Wonderful Days / Blue Sky Teaser

"Wonderful Days" is an animated film written by Micah Wright and Jay Lender, along with the production studio in Korea. To date, it's the most expensive film EVER made in Korea, live-action or animation. Last I heard, it cost about $14 Million US.

The film is not a simple 2D cell animation film, nor a computer 3-D film... no, Tin House actually built live-action scale-model sets and shot them with a 35mm camera. They then animated 2-D cel characters through and around the miniature sets and painted any missing set details with CGI. The skies you see in the film are all real shots of clouds, slightly painted over with CGI. All vehicles are 3D as well, but usually on a real miniature set.

As you might imagine, that process is quite expensive, and the Korean studio ran out of cash after filming the live-action sets. They freaked out because they didn't have the cash to finish the animation half of the film. They went in search of gap financing to complete the picture, but no one would loan them the dough because their story and script was so bad. All of the corporations willing to provide gap financing to Tin House said that the script needed to appeal to a wider audience than just the Korean audience that they had originally scripted it for. That's when they called me and my writing partner, Jay Lender, in.

Luckily, Tin House had not begun production yet, so all Jay and I had to do was look at the live-action sets and write an entirely new film around them. That sounds a LOT easier than it really is, let me tell you!

There were, sadly, several details that Tin House was married to; we weren't allowed to remove the omnipotent little blind singing girl who served as a "greek chorus," the maudlin themes of doomed love and unchangeable fate (which I don't believe in at all) had to stay the same, and we didn't write the final English language translation script, so there are some lines of dialog that I cringe at, but overall, I think Wonderful Days (aka Blue Sky) is a beautiful film, and I'm proud to have worked on it.

If you're into science-fiction film or anime, there are many worse ways to waste 80 minutes.

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Korean
• animated
• film
• Wonderful
• Days
• Blue
• Sky
• anime
• animation