Carlos Saldanha Biography

CARLOS SALDANHA

Date of Birth: July 20, 1968

Carlos Saldanha studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he discovered his passion for animation. He earned an M.F.A. degree in animation and continues to teach and advise students in the school's animation program. After Saldanha's animated short film, Time for Love, was completed, it was screened at animation festivals around the world. He won several awards, including the People's Choice Award at Images du Futur in Montreal and Best Artistic Film at the International Computer Film Festival in Geneva. In 1993, he joined the creative team at Blue Sky Studios.

Saldanha began directing and animating TV commercials for Blue Sky. He won the 1997 Bronze Clio, among other awards, for a Bell Atlantic commercial titled Big Deal. In 1999, he won a Gold Clio for the animation in Re-Incarnated, a Tennents Beer commercial for its European 1998 Soccer World Cup campaign. In addition to working as the supervising animator for the talking and dancing cockroaches in Joe's Apartment (1996), he was director of animation for the computer-generated characters in A Simple Wish (1997) and the penguin dream sequence in Fight Club (1999).

As co-director of the 2002 animated feature Ice Age, Saldana was nominated for both Annie and DVD Exclusive awards. He was then nominated for an Academy Award in 2004 for directing the animated short film Gone Nutty, featuring the Ice Age character Scrat. Saldanha also co-directed the animated feature Robots (2005), featuring the voices of Ewan McGregor, Robin Williams and Halle Berry. He has since directed Ice Age 2: The Meltdown (2006) and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009).

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