Peter Ramsey Makes Directorial Rise With 'Guardians'
The holiday season means parties, shopping and movies. This year brings a new animated feature, Rise of the Guardians, based on William Joyce's series of children's picture books and novels, The Guardians of Childhood. The story follows Santa Claus (voiced by Oscar nominee Alec Baldwin), the Easter Bunny (Hugh Jackman), the Tooth Fairy (Isla Fisher) and the silent Sandman as they unite to fight off the boogeyman, Pitch (Oscar nominee Jude Law). They also get a big hand from Jack Frost (Chris Pine).
Peter Ramsey directed the film. His long Hollywood resume includes work on Shrek and Shark Tale, but Rise of the Guardians makes him the first African-American director of a big budget computer-generated (CG) animation film.
"It wasn't until my mom and dad read a newspaper article that mentioned that fact — like a few months before we finished — that I understood how much it meant to them. And then it brought it back to me. I stepped away from the work and thought about how I would've felt if I could've seen me making this movie back when I was a kid," he tells Michel Martin, host of NPR's Tell Me More.
Ramsey has been on the creative teams of several live-action movies featuring heavy CG effects, such as Independence Day, Men in Black and Minority Report. He says doing animation is a lot like doing live action, but things are broken up into different phases.
For a CG film, he explains, you're not standing on one set with everything lit and actors dressed in costumes.
"It's not all in one place — you end up doing it element by element," he says, "And you know, when it comes to the performances in an animated film, you know, I'm in the recording booth coaching the actors, and giving them their motivations, and putting them in the right head-space — all that stuff that you would do in any live-action project. It's just that there's another step, which is me going to the animators and working with them to create the nuances of the physical performance."
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North and his Yetis lead the ensemble of immortals fighting off an assault from the malicious Pitch.