Mike Safianoff:
Well, about three years ago I was taking care of my friend's two ferrets.  These suckers are basically tails with devious intent – all they did was run around my shanty little dorm room, knocking over my precious few processions and in general stinking up the place.  Naturally we bonded over our shared contentious nature, and if the little fellas didn’t just absolutely beam with pride whenever they made a biological mess of things I would probably be the proud occupant of a ferret swamped home.  Anyway, when my friend returned she told me tales of wild (as if there was any other kind) ferrets hunting in packs.  The idea of a small group of these cretins, teaming up in a very poorly run pack like fashion and overtaking a boar, well, I really wanted to animate that.  Over the next year and a half or so the idea somehow warped into a pack of wiener dogs taking down a fat guy (a natural progression to be sure) but other than that one scene I didn't have a story in mind.  When class 5 rolled around and I needed to pitch three story ideas I wound up developing this one a little bit, and my mentor and classmates seemed to agree it was the strongest of the three.  From there a whole lot of circumstances and conversations eventually led up to the short film, which still needs a title.

Mike Safianoff:
Cripes, more than anything, how important it was to get lots of other people involved.  I sorta careened through this project and made several changes along the way – sometimes a new idea or just affirmation of what I had going would get me back on track.  That and it’s always scarier to hear, "Crap man, you're running out of time!" from someone else, especially when it’s a lot of people.  All the help from my mentor and students, from friends (and sometimes even their friends) really made this story what it turned out to be.  Other people's feedback was more important than what I thought my story was; it had to make sense or else I was just slapping around a lot of keyframes for no apparent reason.

Mike Safianoff:
The short film starts in class 5 with 3 months of planning, then 3 months of doing for class 6.  I was working on an, er, troubled...production back then and had very little time for Animation Mentor in class 5 and parts of class 6.  But luckily the company I was at agreed to let me take a 7 week leave of absence once the project was complete, and that’s when I really got started.  I remember that first weekend, gads nearly 10 months ago now (Aug 4th 2006).  I was staring down at my layout and just thinking, "Nope.  Don't want to animate this."  I had gotten extremely gun-shy after working so hard on a project that had been a bit too ambitious to say the least and I was over-compensating.  A friend of mine suggested something along the lines of "Hey, what if it’s coffee instead of a donut," and that one simple change really spawned a whole new story.  All in all it was about 5 ½ weeks of bleary-eyed-strapped-to-the-chair-barely-even-time-for-cartoons absolute animation bender time, then there was about a week to render the thing and about half a week to just get my head around the rapid story changes at the very beginning.  I finished the Sunday before I had to go back to work.  My clicky finger hath never been the same... 

Mike Safianoff:
I was always doodling my characters during spare seconds at work.  I'm not much of a drawer but I can doodle, and that turned out to be huge.  I was thinking about the characters as I drew them – I didn’t realize it at the time but I was working out my characters through these oodles of doodles, so when I finally had time to get to the computer I didn’t have to waver between ideas, I could quickly commit to whatever felt right, and hope for the best come feedback time.

Mike Safianoff:
Er, unfortunately a lot of that stuff is lost to the ages.  My "pre-production" was for the most part done on whiteboards and sticky notes, maybe the occasional coffee stained notepad.  I don’t even have my storyboard, which actually is a little upsetting.  Guess these things happen when you move three times in four months.  I have my first layout pass and later my first blocking pass, but that’s really about it.

So here’s the layout, not very many shots, not a very complex story really. The "idea" was you would think the dogs would eat him but instead they would spare him in exchange for an infinite supply of donuts.  Getting the whole "spared because we lack the thumbs for commerce" idea across was the real challenge of this film.  This last shot was going to be inside the coffee shop, him looking rather tattered, woefully plucking individual bills out of a wallet while nervously glancing back at the ravenous beasts.

Here is some rough, early blocking.  Some pretty big differences, the human only scene in the beginning was supposed to set up how lonely he is but most people I showed it to assumed he gave off some awful stink or something.  To make up for this new scene, the rest of the short got significantly more conservative and this brief fraternization with human interaction was cast off in favor of more dog stuff (tails are plenty of emotion).

And then there was a flurry of keyframes for a little while and when the dust settled I had the film.  It drags in the middle and has a few shots that didn't turn out so well, maybe one day I'll go back and tighten things up, re-do a few shots – but I know if I start to fix one thing, I'll wind up re-doing the whole film, so...best not to pull that thread.

Mike Safianoff:
My own stupidity.  Laziness.  Fear of the outdoors.  Lack of deliverable food services.  Broken air conditioner.  Above all, time.  I knew I was going to cut a lot of corners to make my deadline, so I re-used a lot of animation, snuck the camera in tighter in some shots, and the climax kinda takes place off screen.  There were lots of specific troubles, the first walk cycle I did with the dog did not bode well for the rest of the film.  The biggest obstacle I remember was just getting the story to make any sense whatsoever, and however well it works is a testament to all the feedback I got from everyone who sat through it.

Mike Safianoff:
Gadzooks, I will never forget my first E-Critique.  I had graduated from an art school about a little less than a year prior to starting Animation Mentor, and although I disagreed with the piece of paper they issued that called me an animator, I at least thought I could handle a bouncing ball.  Apparently not.  That first week when my mentor went through my ball bounce frame by frame, my little world was resoundingly rocked.  Frame by frame, oh yeah, that’s animation – not motion, but frames.  There I was all willy-nilly just trying to make stuff move and this guy is talking about arcs and spacing, breaking down movements, force, applied weight, yada yada yada.  Getting feedback from a professional, even just "meeting" one and being able to talk about movies I had been drooling over for years was such a boon.  Course, then there’s the lectures, which each week presented a month if not several months worth of rich, tasty information, not to mention the wealth of opinions and collaboration in the community with all of its shared knowledge.  Just the general day to day zeal of the place is remarkable.  It was the polar opposite of my previous art school learnings, and I couldn’t be more thankful to every person and facet of the school for that.