#Chris meledandri chris wedge movie
#Chris meledandri chris wedge software

When Bunny won the 1999 Academy Award for best animated short, Wedge had some Hollywood leverage. The poignant kitchen drama about an old rabbit and an expiring moth amazed the animation industry with its rich, lifelike detail, warm lighting and pathos. Wedge and his crew indulged themselves with silent short Bunny, which took eight years to finish. After Aliens 4, Fox invested in Blue Sky, hoping that it would deliver more cool visual effects. Blue Sky got by doing commercials, MTV logos, dancing cockroaches (Joe's Apartment) and swimming aliens (Aliens 4).

#Chris meledandri chris wedge software

It took two years alone to write Blue Sky's signature software for tracing light rays. One year, Wedge earned $9,000, another, zero. It was five years before anyone at Blue Sky 'earned a living wage,' says Wedge. In 1987, Wedge pooled his life savings with five Magi refugees to start their own CG animation house, Blue Sky. 'This was going to be the way people were going to make movies in the future,' he says.

Before the advent of Power PCs, punching commands into piles of data cards was frustrating, but Wedge was excited by the possibilities for these primitive 3-D computer images. 'They were making images with the data.'Īt Magi, Wedge helped to create the pioneering digital effects for Disney's 1982 cyberfantasy, Tron. 'What they were doing was similar to the way light rays worked,' says Wedge. The piece helped to land him a job at the fledgling computer animation house, Magi, run by a band of nuclear-particle scientists. He never studied animation he lingered in college for six years to finish his student film, a seven-minute stop-motion short about a wizard who thinks he makes the sun rise. Long gone are the days when Wedge shot stop-motion miniatures in his upstate New York basement, sent his exposed film to Kodak for processing, and then hovered every afternoon by his mailbox to check what came back. (Fox bought Blue Sky in 1999.) 'Chris Wedge has been around this medium as long as I have,' says Pixar's John Lasseter, the man behind Toy Story.

'For me, part of the fascination with making animation is you go to a place it's a complete immersion in someone else's fantasy.'įox hopes that Wedge, 47, and Blue Sky, his 18-year-old computer-animation company, will do for them what John Lasseter and Pixar (Finding Nemo, The Incredibles) did for Disney. 'We got incredibly uptight about every paint chip, scratch and weather-worn rooftop,' says Wedge.

#Chris meledandri chris wedge movie

The aerial chases in Robot City are more exhilarating than a Disney theme-park ride and the detail in the movie rewards repeated viewing. In a brilliant homage to Buster Keaton, the magnetised Rodney runs down the street, pursued by metal objects. Their nemesis, rising executive Ratchet (Greg Kinnear) looks like a sleek steel Mercedes-Benz and works with Cappy (Halle Berry), a fleet rollerskater who comes to the aid of Rodney and his pal Fender (Robin Williams) when they are chased by giant roving magnets. Rodney turns out to be clever at fixing all his new city friends, who can't afford costly upgrades. The film's plucky inventor hero, Rodney Copperbottom (voiced by Ewan McGregor) leaves his parents in Rivet Town to make his fortune in Robot City.