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OGDEN: What form did your collaboration with William Joyce take? Was there teleconferencing, lots of air travel…?

WEDGE: It was a little bit of everything. Luckily, Bill lives in Shreveport, Louisiana, so it wasn't as difficult as it would have been if he had been on the west coast. Bill and I have been talking about doing something together for a long time.

We met when Fox had optioned one of his books, "Santa Calls", back in 1995 or so. I'd always been an admirer, and a couple of people had recommended we get together and talk. We had dinner to get to know each other, and just became really fast friends.

You know, as we've been talking about this movie, our two different versions of what we talked about and where we met have surfaced, but I remember afternoon-long telephone calls with him where we just talked about everything and got to know each other.

OGDEN: As a director of a film like this, what are your responsibilities? How much of the look and feel are you responsible for, and how much of the message of the film is yours?

WEDGE: Really, you corral it into being. There's so much work to do [running the production] on these films that I can't really do any actual [production] work. You kind of talk it into existence. You sit there and talk in rooms with people. You meet with the designers, you talk about what it should look like. You go through a year or two of iterations with them. That's one thing that Bill was involved in from way back in the beginning. Bill designed a lot of the look of it, and we gave that to our design team. And then you talk about it with animators. And you keep reacting. I spend twelve hours a day talking about the movie with people, including the writers, including the studio. I am probably the person who has talked the most about it. And I have my own stylistic sensibilities that wind up all over the film. Can't really help it.

OGDEN: So your role here, you're not pushing polygons, you're not doing concept sketches, you're really just spreading your concept to other people.

WEDGE: Oh, sure. I don't have time to do any of the actual work.

OGDEN: How hands on has Joyce been with this film?

WEDGE: Early on, Bill did a lot of drawing for it. The characters for this movie have been designed for nearly four years now. Bill designed a lot of them, and some of them we worked on. Some of them evolved here in the studio. Bill's got a great, whimsical, fun, infectious style, but you can't necessarily just translate them straight over into CG. His designs definitely have to evolve into 3D, and so we have to come up with ways to make it work.

OGDEN: Was Robots a story that existed before the two of you met?

WEDGE: No, we made this up from scratch. We've been making it up for about seven years. In fact, I think I can say that we're finally done working on this story because I just locked Reel 5.

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OGDEN: It is widely thought that the budget for Ice Age, considered low by Pixar or Dreamworks standards, led you to a very simple and stylized look for that movie. If that's true, what would you have done differently with the visuals on Ice Age if you'd had a larger budget?

WEDGE: I don't know. You do nerdy things. You just have more visual detail. You know, budget wasn't the only issue with Ice Age. Well, time is money, right, so we only had so much time to do it - it was going to be our first feature. We had a lot of capability to do fancy, complicated-looking imagery, but we didn't think we had the time to do it. So we felt it would be best to focus the design and animation energy on the characters, and we let the backgrounds go rather stylized.

OGDEN: Well, whatever the reason, I think it's a good looking film.

WEDGE: I'm glad it happened that way, actually. Ice Age was fortunately a big success for us, so they gave us a little more rope on Robots. There were many things we learned on Ice Age that we threw out the window for Robots. We thought, "Well, they're giving us more time and letting us do whatever we want," so we came up with a story that was too big to tell, too many characters, too many environments, and we've been paying for that for the past three years.

OGDEN: So, are those the things you mean you threw out from Ice Age? Optimizing from the beginning, that sort of thing?

WEDGE: Just all the sort of economy we had enforced. There was a sort of formula to Ice Age by the time we finished it. It was that you tell enough story to get through to the next set piece, and then have fun in the set piece. Then you tell enough story at the end of that set piece to get you through to the next one…and you'd have another three minutes.

OGDEN: Do you feel you continued that rhythm on Robots?

WEDGE: Well, Robots is a much more complicated story, and it moves at a faster rate. It's just a different thing. Different aspects of a film evolve in their own space, and the story on Robots had to find itself after a while. There are some big, fun, set piece moments, but it's a tighter, more complicated story.

OGDEN: So, there were things you learned on Ice Age that you deliberately tossed aside. What do you feel you learned on Ice Age that you are keeping, and applying to Robots?

WEDGE: We learned a tremendous amount about technique; animation technique and lighting… I mean, there are some very uninteresting things you need to learn in order to change your little commercial company into a feature animation company. Not just managing the work, but managing people and getting the communication working, getting a system online to keep track of everything. All that's become much more sophisticated here. The big trick for us is making the movies up, it's not making the movies.

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