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Carlos Saldanha on Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
By Fred Topel | Image property of 20th Century Fox
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
Carlos Saldanha Goes to the Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
“Yeah, it looks like that’s the way to go,” said Carlos Saldanha. “We were excited and surprised when we decided to do 3D. This was like a couple years back, three years back actually that we started to say it’s going to be in 3D. It’s going to be our first movie in 3D and what is going to be 3D? Then there was this huge vision from the studio saying that 3D is the next big thing. Everybody’s making movies in 3D. We’re talking about three years ago. Then, say, three years from now, there will be way more theaters showing 3D so if you don’t have a movie in 3D, you don’t have space. You have to. We thought let’s do it. Let’s face that challenge and it was great. It was a lot of fun to pursue that new technology just to make it work. I was very curious to see, it would be great to create the ice age and be able to be a little bit of a part of it, feel like you can touch the characters.”
3D did not require anything new of the animators. “It’s a post process. After we finish animation, after we render, we render what they call the two eyes, the left and the right eye. That creates a completion of depth. It’s more of a post process that we do. We have to rerender the frames, we have to recreate the frames, integrate all the layers and the idea of it. The difference is for our creative process. It was more when we did the 3D, we had just to be more aware of composition and camera placement in animations because there were some tricky rules, like don’t break the side of the frame. Try to keep everything in the frame, wide lenses and flat lenses, try to be aware of those things. So it didn’t change the way we created the story but it changed a little bit of the way that we perceived.”
The story introduces a few new elements into the Ice Age world too. They have dinosaurs, existing in a mythical realm that explains how they can be alive in the ice age. “When we knew we were going to do a dinosaur, we always start with the same premise. Oh my God, there were no dinosaurs in the ice age, how are we going to make this dinosaur? So when we went for the designs of them, we said it needs to be an Ice Age design dinosaur. We use the same character designer, Peter Deseve, who’s an amazing artist who did all the characters for Ice Age. We brought him to try what would be a dinosaur for the Ice Age movies. What would be that design? And he came up with a bunch of fun designs, because we want it to be unique to us. We didn’t want it to be just another dinosaur movie. It’s an Ice Age with dinosaurs movie so we wanted to make those characters come to life in our world we created. Also, we play a little bit about the dinosaurs in this movie is not so much just a creature, just coming in to destroy everything. We have mother dinosaur, we have the babies.”
They also added Buck, the hunter who leads the gang to rescue Sid. “This whole thing about Simon Pegg as Buck and the white dinosaur, Rudy, which is sort of like the Ahab and the whale kind of thing. So there’s a lot of stuff we tried to put into these dinosaurs that make them unique to our movie. And Simon was a wonderful addition to the family. It’s great because every movie that we make, like the first one we had this dysfunctional family that got together. We have like Sid, Manny and Diego coming together to become a family at the end of the movie. The second movie, we already had the family. Manny, Sid and Diego were buddies, were all there. The family got expanded with the addition of Ellie, Latifah and the possums, Crash and Eddie. So the family got expanded so now we got a bigger family. So now we go to the third one, it’s like okay now we have a huge family. What’s next? We brought in Buck which was a great little character, a swashbuckling kind of fun to. I love his movies Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz. I always love that, his comedic timing and his voice, the quality of his voice, his energy I think worked great with these guys. When we bring somebody into the family, it’s like bringing your in-laws. You have to see how everybody feels around it, so we have to listen to all the voices with that voice in the middle to see if that voice belongs to the family, and he belonged.”
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs opens to theaters on July 1st.
For the posters, trailers and more movie info, go to the Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of 20th Century Fox
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