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OGDEN: AnimWatch has a pretty good following among those wishing to make their own short films. A great many of them look at "Bunny" as a great example of what can happen to somebody who comes up with something really interesting and unique, gets it done, and gets it out there. What has working on "Bunny" meant over the years?

WEDGE: Looking back on it, it's obvious that "Bunny" got a lot of attention for us. It gave us a kind of validity in the industry's mind.

OGDEN: How much of that do you think had to do with winning the Oscar®?

WEDGE: The Oscar® certainly didn't hurt. You get to stand up there in front of everybody. When I see videotapes of me standing on the stage at the Oscars®, it looks like, "Wow, look at that guy…that's a big deal…" but I can't remember it feeling that way. But it is a big deal. You get about a month of a lot of attention.

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OGDEN: That's a recurring theme among the AnimWatch profilees and contributors who have won and been nominated for Oscars®. I'm so intrigued with the notion of what that actually feels like, to win, to accept the award, to get swept away by the spectacle, but the guys who have been there can't seem to remember it. It's being on stage that you actually block out. But it's the crazy month of phone calls, and suddenly you've got friends coming out of nowhere, that's what you remember.

WEDGE: The thing is, we already had a relationship with Fox, and we'd been trying to develop Bill's movie, and we had been working on another thing, and Ice Age was in the wings. We'd already read the script and had already been talking about doing it. The momentum was already there. So I think it's a bit different for us in that way than it might be for some of the others. But the Oscar completely cemented the confidence from the studio's side for our ability to make a feature, and so things did accelerate very quickly.

OGDEN: Was "Bunny" something you did in your spare time?

WEDGE: Oh yeah…

OGDEN: Was it a crew of other guys, or was it just you?

WEDGE: It was just me for the longest time. The idea for Bunny started right around the time we started the company, Blue Sky. But we didn't have any kind of technology to do any of this. It only became feasible when we had our fancy rendering software written, and this was like 5 or 6 years after we started the company. There came a certain point where we had a crew of animators here and every once in a while somebody was free and I could give them a shot to do. It took a while.

OGDEN: What advice would you give would-be directors just starting out?

WEDGE: I think, if there's anything I managed to do right, at the beginning, it's that I did my own thing. "Bunny" is the one thing I can say with complete confidence that was done without compromise of any kind. I spent 8 years making that thing, and I wanted just to make it perfect. I didn't take anyone's advice, I didn't listen to anybody's notes. I just did it the way I wanted to, and we all had fun. And when it was done, I think it was unique. I think that's the only way for anybody to stand out from the crowd in this day and age. Every year, the theatres are filled with young filmmakers that have unique vision. You've just got to be true to yourself. You can't pay too much attention to what other people are doing.

OGDEN: In Stephen King's book "On Writing", he describes the art of Writing as a form of telepathy, where the writer puts thoughts and feelings down on paper, and reader decodes it through the act of reading. I can't help but think filmmaking is like that, too. What are your thoughts on that notion, and what do you hope people take away from this film?

WEDGE: I don't think it's as mysterious as all that, encoding and decoding. The only perspective I can ever have of a film is my own experience of it. And if it moves me or makes me laugh, or is exciting or colorful, or whimsical or fun or whatever I'm trying to get into a film, I have to feel it first. Now, Stephen King is obviously a more prolific genius than I am, and maybe what you describe is the way it's supposed to work, but I just figure if I feel it, then the audience feels it.

There are all sorts of tools to help with what I'm trying to do. The audience brings all sorts of associations with them about lighting styles and paces of cutting, size of shots and music and sound effects, so you have a great variety of stimuli at your disposal.

OGDEN: And as audiences become more sophisticated, you can throw more and more of that stuff at them, too.

WEDGE: You can throw it faster. They expect it to be faster. When we get close to the end of a project, we start showing it to audiences. We watch their reaction, and more times than not, the feeling I get is that they want you to cut it faster.

OGDEN: That does seem to be the trend, faster, harder, more effects, throw more stuff at the screen…

WEDGE: Well, you know when you're thinking something up you get lost in the feelings and the ideas. When you show a film to an audience, they get those feelings very quickly and want to be buoyed by story and character and comedy. And that's the hard part, that's the trick. You lift them up and then you have to hold them there for an hour and a half.

OGDEN: Where do you think Animation is heading?

WEDGE: I'm a bit of a cynic at heart. I think there's going to be an unfortunate period, to tell you the truth. I think there will be people who think animation movies are successful because they're made in 3D. I think there will be some unfortunate forays into it by people who don't understand animation as well as people who have done it in the past. Actually, you can see this out there right now, it's happening, sadly. There are some unfortunate tendencies in the industry that are market driven. I think that the market is probably having more influence on the art than is really healthy for everybody.

OGDEN: I think that's actually undercynical of you. To me it seems if anything the film industry is way too much driven by the market.

WEDGE: (laughs) Well, in this climate, you can wind up with films made by people that, even though I respect the filmmakers involved, lean on something like motion capture, and wind up creating something that seems like a misunderstanding of the technology to me. We work so hard on the animator's craft. I have too many opinions on it to fit into this conversation about animation and what's different about it and live action movies. But I just hope that more people who understand animation will try to make their own unique films. Thank God there are people like Pixar still out there making movies that they believe in.

OGDEN: Amen, but I think we can add Blue Sky to that short list as well. Thank you for talking to us.

WEDGE: My pleasure.