character with only limited animation needed throughout the film. Trenox and DFeKT did the initial storyboards which HEiNRiCH cut into animatics dialing in at a little more than one minute each. Trenox began modelling the spaceship which would be the stage for the entire film, while DFeKT started doing concepts for the main character. After a while it became obvious that the story needed a different pacing if it should gain any chance of creating a suspenseful atmosphere. Therefore HEiNRiCH took the work-in-progress models Trenox and DFeKT had made, and set them up for quick dummy animation to create a more accurate previz of the film, with added camera moves and animation timing for the characters. Shots were added, removed, or changed altogether ending up, at some point, with a film almost six times the original length. This took place over the better part of a year, and with Scene Event drawing near again, the decision to take a break from the film to do Godmorgen Sol was made. This provided a creative burst of energy, but also set the bar for the quality of the images, from where it was to be raised even further, including the decision to do the film in a 720p HD abbreviation.

Moving forward, several character designs for Marvin (the pilot) had been made and later discarded, causing quite a bit of remodelling during the course of the production for him alone. An entire set piece, the inside of the cargo bay, was also abandoned partly finished because it did not fit with the cut of the film and was left out. This was one of the things you're supposed to avoid by doing the previz and proper planning, but spanning the production over a large amount of time, makes it prone to revisions, both in design, editing and look. Which brings us to our next creative crisis during the fall of 2005.

The temperature is declining, and so is our stamina for keeping up the pace of the production. Abandoning the film is not an option - too much time has been spent on it already to not see it through, but we desperately need a kicker to get back on track. So during a production meeting for E.T.A. DFeKT and HEiNRiCH discuss the possibility to do a small project, to finish something and feel the cretive juices flowing again. And so, production on Mice & Monsters began, propelling us into a storm of missed deadlines and obstructing commercial projects taking focus right up till the easter premiere at BreakPoint 2006.

So, once again we raised the bar for the look of the film, but now we are compelled to get it done or die trying. After a slight break following the release of Mice, HEiNRiCH is beginning to output final composites of most scenes not requiring character animation. The shot with the floating coffeecup spilling liquid through the air is the first to be completed, and sets the tone for the film in terms of detail. Meanwhile the majority of modelling is done, leaving only the pitfall of animation missing as well as various matte paintings. During the fall of 2006, contact is made with british radio freelancer Patrick Charlton, who gathers friends and colleagues to do readings of the dialogue Tytte and HEiNRiCH has written for the various tv-channels audible in the film. Shots are beginning to roll out at a more steady pace, with only the occasional odd commercial job settings us back a month or two - or three. This is repeated throughout most of 2007 aswell, ending up with an extensive pullthrough during the crossover between 2007/2008. Most of the films shots are completed in this period, leaving only finalized sounddesign to be done by Tytte while facing exams at his university. Sound was delivered and finally mastered two days before leaving for Bingen. The only thing left was to make a satisfactory encoding of the film and enter it in the competition.

In retrospect, there's a lot of things which could/should have been done differently, but then again that's part of the process; learning from our mistakes and forever trying to improve our skills.

In any case, we have finally finished out first animated short film - which turned out to be the third.
So here's to the next life-sucking production of 3-4 years... (or less).

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.

down a long road ahead, meaning we have nothing to present at this years Scene Event. Having discussed the idea of doing a quick short film (with our new goals in mind) with the rest of the JUNK crew, HEiNRiCH got the idea for a story from his brother on a canoeing trip in Denmark. The idea was to turn an old danish kids song into an animated short.

When he got back from the wet trip on the stream, he quickly sketched out a simple storyboard and began production using his last week of vacation (two weeks prior to Scene Event). To shake things up, Trenox was working on a game project in Austria and DFeKT likewise busy with commercial projects. It was clear from the beginning the there could be no fallpits of trying to make things too pretty, if this was to be completed it had to be done efficiently and relentlessly. The guitar, borrowed from Jesper Fleng, was played and recorded by HEiN's brother Peter Vahlstrup and the singing was done by Magnus Porse. Tytte got the seperate recordings and did the mixing + additional sounds effects.

In the final days up to SE, DFeKT worked tirelessly to complete backgrounds for all the shots in the film. Having made no camera moves in the 3d scenes proved valuable for more reasons than having the ability to do the tightening of shots in post production. It also enabled DFeKT to do great work on the initial 3d plates improving the final look of the film considerably.

The production was finalized at Scene Event with nightly rendering of both 3d scenes and compositing jobs - as always. In the end is was a great experience for us, to finally have a product with story (even if it was a simple one) and coherency completed.

more than a few small shots, but got swept away in the time pressure and ended up spending the entire weekend delivering shots for their production, making it more of a 50/50 effort than just the initial helping out that we planned.

Thus we hardly got anything done on the production of our own short film project which was the reason we came to TMD - apart from the social aspects ofcourse. A slight blow in the face of our newly found production values, but we did have loads of fun doing the shots for the TBC production.

