Q&A with Director Ash Brannon

Bill Desowitz talks with Ash Brannon about collaborating with fellow director Chris Buck and the animators and voice cast on Surf’s Up.

by Bill Desowitz

Ash Brannon previously made his mark at Pixar Animation Studio, where he was co-director and co-developer of Toy Story 2 along with animator and character designer. Prior to that, he was story artist on A Bug's Life and directing animator on Toy Story. Brannon previously was an animator on the compilation TV series That's Warner Bros.! for Warner Bros. Animation, he contributed to Nike's "Hare Jordan" Super Bowl spot and honed his craft on Disney's The Little Mermaid. After studying at CalArts' Character Animation program, he taught animation at the famed college for two years.

Bill Desowitz: What was the collaboration like between Chris and you?

Ash Brannon: Normally, in animation, you divide by sequence or department. In our case, we worked so well together, we were such natural collaborators that we never split up. It was really unexpected but it worked out great because we were there together to bounce ideas back and forth.

BD: How would you describe what the two of you do best?

AB: Speaking about Chris, he is one of the best character animators around; he knows how to milk the moment for entertainment and true character value. And I don't want to speak for myself…

BD: I imagine, coming from Pixar, you're well trained in story.

AB: Yeah, I was very fortunate to work with [the late] Joe Ranft. In fact, he was my story instructor at CalArts. And just to work with Joe everyday, you couldn't help but become a better storyteller.

BD: What's notable about Surf's Up is how loose it is.

AB: One thing an audience needs is a good, strong story with forward momentum. And we wanted that but we also wanted it to feel spontaneous. It was a challenge to have a nice, tight story but to have plenty of room for the actors in the improv sessions or the animators to make it feel as spontaneous as possible. And the camera work: we let our head of layout [James Williams] do most of the handheld shots either himself or from one of his crew and he'd get these great camera moves that made you feel that you had one chance in a lifetime to capture, and that's the best we could get: not too polished.

BD: The other challenge is not to go off on too many tangents.

AB: The main thing was to keep the audience entertained -- if we took a little detour here and there, that was OK. We made it for ourselves, first and foremost.

BD: Talk about what it was like working with Sony, since this was the studio's second animated feature.

AB: Being the second feature was fortunate for us because we were off the radar through most of production. All eyes were on Open Season [until that was completed] and we got to plow forward. It was nice to feel that there weren't a lot of cooks in the kitchen all the time. We had a really great supervising animator, Dave Schaub, and a crack team. It never felt like two separate divisions between Imageworks and Animation. The work was seamless.

BD: What was it like working with the animators?

AB: One of the things we did with the animators was we went to Zuma Beach. This gave us the opportunity to not only get to know everyone but also to get on a board and try to catch a wave. They put a lot of themselves into the shots and we got to know most of them individually and watched how they work. In fact, during the scene where Big Z and Cody make a surfboard, we set up cameras and the exact angles and Dave Schaub played Big Z.

When you give them a chance to flex their muscles, they can go way beyond what you expect they can do. There are amazing artists who didn't get a chance to showcase their talents until Open Season and now Surf's Up and the movies yet to come.

BD: What was the challenge like of using the camera in mockumentary fashion?

AB: It was one of those fortunate moments in time for us. In terms of the Wheels camera, we worked out a pretty refined version of what they had on The Polar Express. We just fell in love with the idea that we could do something other than a real keyframed, polished, sterile camera move. We could give it the human touch. I read about the movie Children of Men and the reviewer pointed out the great camerawork and how it reminded you that there's a human being behind the camera all the time. It never occurred to me that that's what the audience could take away from it. We've gotten a lot of feedback on the cinematography and how much the people like it. We wanted it to feel really organic from the lighting to the water to the camerawork to the performances. That was our touchstone.

BD: And what about the look of the penguins and this latest wave of penguin movies?

AB: Oh, yeah. Madagascar was the only movie we knew of with penguins when we started. We had a really talented designer, Sylvain Deboissy, who did all the characters on his own. We wanted someone who was streamlined, had really nice silhouette but also detailed enough that it could fit into a pretty believable world because of the water. On top of that, you have a bunch of penguins you need to distinguish at a glance. And I think Sylvain pulled it off. It has his signature look. And the way they were animated has a lot of squash-and-stretch and the properties of 2D animation.

BD: And what was it like working with your cast?

AB: It was a dream. Cody was really hard to cast. We needed someone who could perform really well and be that teenager who is in his angst-filled years. And Shia had some fame from his Disney Channel years [with Even Stevens] and Holes. We had no idea that was going to be in Transformers and now Indiana Jones 4. So we really lucked out in getting him at the time. Jeff Bridges was our only choice for Big Z. In the beginning, he was going for a voice and we said, "Jeff, we just like your real voice -- you don't have to put on anything." Pretty quickly, he settled into the voice we all know.

And we told them that not only were we going to improvise scenes and often when they were in the same room together, we'd interview them in character. And Chris and I got such rich material through these interviews. We had all these transcripts and we'd go back and listen to them in editorial with a highlighter, pick out our moments and we'd have a scene. It was really fun. And everyone had fun during the sessions. And we have tons of material that we couldn't even use. James and Mario made a great team together: they could do a radio show like the old Bob and Ray program. They had really good chemistry and I wish we could've gotten more of them together.