So my kids are sitting down to watch the movie and we played the game before the movie started....I never realized how little I really knew about Bees (sad, I know) -- I do know to RUN when I hear or see a Bee, that is about all :) So, I figured I would share some fun facts:


Bee Movie Fun Facts
Everything you want to know about DreamWorks' animation Bee Movie!



Saturday, November 3, 2007
Bee Laws in Bee Movie

If you’re going to create and develop a new society for film—as in the world of bees—well, it’s gotta have laws, right? Some of the rules that govern the bees in “Bee Movie” include:

1. NEVER talk to humans!
2. Only the Pollen Jocks are permissioned to leave the hive.
3. Think before you sting.
4. Bees can’t fly in the rain.
5. No foreign shapes, including circles, triangles and squares.
6. Black and Yellow—Hello.
7. All bees wear stripes.
8. No smoking, and no buzzing past 6:00pm.
9. All bees work to produce honey.
10. Making honey is fun!—that’s why bees don’t need vacations.
11. All bees perform one job, and they do it for the entirety of their lives.
12. There are over 3,000 bee occupations, so choose carefully (*see below).
13. Every little job is important…together they add up to something big.
14. Bees work their whole lives…to get to the point where they can work their whole lives (see 9 through 13).
15. Bees as a species haven’t had a day off in 27 million years.
16. Nobody works harder than bees.

• Each bee must pick one of the 3,000 occupations available at Honex and remain in the one they chose for the rest of their life. The different sectors at Honey include: Heating, Cooling, Viscosity, Krelman (Adam’s pick), Pollen Counting, Stunt Bee, Pouring, Stirrer (Martin Benson’s occupation), Humming, Regurgitation, Front Desk, Hair Removal, Inspector No. 7, Chef, Lint Coordinator, Stripe Supervisor, Antennae-ball Polisher, Mite Wrangler, Swatting Counselor, Wax Monkey, Wing Brusher, Hive Keeper…and Restroom Attendant.

• One of the messages of “Bee Movie” is that every job that you do matters…so do it well.

• “Thinking bee” means working together in harmony, being proud of that work and always thinking on a group—not individual—level.


The Buzz About Bees

To produce one pound of honey, a colony of bees will have to fly 55,000 miles and visit two million flowers—that’s a lot of frequent flyer miles.

The lifespan of an average bee is six weeks…during that time, their entire output of honey amounts to around one-twelfth of a teaspoon of the sweet stuff. During production, the cast and crew harbored more than a little guilt every time the honey bear was squeezed into a beverage or over a snack.

Bees flap their wings at about 200 beats per second, which is what we hear as a buzzing sound…funny that they’re not skinnier.

There are approximately 20,000 species of bees worldwide—4,000 just in North America alone!

In reality, it would take two billion bees to lift a plane. Talk about a takeoff.

Love heals all wounds, and honey can heal some: it kills bacteria and can seal an open wound.

That’s some shelf life—a jar of honey was discovered in an ancient Egyptian tomb and, when opened, proved to be as good and as edible as a jar purchased off the store shelves today.

In real life, only female bees collect nectar and pollen. In order to serve the story of “Bee Movie”—and provide a large, tough and athletic contrast to the average and slightly smallish Barry B. Benson—filmmakers decided to make the Pollen Jocks male. No offense to the ladies intended.

Oh bee, where is thy sting? Well, don’t look to the guys. Female bees sting, but only if the hive or the individual bee is threatened. Male bees, also called drones, don’t have stingers.

Talk to the foot, cause the bee ain’t listening. Bees send messages through odors, vibrations, and even dancing! One bit of fancy bee footwork—running in a figure eight while jiggling their backside—tells other bees the distance and direction to a food source.

“If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have not more than four years to live.” While this timely quote is attributed to Albert Einstein, he didn’t say it. The anonymously authored quote seems to have made its first appearance in the public eye 40 years after the genius’ death in 1955.

According to scientific evaluation of the bee—weight, size, wingspan, etc.—the insect should not be able to fly. It’s a good thing that the scientists never told the bees.

Driver, have no fear! Unlike Barry B. Benson, bees cannot actually pass through a car’s air-conditioning unit—it’s a system sealed to the outside, with the exception of air intake, which is brought in through a filter. But that doesn’t mean a crafty bee can’t find its way in through your windows…

The bee stars of “Bee Movie” each have two eyes; however, real bees actually have five eyes (two large compound eyes and three simple eyes called Ocelli). All the bees in the movie have four limbs—but real bees, being insects, sport six. Filmmakers decided to anthropomorphize them (make them seem more human), giving them two arms and two legs, so that the audience could relate to them more…removing the “ick” factor, as it were.

Bees do see color, but they are drawn in the direction of the flowers by scent, which is received through their antennae.

Posted by deskjet at 12:04 PM 0 comments
Animation Process of Bee Movie

During peak workload, there were 40 animators working on the “Bee Movie,” both in Glendale and Redwood City.

As he was with every step of the process, Jerry Seinfeld was extremely involved in the approval process in animation. The West Coast animators would be at work online with Seinfeld, showing him shots in his office in New York, while the animators in California were receiving notes. Jerry would also make trips out to the studio to see the work first hand.

When supervising animator Gabe Hordos came onboard the project, his first shot was an extremely time consuming and challenging one. When it was finally approved, both Gabe and Jerry lit up victory cigars in California and New York to celebrate.

The animators, to date, have animated almost 11,000 feet of animation.

The first production shot on “Bee Movie” was finalized in animation on April 15, 2006. The last shot was animated on August 18, 2007.

The animators took a trip to San Diego at the beginning of the show to see Seinfeld perform in front of a live audience, to learn some of his nuances so that they could fold them into the character of Barry.

It’s worth a thousand words…To be sure to capture the exact body performances Seinfeld wanted in each character, the animators recorded every approval session with him.

Insects are great, but…Ray Liotta proved to be a popular character for the animators—they enjoyed capturing a real life person going so over the top. But the only way they could make the Ray Liotta character actually look like Liotta was to set the character default in the face as “no emotion.”

The animators executed more than 60 behaviorial cycles for the FX team to utilize for the crowd behavior.

The animators also loved bringing Renée Zellweger into “Bee Movie,” and used a lipstick cam to capture her facial performances during recording sessions to be sure and include as many of her particular nuances as possible.

When a bee stands, how tall is he? Since Barry is 0.825 inches tall, this made it difficult to animate him flying through space, as he always had to be on camera.

On a normal show, one to five characters require hand-animation. On “Bee Movie,” this number was significantly larger, with one to twenty-three characters needing to be hand animated. In one shot alone, 46 characters had to be hand animated.

Ain’t Hollywood grand? What other job allows people to watch episodes of “Seinfeld” in their offices all day long?

Animators have many different controls to make a character “act,” such as facial expressions, hand gestures and general body movement. Actors lend their voices to bring the character further to life. On “Bee Movie,” animators were also able to use the bees’ wings to convey emotion! By varying the speed and intensity of the flapping wings, they could convey anger, annoyance or joy. (This is inspired by real life, where bees utilize their wings to communicate with each other.)

The average honeybee can flap its wings between 180 and 225 times per second…which is a little tough to animate. So, the bees in “Bee Movie” flap their wings only six to seven times per second as they take off. Then, the wings are put through a motion blurred particle render to create the illusion of super-fast wing motion. (It took months to set up this effect, and it was continually tweaked throughout the show.)

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