Yes - we blame them entirely!

benefit because we could turn a shot around in much less time with respect to our individual key areas of expertise. Of course for this approach to work, we needed to have scenes where team effort could apply. Most of the others shots was not made in this fashion, which may be evident primarily visible through the less complex nature of the remaining scenes. In the end the video ended up feeling a bit long, mainly due to shots extended through editing to fit the acid sounds of Budda-X's (already) short soundtrack.

By the end of this Scene Event, we vowed to only release films with atleast the simplest of storyline and pre-planned continuity. In the weeks after, we created an internal forum on our domain and began production of a yet to be named short film based on an initial draft and storyboard presented by Trenox. We planned to have this film ready by next years Scene Event. This later turned out to be wishful and thinking based on our ambitions for the project.

dynamics tests he had lying around that made it to several shots in the video. Trenox did the Sony monitor and credits scenes on the spot, and DFeKT made a nice intestine tunnel filled with particles. Budda-X finished the RAW soundtrack based on and old track he had lying around. Thanks to whoever let us use his camera for the true telesync that this production is!

The rest was made our old fashion way; non-sequential graphics and effects that, hopefully, looks cool enough to be entertaining throughout the quick pace of the video. Featuring hard pumped goatrance by Tytte, which was, sadly, faded out in the end again due to lack of footage. Will we ever learn?

superbly smashy drum'n'bass track cutting everything together nicely. Also, it helps continuity along when everything is graded.. well.. green!

The video features some nice cybernetic modelling by Trenox and boasts some fancy frame-by-frame Photoshop lightning animation by DFeKT. Orange also did the scene with the glowing cylinders and HEiNRiCH did the wired intro sequence and the displaced JUNK logo in the end.

spitting out test renders of glass, chrome and experimenting with the, then, all new skylight lighting methods. So in a bid to participate in the production he would finish out his sequences at home, being in contact with the onsite crew through ICQ and an FTP server for uploading zipped JPEG frames (for efficient upload times). Tytte, who neither present at TMD, was engaged to do a quick goa track to accompany the graphics, and prevailed efficiently, only to find his music faded out in the actual release due to lack of footage. He was not pleased.

Nonetheless, the animation ended up winning the 1st prize, gaining JUNK two much needed GeForce3 gfx cards.

Warcraft III was enjoying ever increasing popularity, and we, having no inclination to play this game, decided to spoof it's highly acclaimed (and cool) animated intro sequence instead. Only with smurfs instead of orcs. This required teamwork, not only on our part but also on the rendering support of Thomas Suurland and Anders Stensgaard, without whom it would probably never have been finished in time (which it wasn't, we rarely deliver anything before the actual deadline for entering the competition has long passed). Again, we got a helping hand from Orange with the sound fx for the smurf sequence. In the end, it was finally delivered and shown on the bigscreen to cheers from the crowd when they saw our crowd-pleasing spoof finale. It seems running smurfs and a grain harvester is a good mix after all.

Funny note; This is the 4th most downloaded wilddemo on scene.org (nearly 60.000 and it's 34mb). However, upon contacting the scene.org crew to verify if this could really be true, we were told that they had been the victims of a server crash, rendering their database stats a bit fubar, and had no way (or will) to change the counter back to whatever it originally was. This has probably caused a lot of extra hits on our release from people thinking it's better than it is. However, we cannot be held liable, sorry. :)

demo in a Virtual Reality machine and ends up seeing himself seeing the demo.

So in a way its a mix of a story driven demo and our more traditional effects driven demos (in reality it's just a big showcase for the huge spaceship model in the demo).

What a virtual paradox indeed!

shots and tasks between us with little effort, and got a helping hand from Orange (Ostebulen/TBC), to do the sound recording of the Bunny's voice, in his car. DFeKT got some nice Bunny quickie animation/setup going and Trenox got to polish on his spaceship modelling and texturing skills, while HEiNRiCH was mostly just trying to get the volumetric particles to work while his computer was still capable. ZwartZ did the still image breakers amongst other things. In the end, however, due to time constraints and endless software crashes caused by heat in the hall, we ended up with a product with no Santa, no explanation for the Easter Bunny's link to santa, nor any explanation as to why the Easter Bunny speaks swedish. Note the amazing earth destroying effects cooked up by HEiNRiCH in the last minute before the productions was to be submitted - way past the deadline. Never before has gaussian blur been put to such dreadful use, and it never should again.

In conclusion: We tried to make a coherent storyline, yet failed to a certain extent at achieving that goal. Rest assured though, this will not be our last attempt at the effort.

nights testing. As a result of this, the end result is somewhat incoherent and lacks theme and continuity throughout the video, only being knit together by the hitting thuds of Budda's acid techno. Amongst other shots, Trenox did a nice toon rendered rollercoaster and DFeKT got to exploit the 3d Studio Max 2.x Combustion (later renamed Fire Effect) plugin in a period of time where it was still cool. Also featured is some rare seen ground hitting fluid dynamics - courtesy of Budda-X, and some interlaced stills by ZwartZ.

Also, on a historical note, this was the first production to showcase what has since become the landmark for many a JUNK production - the male phallus urinating.