Acclaimed artist/ character designer Peter de Sève, who designed the characters for “Ice Age,” returns for ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN. Having been an instrumental force in the making of the first film, he was delighted to revisit his original creations and create several new characters. Ellie was a particular new favorite. “I’m excited about having a strong, interesting female character become part of this world,” says de Sève, “because we didn’t have one in the first film. Ellie is smart, eccentric and really knows who she is – despite her identity issues!”
To create designs for possums Crash and Eddie, de Sève studied other kinds of rodents, including prairie dogs and meerkats. He designed Crash and Eddie to be tubular-shaped, and gave them as much flexibility in their movements as possible. Some of the other new characters de Sève created for ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN were designed for the first film but never used. “I was dying to get bird characters in this movie,” says de Sève. The designer got his wish with Lone Gunslinger Vulture, condors, and other winged creatures.
Even Manny, Sid and Diego got a bit of a design overhaul. “I always had in mind they would grow as characters and evolve as personalities and in their look,” says de Sève. “We gave them subtle improvements but couldn’t do major retooling because their looks had been established in ‘Ice Age.’”
De Sève worked closely with the modeling department, headed by Mike Defeo and Shaun Cusick, to continually fine-tune these and other characters. Defeo and Cusick and their team used new technologies to subtly rework Manny, Diego and Sid. First, they created clay models – perfect three-dimensional representations of the characters that were scanned into computers, creating a digital 3-D version of the sculpture.
Next came the rigging, which puts all the bones and moves on the characters, and sets up skeletal structures, musculatures, facial expressions, and controls for jaw, brow and eyelids. According to rigging supervisor Mark Piretti, several characters presented interesting rigging challenges. For example, Ellie’s big shock of hair, which hangs down close to her eyes, had the riggers developing a new hair-shaping system.
The layout department, headed by Arden Chan and Robert Cardone, provided continuity from shot to shot, making sure the show flow was working. They would often set up a scene in 3-D, which enabled the animators to know exactly what the shot should look like.
The animation department, led by three animation supervisors – James Bresnahan, Galen Tan Chu and Michael Thurmeier – dealt with anything that moved – the characters and, sometimes, even the camera. There were 60 animators on ICE AGE: THE MELTDOWN, up from 35 on the first film. The increased staffing reflected the new film’s more sophisticated effects, increased scale, and sheer volume of work. Says Galen Tan Chu: “We preserved the characters from ‘Ice Age’, putting them onto a new model, with more advanced technical controls, which could articulate the characters in exciting new ways. This film’s definitely on another level from the first one.”
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