BYU professor, alumni share experience of working on 'The Peanuts Movie'

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PROVO — An animated world Americans have loved for decades will soon play out on the big screen, thanks in part to a Brigham Young University professor and six alumni.

"The Peanuts Movie" hits theaters Friday, and the trailer shows Charlie Brown and his friends to be as familiar as ever, which was apparently no easy task.

Illustration professor David Dibble, who was part of the design team at Blue Sky Studios, said it took a lot of work to make the film look like Charles Schulz's world.

"...It was one of the hardest films that we've ever done, because it was based on such an established style that we're trying to hit," Dibble said. "And so it really took a lot of work to make it look simple and make it look like his world."

Dibble said they boiled down Schulz's drawing style so different people could work on different parts of the project, but it would still feel as if it came from Schulz's hand. Dibble created a style guide so anyone working on graphics could reference it.

The professor worked on graphic design for the film, so he created things such as posters on the wall. One challenge he faced was putting the graphics into the world in a way that would look like they came from Schulz script but that wouldn't demand too much attention.

A challenge faced by the design team in general was taking the two-dimensional characters and scenery and making them three-dimensional while still staying true to their original style, Dibble said.

One solution the team came up with was to have the characters face profile and then face front as much as they could so they could hark back to what Schulz's did, Dibble said.

Dibble said something he has tried to teach his students is the level of attention to detail most people won't ever see.

BYU alumni Tyler Carter, Jeff Call, Seth Hippen, Raphael Tavarez, Michael Murdock and Brandon May also worked on the film.

Carter, a visual development artist at Blue Sky Studios, said his time at the university helped him prepare to enter a professional studio, because he worked in groups to create projects and problem solve.

He said that is exactly what one does at a feature animation studio.

One of Carter's main responsibilities was developing Snoopy's imagination world. In that world, Carter references the Wasatch Mountains, which inspired him as a child.

Carter worked on "The Peanuts Movie" since the beginning, and said they spent hours researching 50 years of archived comic strips.

Someone pointed out that Schulz drew his characters slightly different in each of his comic strips, so they created a matrix of hundreds of Charlie Brown's and went through them and chose good profile, three-quarter and straight-on pictures for him and the other characters.

They committed to final designs, and from there, translated them into the final look.

Carter said they almost retrofitted their three-dimensional animation to look two dimensional, and he doesn't think people will ever realize the trouble it was to create.

"...We don't want them to, our job is to make it seamless, so that when you watch the movie it's enjoyable, and you come out thinking about the story and the message, and everything else just feels like you're just part of the Peanuts world for an hour and a half," Carter said.