Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs 1: Designing the Jello Mold and Ice Cream Town

THE JELLO MOLD EXTERIOR




Designing Jello Mold was a totally fun task since right from the very start I knew it's going to be iconic for the film. The challenge: since we haven't seen a giant jello before, I have to check real kids' jello and observe how light reacts to its texture. The last image above, though, didn't make it to the movie due to story change. In the first version, Flint stuck himself inside the "deflated" rotten jello mold he originally built for Sam. The revised version was inside a garbage can instead which ended up in the film. Below are more jello designs.



THE JELLO MOLD INTERIOR





To cap the fun on the Jello Mold is the interior design. I haven't been inside a jello before. So to imagine what it's like in there is as challenging to me as to both the animators, who had to imagine jello's behavior when it's that big, and sound designers, who had to come up with how jello sounds in that scale.

THE ICE CREAM TOWN


The before and after approved versions of the ice cream sequence. Old houses and buildings around Venice Blvd. in Los Angeles and Culver City came in very handy for me in designing the neighborhood architecture. The ice cream covered version was kinda tricky. The ice cream had to be simple and very recognizable unlike the earlier version where I made them look like giant poop all over the town. Art Director Mike Kurinsky brilliantly added flavors and stripes on the final painted version.




To design the town, I had to come up with a way how to populate the area with the least amount of elements to be built in 3D. So I came up with three different L-shaped "Lego" blocks and interchangeably attached to each one creating different combinations that made up the whole town.

More to come next week...


All images ©Sony Pictures Animation.