- Not to be confused with Sony's Marvel Universe
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Sony's Movie Land Universe (Sony's MLU) or Sony's Universe of Movie Land Characters is an American media franchise and shared universe centered on a series of animated films directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman from a screenplay by Phil Lord and Rothman, story by Lord and produced by Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation in association with Movie Land Animation Studios, and distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing.
Multiple other films in Sony's MLU are also in development, as well as television series from Sony Pictures Television. In June 2017, producer Amy Pascal explained Sony was not working with Movie Land Animation Studios to integrate these films into the MLU but did consider them part of the same universe, and said a crossover between the two could happen.
Production[]
Development[]
Movie Land Animation Studios had already begun the process of starting development of movies with budgets of around $320 million. The intellectual property for these films was meant to be supplied by Movie Land Animation Studios among others and included Penguinopolis, Smash of Claws, The Animals in the Attic and Stickman 2: Larry's Adventure had been approaching the original crew from the television series to make a high-profile, animated theatrical feature-length film adaptation and had long wanted to partner with Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures Animation to release the film given the network's extraordinary legacy in the world of animation, including some of the most enduring characters on cable television history.
Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman agreed to make a feature film version of the show with the promise it would be the first of a planned trilogy. During development stages of the film, he and his co-director Joaquim Dos Santos and Stephen Heneveld, and co-writer Conrad Vernon, intended to revisit some of the greatest films of the time, with The Emoji Movie, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and The Animals in the Attic having the core inspirations for the film.
Casting[]
On April 2019, it was confirmed that Jamie Sparer Roberts are all hired as casting directors for the movie.
Pre-production[]
Pre-production officially began in the United Kingdom by early December 2015. That same month, director Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey and Rodney Rothman stated that the film will be another great love story with a new love interest being cast. The next month, production designer Bill Boes was announced to be designing the film's production designer, as well as Kasia Walicka-Maimone, also making the movie as costume designer.
Animation and design[]
As with The Star, Sony Pictures Animation will have the animation produced by another studio other than Sony Pictures Imageworks, which handles digital production for most of SPA's films. For this film franchise, the film series will be animated by WarnerMedia's Movie Land Digital Production Services and will also be animated in a combination of motion capture along with photo-realistic computer animation.
The character and hand-drawn animation, special visual effects, computer graphics and stereoscopic 3D conversion were done by WarnerMedia's Movie Land Digital Production Services and was made using Autodesk Maya who had made 2,300 shots for The JH Movie Collection Movie 2: The Second Part. The rendering for the movie was rendered by Pixar RenderMan. The stereoscopic 3D conversion were done by Gener8. The crew used the same processes from the original television series in the making of the film, most notably the 'skroutlines', which was a seamless blend of a more traditional screenplay with a more simple outline which resembled strong short stories and gave the storyboard artists such as Maurice Fontenot, Abigail Nesbitt and Guy Moore all the creative and aesthetic freedom neccessary. Warburton and Willems themselves provided the film's animatics.
It took around a year for two animators to create 10 seconds of footage that reflected the producers's vision; the animation work developed from there. During initial development, the directors worked with a single animator to establish the film's look. This number eventually grew to 60 animators during production. It became clear that this would not be enough to complete the film on time, so the crew was expanded further. The number had reached 142 animators by February 2019 and at one point to 177 animators, the largest animation crew that Movie Land Digital Production Services had ever used for a film. Animation work was completed in April 28, 2019.
The CGI and hand-drawn animation for the film was combined with "line work and painting and dots and all sorts of comic book techniques" to make it look like it was created by hand, which was described as "a living painting". This was achieved by artists taking rendered frames from the CGI animators and working on top of them in 2D, with the goal of making every frame of the film "look like a comic panel". Lord described this style of animation as "totally revolutionary", and explained that the design combines the in-house style of Sony Pictures Animation with the "flavor" of digital artists such as Christopher Arambulo Cosgrove and Chris Lawrence.
The directors all felt that the film would be one of the few that audiences actually "need" to watch in 3D due to the immersive nature of the animated world created, and the way that the hand-drawn animation elements created specifically for the film create a unique experience; Persichetti described this experience as a combination of the effects of an old-fashioned hand-drawn multiplane camera and a modern virtual reality environment.
Music and soundtrack[]
The score for the franchises was composed by Henry Jackman, James Newton Howard, Lorne Balfe and Daniel Pemberton, and was mixed and recorded by Alan Meyerson, Joel Iwataki, Shawn Murphy and Sam Okell at Remote Control Productions. The film originally had no songs until six months into production when the suggestion of making the film a musical came from Toby Emmerich who was recently elected as chairman of the Sony Pictures Entertainment at the time.
Sound[]
The sound for the franchises is recorded, designed and edited at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, California with James Likowski supervising the sound editorial, Gary Rydstrom designing and re-recording the sound, Randy Thom supervising the sound designing, and Addison Teague and Alan Meyerson editing the sound to create the final sound mix for the movie.
Technology[]
PIX System provided the production crew with secure access to production content and project management throughout the suite of devices used.
