

To accomplish this, Ludwig examined how light passes through water, ice, and crystal, and programmed those properties into the software. : 12–13 At the time, scanline renderers were prevalent in the computer graphics industry, and they required computer animators and digital artists to add lighting effects in manually : 13 Troubetzkoy and Ludwig adapted MAGI's ray tracing, algorithms which simulate the physical properties of light in order to produce lighting effects automatically.

: 13 Īt Blue Sky, Ferraro and Ludwig expanded on CGI Studio, the studio programming language they started at MAGI and began using it for animation production.
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: 12–13 After MAGI was sold to Vidmax (Canada), the six individuals-Wedge, Troubetzkoy, Ferraro, Ludwig, David Brown, and Alison Brown-founded Blue Sky Studios in February 1987 to continue the software design and produce computer animation. As MAGI's success began to decline, the company employed David Brown from CBS/Fox Video to be a marketing executive and Alison Brown to be a managing producer. : 13Īfter Tron, MAGI hired Carl Ludwig, an electrical engineer, : 13 and Mike Ferraro transferred to the film division from the Cad Cam division of MAGI. Using his background in character animation, Wedge helped MAGI produce animation for television commercials, which eventually led to an offer from Walt Disney Productions to produce animation for the film Tron (1982). : 12–13 At MAGI, Wedge met Eugene Troubetzkoy, who held a Ph.D in theoretical physics and was one of the first computer animators. MAGI was an early computer technology company which produced SynthaVision, a software application that could replicate the laws of physics to measure nuclear radiation rays for U.S. In the late 1970s, Chris Wedge, then an undergraduate at Purchase College studying film, was employed by Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. History 1980–1989: Formation and early computer animation Scrat, a character from the Ice Age franchise, was the studio's mascot.
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Ice Age and Rio were the studio's most commercially successful franchises, while Robots (2005), Horton Hears a Who! (2008), The Peanuts Movie (2015), and the aforementioned Spies in Disguise were among its most critically praised films. The studio ceased all operations on April 10, 2021. In February 2021, Disney announced that Blue Sky would be shut down in April 2021 citing the economic impact of the COVID-19 lockdowns on its business operations. Ģ0th Century Fox distributed the films produced by Blue Sky Studios in theatrical markets, until its closure on April 10, 2021.īlue Sky Studios was a subsidiary of 20th Century Fox Animation until its acquisition by Disney, as part of their acquisition of 21st Century Fox assets in 2019. Its final feature film was Spies in Disguise in 2019. It produced 13 feature films, beginning with Ice Age in 2002. Using its in-house rendering software, the studio created visual effects for commercials and films before dedicating itself to animated film production. It was founded on February 22, 1987, by Chris Wedge, Michael Ferraro, Carl Ludwig, Alison Brown, David Brown, and Eugene Troubetzkoy after their employer, MAGI, one of the visual effects studios behind Tron (1982), shut down. was an American computer animation studio based in Greenwich, Connecticut.
