This was a volunteer project done in every participants spare time. Since the participants work for Disney, DreamWorks, Warner Bros, Rhythm and Hues, Sony Imageworks and Digital Domain, you can imagine that our "day jobs" don't really leave a great deal of spare time.

Add to that a hoped for completion in time for Electronic Theatre consideration (which we just couldn't make) and you have a frantic production schedule from the start day to the end day.

Budget: None. Doug Cooper, myself, Christopher Janney and Kellie-Bea Rainey either invested our own equipment or bought cabling, Zip and Jaz drives and discs to supply the production, in addition to a Midi mixer to use for facial animation. I licensed a small music and effects sound library. In all, the total amount spent on this production not including computers or software was around $5,000. The entire production staff volunteered their weekends and evenings because this was a cool and unique project.

The total amount of time we had for animation was 2 1/2 months, with 2 weeks for final renders and compositing with backgrounds painted in Photoshop and Fractal Painter, as well as hand drawn (in Photoshop) effects.

Type of animation: We decided to do this project in the first place to demonstrate a type of animation which has been underrepresented in the CGI industry. Characters as flexible in shape as drawn animation characters, tight pacing, scenes that couldn't happen in real life. Basically what we have is 5 1/2 minutes of animation that simply couldn't be motion captured, puppeteered or done with procedural programming.

We weren't going for a traditional cartoon look with outlining, but rather something different and unique, and we think we achieved that.

In terms of production management, beyond the storyboards which were also done as layouts, an almost unprecedented amount of creative decision making was left up to the animators, our background director and "technical" director. I use the quotes because Doug Cooper showed that composition can also be an art form, not just the mere assembly of elements (of course he used Toonz, which has a very high degree of flexibility in how elements can be assembled, including camera moves, and timing). Production History Notes on Pysics.

-Steph Greenberg (The Director)

This project had three Acts which added up to approximently six minutes. We had a three month deadline to complete the production. In truth, to complete a six minute animated short in three months is virtually impossible. To add to this, we had no budget. In spite of these obviously hindersom factors, we banded together and got the job done.

Who did all this? Luckily we had a crew of highly professional and dedicated individuals. We started with 5 on the team in February (four authors/artists and one Producer), and ended up with 24 by the end of the show (17 artists, 3 technicians, 3 production assistance, and 1 Producer). We all had jobs at different major companies, and most of us didn’t know each other before the project. Of course together the crew worked weekday evenings, weekends, holidays, some even worked their vacation days. Under these times-tables we got to know each other real quick. We even pulled the crew’s significant others to work as our production assistants on the project. Support from home is definitely a key to a successful production.

Within the crew, some stayed from beginning to end, others came on for short amounts of time then were forced to return to the deadlines and overtime of their paid jobs. A great example was when our facial target artist got married in the middle of production, went on her honeymoon, and then afterwards came back to the project. Talk about dedication!

As the word spread throughout the industry about the project, we had artists calling up to see if they could get on and help. We eventually had a waiting list of top 2D and 3D artists and technicians on call for openings on the project. How did we do it all? We did the smartest thing one would do when having no budget. We pulled from our resources and cashed in our favors. Of course getting hardware and software support for the project, had a huge impact. We networked the units and had weekend JAM sessions that lasted from Friday night to early Monday morning. We used our home units and ‘data wrangled’ files with ZIP and JAZ discs. We even emailed portions of the show back and forth when we could. We made a big noise. We gossiped about the project in hopes to inspire CO-workers and talented associates to get interested.

During actual production, we all lived off of Diet Coke, Barq’s RootBeer, Cactus Cooler, coffee, bulk foods, Bojay’s Pizza, Dominos, and Pink Dot delivery service. We played the ‘Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ and ‘White Zombie’ over and over. Nothing like a dose of wild tunes and caffeine to keep you animating.

We forgot about TV, party invites, film screenings, visiting relatives, cleaning the house, washing the dog, and going to weddings… well, not that. Can’t give up ‘Everything’.

All-in-all, we worked together and got it done within deadline, spending a minimal amount of money, having a minimal amount of crew and personality conflicts, experiencing little to no equipment problems, and receiving immediate attention from tech. support. The crew had such a great time creating this unique looking, quality filled, CG animation short, that we coined the phrase: "How come this is all the fun that work isn’t?!"

With our budget of almost nothing, the needs of each of the individual artists, moving data around the city, editing and recording 6 minutes of animation and sound, painting background images, and finally pulling it all together into a cohesive piece, this project certainly had it's share of technical challenges. In addition to the dedicated, and very sharp crew, we had some useful pieces of equipment and software which were key to our success:

The film combines 3D characters animated in Softimage 3D version 3.51 with 2D backgrounds painted in Photoshop 4.0. We used the Softimage Toonz application to integrate, and compose the 2D and 3D elements for the film, and the QFX image processing software from Ron Scott, Inc. was used to create the stylized cartoon rendering look for the 3D characters. Editing, and video output was performed with Adobe Premier 4.2 using DPS Perception Video Recorder for final output to video tape. All images were produced and output on Windows NT workstations from NeTpower and Digital Equipment Corp. Our special thanks to Softimage and NeTpower for their diligent technical support.