#CHRIS MELEDANDRI CHRIS WEDGE MOVIE#
#CHRIS MELEDANDRI CHRIS WEDGE MAC#

When I see a lot of movies, animated or real-life ones, I’m always bewildered by the lack of ideas just on simple dialogue, like: shot-countershot-shot-countershot, but I try to find an idea out of these shots like, maybe the character is saying something but is more interested in that coffee cup she’s holding.Īnd the weight I’m putting on the animation team is to go beyond the cliché, and I’m going to cite one just because it annoys me: when you see a character who’s embarrassed rubbing his neck or rubbing his arm.

Whether it be a directorial camera idea, staging idea or animated idea, I try to push everyone in each department to find that idea that will make us if not original, at least interesting. Pierre Coffin: Every time I get an individual shot, I try to put an idea in the shot.

#CHRIS MELEDANDRI CHRIS WEDGE MOVIE#

To me, if you can get your movie working as a story reel – a bunch of crude drawings – that is such an indication you are on the right track.Ĭartoon Brew: How do you approach a scene once it is ready to go into production? So, there are some guys that can really nail that.

One of our guys, Eric Favela, who was just nominated for an individual achievement award at the Annies for boarding, is one of those guys. That said, I don’t think everybody is as good at it it’s just like animators, some guys are good at action staging – there’s a couple of the guys that are just so funny, you really can get a suggestion of performance. And I do think you can get suggestions of performance out of storyboards. So, the remote thing has been helpful in knowing if we have something that works sooner rather than later, because you can take the drawings and get a sense of what you’ve got by just flipping through them.Ĭartoon Brew: How much suggestion of a character’s performance do you get out of the storyboard process?Ĭhris Renaud: There are some storyboard artists who are so good with their performance in the boards that it really helps the playability of the reels. We had some guys who had worked on Family Guy and some that had contributed to The Simpsons, and so with a range of people we tried to build the team.Īs much as pitching boards is fun, I do think that sometimes it can be misleading because you are pulled in by the pitch of this very charismatic, funny storyboard artist, and then when you put the drawings into edit, you’re like, ‘My god, this doesn’t work’. But we had to storyboard it first, so we looked for talent, knowing that there were great people in the United States who had a lot of experience.

#CHRIS MELEDANDRI CHRIS WEDGE MAC#

How did this arrangement come about?Ĭhris Renaud: When I left Blue Sky and went to Illumination, the discussion was, ‘Well, how do we do this?’ And very quickly Chris Melendandri partnered with a man named Jacques Bled (current CEO of Illumination Mac Guff) and Pierre Coffin, my directing partner with the company here in France, to get the first Despicable Me made. Cartoon Brew: While Illumination is based in Los Angeles, and the animation is produced in Paris, your storyboard team is primarily freelancers working remotely.

Chris meledandri chris wedge