Features | |
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Census by Shilo |
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Best Tutorials - 2009 Selection |
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When We Left Earth winners Announced |
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The Making of Cable |
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Toy Story Concept Art |
News Headlines | |
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Alice In Wonderland Exclusive HD Pictures |
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The Making Of Dominoes |
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CG Gallery Awards - January 2010 |
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Vanquish CG Trailer |
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Unknown Place Challenge |
Other Features | |
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Spot Focus : Dominoes |
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Top Indepenant short movie 2009 |
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Hess : Mountain Race |
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Flashforward VFX |
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Interview with Neil Blevins |
IT'S ART: Can you tell us about the team and why you made this film?
We really wanted to do a small story - only a moment in the life of two bugs- on a realtively high technical level; we being a group of 11 motivated students doing a regular production at University of Media Stuttgart, Germany (www.hdm-stuttgart.de) . We were actually two groups doing a collaboration: The Computer Animation (CA) division and the Interactive Media (IM) group. The CA people mainly do three dimensional stuff, like Maya, ZBrush and Realflow. The IM people are more into programming, 2D Design, Photography and of course Motion Control, which was the main reason for this collaboration.
IA: What was the source of inspiration when you started to work on it?
The first idea came up around December last year when Florian and Gregor, two of our team members, suggested making something like a mixture of "The Carpet People" and "Minuscule". We had a look at Pratchett's original illustrations, got some DVDs of "Minuscule" and searched all over the internet and in books for references, especially for acarians and flies to get a feeling how they really look. Soon we became fascinated with the "location carpet", a huge forest, an unbelivable jungle, a parallel universe, another world under our feet. The detailed descriptions in Terry Prachett's "The Carpet People" inspired us to create our own little "Carpet Fantasy".
IA: How did you create the characters and develop the story?
Because the semester wasn't up for another two months, we started slowly with scribbles, story-patches and mainly small scenes which were potentially funny. Hannes, our character designer, worked with the 3D people on the characters but by then we still didn't have a story. Knowing our story was going to take place in a carpet we took all the creatures we could possibly imagine living in or around a carpet and let them fool around: the depressive flea, the lazy spider, the hyperactive silverfish...The story actually began growing with the characters and we built it around the designs, so story and design kind of marched hand in hand. Funny to say but Hannes, who did the complete designs, never saw the designs of "Minuscule" because we never showed them to him. We wanted to have our "own", nevertheless they obviously have some things in common.
In the end we had a very straightforward little story. The ending for our two main characters was very tragic. What's happening next? Can one of them escape? We have no idea. Just enjoy watching them in their world.
IA: How did you guys exchange ideas, collaborate...?
At first we would just meet for a beer in the sun or at a café near the university to exchange ideas. Later on, during the production phase, we met every day in the lab at university. First we met in one big group, then once we reached the advanced stages we met in smaller groups so each could do their part of the production. Every other day we would meet with the "heads of departments" (if you can have this in such small group production) and talk about results and progress.
We were kind of lucky because the motion control stage is not far from the CG and IM lab, only about 3 floors, so the exchange was very fast and direct like: "Hey, we got something here, have a look!"
