youthful prehistoric critters on a disastrous camping trip. "It was directed by Karen Disher, a lead story artist on HORTON along with Galen Tan Chu, one of our lead animators. Doing shorts is wonderful opportunity for up and coming talent at Blue Sky to show what they're capable of" in terms of taking on feature-length assignments down the road.
Like any successful company, Blue Sky has grown. Today its staff is spread out over three floors of a generic suburban office building, leading to a lot of elevator rides for the company's artists and executives. This past January the company announced it would relocate seven miles north and across the New York border into Greenwich Connecticut, a move scheduled to take place over the Christmas holiday. "This is huge for us. When I came to Blue Sky we all fit on one floor. We're not as big as a Pixar or a DreamWorks. That's what's so great about Blue Sky -- we're a little bit more of a family.
"That's the spirit of this place, the stumbling into one another in the hall or passing by someone's desk, and going 'Ohmigod that's really cool looking, what are you doing?' Now that we'll be on one floor in one space, we'll be back in the physical spirit of what we've always had here."
--By Joe Strike
