Ask Insomniac Games founder Ted Price what he's learned about the process of adapting one of the developer's franchises into a feature film, and he's quick with a reply: "It takes a long time."

Loading

Loading

Loading

In April 2013, it was announced that Insomniac had teamed with Rainmaker Entertainment and Blockade Entertainment to make a Ratchet & Clank animated feature film . It's due in theaters soon, on April 29, and was created to be as honest to the source material as possible. Insomniac Games Senior Writer T.J. Fixman wrote the story, and several key voice actors are reprising their roles in the project.It's clear that there's an intent to make this movie be true to the Ratchet & Clank video game universe; Insomniac even shared their video game animation assets with the teams creating the movie to make sure the portrayal of the world, such as the planet of Gaspar, is the same as their own."When everyone understands the universe, everybody involved understands the story, the characters and the motivation for the characters, then things go much more smoothly," Price told IGN during a recent visit to Insomniac's home base in Burbank, Calif.A lot of effort went into making sure there was a unified vision between Insomniac and the creative team behind the film. Insomniac's Ryan Schneider acts as associate producer on the movie, and Price said that was a way to "make sure that what the guys making the movie were thinking was the same thing we were thinking and had thought for the last 15 years, making Ratchet.""There's a lot of collaboration on making sure the characters themselves were cast in a way that reflected what we built for the game in particular," he said. "We have all the main characters, actors, the ones who voice them in the games, coming back, and they're part of the movie."For the team at Insomniac, the decision to adapt Ratchet & Clank into an animated movie was a surprisingly easy fit."When we actually first started the franchise, our aim with the project was to create a game that feels like a Pixar movie," Insomniac Chief Creative Officer Brian Hastings said. "As a result, we've always wanted to see it on a screen, because we felt like it would be a perfect fit. And when you play the latest Ratchet game [due out on April 12], it does -- it looks like a Pixar movie."Price added, "Literally in the trailer we have to say which is in-game footage so people can tell like, 'Oh my God, are you kidding me?' That's pretty cool, yeah."Schneider called the Rainmaker and Blockade collaboration "the right partnership," especially after the Insomniac team had been through many meetings with other production companies that ultimately didn't go anywhere."It's agonizingly difficult to make a film," Schneider said. "It's spectacular that we're doing this with Ratchet & Clank, because it's almost impossible. These guys, all they do is take pitches all day long."When asked what other Insomniac franchise they might like to see come to the big screen next, Price was quick to suggest Resistance. According to Schneider, they came pretty close to making that a reality."We came pretty far with Resistance, but what happens is, you have producers get other projects, actors get other projects, priorities change," he said, adding of the Ratchet & Clank film, "The fact that this has been seen through start to finish is pretty exciting."

Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Follow her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz