“Over lunch, I took the opportunity to ask visual effects supervisor Rob Bredow a fairly nerdy question: What was the one thing in the animation process of “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” that made him crazy? “It’s hard to choose just one in this movie,” he said. “One of the very intimidating things was the spaghetti twister, just because it was going to tear apart the town, and it was made of thousands of individual noodles that all had to look together like spaghetti. And the whole concept was the way you twist spaghetti around a fork off your plate making this twisterlike shape. So we wanted to be inspired by that shape and make this twister, but also make it big and dramatic without being scary, so there’s this subtle balance.”
Listening to Bredow, the complications of making a family-friendly disaster film sound even more convoluted than the spaghetti twister: “You can throw meatballs, but they have to land in good places, and the explosions have to be friendly explosions, kid-friendly, so that was kind of a challenge.”
After that, things got a little goofy. Phil Lord used the Blu-ray exclusive “Splat!” bonus feature, in which you can “throw” virtual cream pies, meatballs and mustard at the screen with your remote, to recreate Jasper Johns’ “Flag” on-screen, Jackson Pollock-style. (“I didn’t even know about “Splat!” mode until today,” Lord had noted earlier. “You throw food at something because you love it, right?”)
Still, the one thing I remember most from the day wasn’t part of the tour at all, and wasn’t one of the bits of information from the film makers or one of the pre-production art pieces and storyboards lining the walls. Tucked against a wall in the open office area hastily converted to a serving area for the day’s Italian lunch (complete with comically large meatballs) was a bookshelf crammed with fifty 4-inch-thick binders bursting with storyboards, production designs and other preliminary documents, and, at the upper-right-hand side, one lone, slender copy of Judi and Ron Barrett’s original children’s book, “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” nestled in among and outnumbered by much larger binders that were still just one small part of the moviemaking magic (and, yes, marketing madness) that it inspired.”
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