And we were off. Because of the amount of time it takes to properly rig a character, we'd planned on doing an abstract, 'segmented' world: characters were non-contiguous, with the segments of their arms and legs floating instead of joined (to avoid having to smartskin the joints so they'd look good while bending), heads floating for the same reason, and sets in a matching style (think the old Star Trek episode "Specter of the Gun", where clocks hung in empty air because the Omnipotent Aliens of the Week hadn't bothered to make the walls the clocks hung from).

That all got thrown out. From what I've seen of the script (the parts I was animating or lipsynching), it was a great decision to do so. I modeled some fun characters, some props and a couple of sets.

As to animating... I should have stuck with doing lip-synch. I've done very little animation, so I spent a great deal of time being frustrated because the program wouldn't do what I wanted it to. In fact, I'm hoping Fearless Leader will let me completely redo scene five for a "director's cut" edition of the short, to fix some problems (such as totally forgetting that I had to cut between closeups, so the greater part of the scene is just a boring three-shot over the head and arm of a corpse) and generally animate the characters better.

Saturday morning at around 4:30, RoadRunner went down. This was pretty disastrous given that the entire thing was an Internet collaboration. Even if I'd had a regular modem and an ISP to connect to via the phone lines, the sheer amount of data that needed to be continually pushed back and forth would have made it impossible to participate. I called RoadRunner tech support. They promised that a technician would be out sometime by Monday at the latest. Arrrrgh! I decided that, without a way to do any more work, I could risk sleeping until 7:00 AM.

When I got up, the connection was working again (the RoadRunner tech finally showed up sometime in the early afternoon). Hooray! The rest of the weekend is already a total blur (I didn't get any more sleep until 7:00 Sunday night, at which point I slept until after 8:00 this morning, waking up only once to watch Farscape). I consumed mass quantities of caffeine; damn the GERD and heart palpitations, full speed ahead!

While we didn't finish by the deadline, we managed to make an animated film running nearly seven minutes — script written, voices recorded, models built, scenes animated, score composed and recorded, and everything edited together — in 53 hours, with only five animators. And that's one hell of an accomplishment by any standard.

And I have to thank my wonderful wife Karen, who not only put up with being a computer widow for the weekend, but was fantastic about bringing me food and drink and making sure I had everything I needed.

The world premiere will be in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday night. After that, it'll be made publicly available on the Internet. I can't wait to see it myself!