Thomas Lubanovic:
My idea started with the character and led to a story. I was doodling a bunch of different expressions using just a moustache with some eyes and eyebrows. It was fun to work with these basic shapes and I kept drawing and thinking of possible stories.

The idea of a phone falling out of the sky popped into my head one day when I was leaving work. It was a pretty basic idea, the rest of the story took quite a while to build up and figure itself out.

Thomas Lubanovic:
There were many things I learned. One was that it was entirely possible for me to complete a short film if I gave myself enough time to work and break the project down, piece by piece by piece. I'm glad we spent so much time on story and revisions because it helped me understand pacing and emotional beats.

Revisions really were an important lesson. There was a section of animation I completely redid, when the Wildman jumps down out of the tree. He originally landed and skidded across the ground, but my mentor Ethan Hurd suggested I could make it look much more natural by having him bounce and settle. This was getting close to the end of our production schedule, but I made the changes and it absolutely made the film better.

Thomas Lubanovic:
One of the best things I heard in school was that, as animators, we will always be rewarded by experiencing new things ourselves. Every second not animating should be spent living, in other words. Going on adventures, meeting people, and following our curiosity can only give us more knowledge to use when we need it.

And so, when I was invited by some friends, I went on a huge road trip in the middle of production for my film, from Minnesota to Arizona and back. I was still animating, sometimes on the road on a laptop in the backseat, or when we stopped at hotels. It was a good way to get inspired and test myself. Also, I didn't know when I'd get another chance to visit the Southwest. We saw the Grand Canyon at sunrise and I managed to get all my shots finished.

Thomas Lubanovic:
During the pre-production class we were really encouraged to explore and revise ideas, so most of my early planning was brainstorming and thumbnailing, over and over. Once I had a story I wanted to work on, we were starting to put together storyboards and animatics. That helped me figure out interesting camera shots and also cut out story ideas that weren't working.

Another important step during planning was getting the environment and set created for layout. I knew I wanted to keep it simple, so I made everything very geometric with rounded edges. The trees and nest and cell phone and Wildman all had to look like part of the same world.

Planning for animation was a combination of drawing poses, acting them out and looking around YouTube. It was a good excuse to watch a lot of dumb cat videos. In the first half of the film, most of the poses are loosely based on some type of animal reference.

Thomas Lubanovic: These are some of the first thumbnails I did, a starting point for my character and the story.

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As I went through different ideas, I eventually settled on something more like this. The Wildman is more animal-like and I was happy with this kind of simple environment for him to be in.

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I did lots and lots of drawings to help myself figure out what I was doing, even late into production. This made animating so, so much easier.

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This was my final pitch for the story idea. I recommend spitting out your gum when you do this. The ending was very, very different at this point. Something I kind of liked, but not quite the character arc I was going for.

Here's the storyboard/animatic that developed out of that pitch. You can see the camera shots and ending getting closer to the final result, but there still weren't quite enough emotional beats.

In the 3D layout of the film, I learned a lot about camera movement and lens length, which was fun and sometimes frustrating. I was still working on that ending, too, deciding to have him fall out of the tree after his calm scene with the bird/phone. It was also important to get a few of the main sound effects in at this point, even though they were pretty rough.

This is the first blocking pass of animation, when I realized that it would be really fun to make him more like an animal and less like a typical caveman. I wanted to show a range of actions and emotions that appealed to me.

Throughout blocking, I played with different details in the film. I put in a temporary soundtrack, which helped with defining the emotional beats. The camera placement and movement went through polishing, too, and some things I couldn't make up my mind on for a while, like the look of the bird eggs.

This is when I started splining out my poses and realized how much more work I had to do. If I could go back, I would spend many more hours on blocking-in breakdowns and nailing down the timing. The last 5% of work really does take the most time, and it would've helped to get there sooner.

The next few weeks of polishing finished up the film, but I wanted to point out a section that I reworked. My mentor Ethan Hurd thought it would improve the story, and I'm glad he suggested it.

The final render was only one image sequence, since that's all I had room for on my hard drive. All of the sound compositing, titles and color correction were done in After Effects.

Thomas Lubanovic:
One of the obstacles I saw coming was that many students have a hard time getting their film completely finished by the end of the term. Three months really is a very short amount of time to finish a film, especially when you need to work to pay rent and buy groceries. I was lucky in that I had a decent part-time job delivering sandwiches that allowed me to survive while making time to animate. It was really apparent that students with families and busier schedules had a much harder time and I was impressed by how good their work was.

After classes were finished, it took about another month to completely finish my film (polishing animation, rendering, sound, music). Texturing and rendering were pretty annoying to me at the time, so I kept it as simple as possible. Flat colors and only a couple lights, but I tried to make it fit the look of the film. Sound and music were actually a lot of fun. I borrowed a microphone and a banjo from friends and went running around the woods to make effects with rocks and wind and tree branches. In my other student films I always slacked off on that step and I'm glad I spent the time on that.

Thomas Lubanovic:
Well, I'm sure this film would've taken twice as long to make and been half as good. The feedback from my mentors and classmates was invaluable. It was a great motivator, knowing that I had a schedule to stick to and people ready to critique my work.

My story mentor, Mark Pudleiner, was full of excellent suggestions and enthusiasm to help me refine the story that I wanted to tell. It was too abstract at first. Mark was really adamant about capturing real human emotions and giving each beat its proper amount of time.

Ethan Hurd, my mentor during production, helped me a lot with my posing and acting. Some of the actions and storytelling ideas were really difficult to figure out. I think each successive class and mentor at Animation Mentor really teaches you to see more detail in your work and purpose in your choices.

Thomas Lubanovic:
Absolutely pick a story and character that you'll have fun with and hopefully not get tired of. It's worth abandoning ideas that don't work. This is your chance to really develop as a storyteller, so practice your pitches with your friends. Get ready to hear lots of feedback, some that will be helpful and some that you'll disregard completely.

I think another important thing is to draw inspiration from whatever art you most enjoy. When I was working on this film, I was really into comic artists Scott Campbell and Graham Annable and some musicians like Bonnie 'Prince Billy' and the Avett Brothers. It was a combination of nerdy and folky themes that crept into my film. Letting this happen is a good way to make your film more personal, I think, and more rewarding.