Gabor Lendvai:

I have always been interested in how different things work around us. It's always been fun to find another layer or mechanism beneath them. It is a bit like trying to find the hidden clockwork behind our everyday life.

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Gabor Lendvai:

The most important lesson was that every single frame in a short film has to have a strong reason to be in the sequence. All of the scenes that are shown should work for conveying the main idea/concept of the film. Should a scene, however well it is worked out, not correspond with the main idea, it is better to cut it out or find a way to build it into the story.

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Gabor Lendvai:

The importance of exact planning cannot be told enough. During this film, I enjoyed all the advantages of planning. To have an exact plan helps you through even the hardest periods of the process, when you're nearly running out of time and there is no time to make important decisions. If you have no planning, the result will be chaos.

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Gabor Lendvai:

After I had chosen the idea, I wrote it down and made a story pitch video. During that process, I cleaned up the idea, as well as the personalities of the characters. When it was as clear and simple as it could be, I started to plan the visualization of the scenes by drawing some very simple, fast sketches, just to show the plans and scenes. With these sketches, I started to plan the timing, putting them together in the animatic. When I was satisfied with the scenes and the timing, I started to build up the scenes in 3D, with the characters not yet animated, just to put the cameras to exact positions. This process was the making of the layout. Until I finished the layout phase, I let myself change the scenes, timing, camera and character positions, and other parts that create the structure of the film. These phases were planned out in advance rather than leaving the big decisions to be made during animation.

When I finished these planning phases, I started to make some sketches of the animation and reference videos. Using these guides, I started to make the rough blocking of the animation, and the finished blocking phase, and refined it. While working on the animation, I started to work on the lighting and rendering, to know how much animation I would need in the zoom-out scene. After I'd finished the detailed modeling, texturing, lighting, and animation, I rendered out the scenes, and started the composition process. When it was finished, I recorded some voices, made the titles and put it all together. 

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Gabor Lendvai:

You can see on these different phases how the animation process was fleshed out, and how the idea was cleaned up. First, I reduced the camera angles to three altogether, then I changed the order of the scenes; the room interior went to the beginning of the film. You can see how
I tried to find the right place for the two characters in the last
scene.

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Gabor Lendvai:

One of the obstacles was the body size of the white character. I'd made the door before I started animating the big guy  walking through it. So when I arrived at that phase, I had to work a lot on how to turn the character's shoulders without his shoulders touching the door frame.

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Gabor Lendvai:

First of all, the most important thing is that Animation Mentor taught me how to animate. :)

In the process of making the short film, the most important help I received was the constant ability to discuss questions with my mentors Mark Pudleiner in Class 5 and Michelle Meeker in Class 6, and other mentors, peer buddies and classmates.

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Gabor Lendvai:

In my opinion, the most important advice I could give is to always keep the process under control.  There are a lot of traps along the way, which are worsened by unplanned scenes or movements. Do not move on to the next phase until you’re finished planning, and until you are satisfied with it. The other important thing is to make a time schedule. Always check whether you are on time or late, and revise your schedule if necessary. With these two things you can minimize bad surprises in the animation process, and you can concentrate on character animation.