Martin Kirkhaug:
When I started Class 5, I had no idea what kind of short I was going to make. The first lecture with Rebecca Stockley was awesome and helped a lot! After doing her exercises, I had about 10 story ideas that I posted for feedback.

The old man approaching the Gate of Youth idea was a result of some brainstorming and story spine exercises early on in Class 5. The idea of re-living your life with a lifetime of knowledge fascinates me and I also like that it’s a supernatural, but yet a well known concept, so not too much explanation was needed. I did a lot of research about fountain of youth etc, but couldn’t find anything about The Gate of Youth, so it was also kind of original.

My initial idea with this story was to make a short about how any attempts on messing with nature, will fail. The moral of the story in the beginning was something like “Nature will always find a way to preserve its natural path.”

The story went through a lot of stages on paper. With the help of a couple of very good Animation Mentor classmates, we brainstormed a lot of different ways of telling the story. At one point the old man turned into a seed and was picked up by a dove that flew into heaven. In another version, the man was electrocuted by a fuse box attached to the gate. It was really fun exploring and coming up with all kind of crazy stuff. In the version I submitted in the text pitch (and also the video pitch), the man turned into a skeleton and collapsed into a pile of bones.

Martin Kirkhaug:
That making a short is a lot harder and more time-consuming than you would think!

I think the most important thing I learned was how to develop a simple idea into a workable complete story. I also learned how important the pitch and the response to the pitch are. Just by telling the story to somebody and getting their instant feedback, gave me indications early on if I was on the right track, and what parts worked and what parts needed more work.

Martin Kirkhaug:
About 7 1/2 months total. I did the story, animatic and layout in Class 5 (3 months). I also figured out all the effects and the modeling before Class 6 started, because I wanted to have 100% focus on animation in Class 6. Animation took 3 months during Class 6 and then there was about 6 weeks of lighting, rendering and compositing it after Class 6.

Martin Kirkhaug:
I did a lot of planning. I wrote a long back-story for the character from the day he was born and up till the time he was standing in front of the coin slot. Even though most of the back-story is not seen in the final film, it really helped me to create the story, to make acting choices, and to define the character and his thought process etc. I also did a lot of very rough and simple storyboards to test out camera angles, etc. I can’t draw at all, so the storyboarding was very time-consuming. But it helped a lot to have the rough boards first, so I didn’t waste time re-drawing the refined storyboards.

In terms of time management, I made a very thorough production plan with daily deadlines that I made a big deal out of following during the production.

Martin Kirkhaug:
Pitch:
This is the final pitch of the story and at this point I’d decided that “Forever Young” was the film I was going to make.

Storyboards:
I spent tons of times on these boards. I drew the background and the character separately and composed them in Photoshop so that I could make several poses of the character on the same background for use later in the animatic. The story went through several revisions during this stage.

Animatic:
These are the storyboards edited together. During the storyboard/animatic stage, a lot of shots were removed and/or simplified. In my first animatic pass I think I had close to 25-30 shots. My mentor (Pepe Valencia) did a fantastic job helping me cut it down to what is in the film now – 16 shots.

Lee Holdridge’s music is also added. The music at this time was supposed to be temporary only. But as the film progressed into the layout, I liked the music more and more and I decided to write an email to Mr. Holdridge asking for permission to use his music. He was very kind and there was no problem using his music as long as it was for non-commercial and educational purposes only.

Layout:
By now, both my mentor and I were happy with the cam angles and the shots. There were only some minor changes in the camerawork during the layout.

Blocking, Refining, Polishing:
Animating the short in Class 6 went pretty well. It was crazy hard and my mentor Bret Parker was pushing a lot, but she was also really good at focusing on the most important things, so it never felt too overwhelming.

Martin Kirkhaug:
The hardest thing during the writing/pre-production was to stay objective, which I felt was more or less impossible. I relied heavily on very good friends that helped me by giving me honest opinions about the development of the story. But after showing the work to someone, they’re not objective anymore either. So I constantly had to find new people to show it to. Towards the end of Class 5, I ran out of fresh people, so I turned to my brother who is a high school teacher and he screened the animatic in one of his classes. They all got it, which was pretty cool. Some didn’t like it or thought it would be better this or that way, but at least they all understood what was going on – which was the most important thing to me at that point.

Another thing is that I got very attached to my story. At times it was very hard to make changes that my mentor gave me, because I liked it the way it was. But in the end, I’m glad I trusted him and let my ego go, because now I think the changes made the story a lot better in the end.

Martin Kirkhaug:
I didn’t have any experience with character animation before I started Animation Mentor, so everything I’ve learned and everything that’s in this short is because of the education I got from Animation Mentor.