Surf's Up Directors Speak

Over at Animated Views, there's a cool interview with the directors of Surf's Up, Chris Buck and Ash Brannon. The best part of the interview is where they talk about how the other penguin movies affected their movie, namely March of the Penguins and Happy Feet. Here's an excerpt:

When we started Surf’s Up, we had no idea about the other movies. I know people find that hard to believe. But even though the animation industry is a small thing, we don’t always know what everyone is doing.

Of course, March of the Penguins is live-action and a documentary. Happy Feet – you know, I don’t even know the genesis of that. But it may have started as live-action – sort of a Babe-like thing that George Miller was doing. Of course, George Miller runs in different circles in the animation world. So we didn’t really know about Happy Feet until probably we were a couple of years into our production.

We had already built models, and our story was already set, at least the basics of it. It wasn’t like we could just say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to change the animals, because someone else is doing something with penguins!’ It was a matter of, ‘Well, we’ll just run our course, and hopefully there’ll all very different movies.’ A good thing is that people like penguins!

Go check out the entire interview at Animated-Views.com

Behind the Scenes of Surf's Up

Over at AWN.com they have a cool new behind-the-scenes look at Surf's Up, the cool new movie by Sony Pictures Animation! It has some sweet production artwork, so go check it out! Here's a brief excerpt from the article:

"It's important to understand that, as with most animated films, nothing you see in Surf's Up actually exists. Everything, from vast landscapes to the most minute detail, had to be conceived, designed, and created from scratch: characters, locations, sets, props, weather, lighting and, of course, the waves. It was the job of the visual development department to "design" the film. At any given time, we had a crew of about 10 highly talented artists, working for the better part of three years. Of course, we also worked in tandem with the other production departments (story, look development, vfx, modeling, animation, texturing, matte painting and lighting) to keep up with the huge amount of designs necessary to feed the production pipeline. Once everything was designed, it was up to the Imageworks team lead by digital supervisor Rob Bredow to figure out how to bring it all to life. When embarking on the design for an animated film, one of the first questions we ask ourselves is: What is the "look of the film"? There are a lot of options: cartoony, realistic, stylized, primitive, retro, graphic, cutesy, high tech, wacky, dimensional, flat, etc."

Sony Pictures Animation and AWN Present SURF'S UP