blog del centro de medios audiovisuales

Sol and seeing it through completion in such a short amount of time during the summer. During a production meeting for the aforementioned short, DFeKT brings up one of his own short film stories, which he never got to complete in his own spare time. We decide to roll with the project, in a greatly reduced version, cutting the length (and production time) in less than half of the original. This time Trenox is available and the character work is divided between him, DFeKT and HEiNRiCH doing one character + animation each, with the exception of textures done by DFeKT for all characters. A pipeline is set up in which Trenox and DFeKT delivers finished animation for HEiNRiCH to light and render out and composite. Tytte went to great lengths for the score and sound effects which turned out even greater than anticipated.

However, the project got delayed two times due to commercial projects intervening with the available spare time given to us, causing us to miss the initial deadline for TRSAC 2005 and later the Annecy admission deadline in february 2006. We eventually planned on releasing the film at Breakpoint 2006 in Bingen, Germany, giving us plenty of time after missing the february deadline. However, having the production span this long (starting early november, 2005) backfired at the initial idea of making this a quick production, just as Godmorgen Sol had been, to revive energy for our original film project.

In the final weeks before going to Germany, Mice & Monsters had grown into a much bigger project than intended, we kept adding details, tweaking stuff and making major enhancements in the compositing process, bordering on overzealousness. For a period of time, it didn’t look like we would make it. Eventually we drove to Bingen with the majority of scenes rendered out, only lacking some generic compositing on most of the shots. Tytte did the mastering and mixing on the spot during a degree of distress as there were constantly noise from the bigscreen and PA system. Finally, after numerous export problems and audio sync problems to be solved, we released our second animated short at Breakpoint. It ended up doing very well in the competition granting us an unexpected, yet greatly appreciated, second prize.

Looking back, we are glad we did the film, but it took nearly 6 months of production time out of the schedule of the other, much delayed, short film project. Now we will commit ourselves to scoop up production on that again, and slate it for a 2007 release, hoping to submit it to both Breakpoint and Annecy in 2007. Time will tell what will finally come of our (perhaps too) ambitious project.