Mike Stern:
I had a similar experience as the character in the film. Some co-workers and I went to lunch at an outdoor restaurant and we were seated right next to these speakers that were blasting lite jazz. We asked the waitress if she could turn the volume down, but apparently the management insisted that the music remain loud so that it could attract customers from the street. It immediately became the topic of our lunch conversation because it was impossible to focus on anything else. It truly felt like we were being harassed by the music. I had been looking for ideas for my short film and the idea of a musician harassing an uninterested listener seemed like a funny concept to me. When I got back to the office I searched around on the Internet and I stumbled upon a song that was a great fit for the scenario. From there on out, it was all about finding ways one could be harassed by a soprano saxophonist.

Mike Stern:
I think the most important lesson I learned was what my own limitations are. Everything in this short film took longer and was more difficult than I expected.

I learned that it is so important to find a comfortable pace, and then stay focused and maintain it. It took a lot of trial and error for me to figure this out. There were times where I would stay up nights on end to finish a shot, but then I would be useless for the next few days and lose that time. There were also days where I would open up a shot for an hour and noodle on it while surfing the web/checking emails and end up getting nothing done at all. The solution was right in the middle. When I worked, I would shut everything off except for my 3D software and focus on the animation for about four hours, then I would walk away from it at 12:30 a.m. at the latest to get a full night's rest.

Mike Stern:
Kyle Clark was my mentor during the short film classes, which worked out really well because he came in with a lot of experience in overseeing long-term projects. The best piece of advice that he gave me was to stay focused on the big picture, and he reinforced this idea each week when he checked in on my progress. One of the easiest ways to get off track in the process of making a short film is to get caught up in the small details before the overall structure is working properly. You can waste a lot of time fine-tuning things only to find out that they don't work in continuity. Kyle encouraged me to take a step back and to test my work in the edit at every stage, that way I could start by focusing on the larger issues before trying to work out the smaller ones.

Mike Stern:
The fact that I was doing a short to a soundtrack really helped me with the planning process. A lot of the planning was done in my head by listening to the music and visualizing the action. Each day as I walked home from work, I would loop the soundtrack in my headphones. As the soundtrack played, I would think about the different ways that the characters could interact. When I got home, I would quickly sketch out all the ideas. I used those sketches as a starting point for my animatic.

When I started my animatic, I kept everything pretty loose and experimented with a lot of different ideas. It was fun to slug in a bunch of drawings and push them around in the editing software. I spent a lot of time in this stage because I wanted to make sure that I solved any story or layout issues here before the 3D software was involved. When I had an edit I was happy with, I imported it into Maya as an image plane and used it to build my layout pass. I literally copied the animatic frame by frame and matched the poses and cameras. The translation of the animatic got me close to the final layout pass without having to do too much guesswork.

Once I had the layout file built, it was time to start animating. I took the single layout file and broke it up into separate files for each shot. I saved a playblast of each shot and cut together the full short in my editing software. This made it easy to swap in the latest animation and to have a solid idea of the state of the overall film.

The edit was all set and the next step was to pose out the animation. I kept my first pass of blocking very rough with only a few poses for each shot. That way, I could easily make changes based on the way the shots hooked up in the edit. There were even a few shots that had enough information just from the layout pass in order to sell the idea.

After all of the shots were blocked in and the action worked in the edit, I started my breakdown pass. At this point, I was still working in quick passes across all of the shots so that I could make changes as I needed and continue to accept stronger ideas. I also took some different breakdown approaches based on the shot. I stayed in pose to pose for the majority of the shots, but for some of the physical shots I switched over to spline and started to layer the motion.

Once I had a solid breakdown pass across all of the shots it was time to start refining. I split the shots up into groups based on their difficulty and attacked them one by one. I started with the medium shots. Once I got the flow of things, I worked my way into the harder shots. I would pick up on some of the easy ones when I was feeling overwhelmed with the more difficult ones. Once I started the refinement process on a shot I tried to take the shots to completion, but there were cases where I would put a shot aside and come back to it. Even during the polishing stage, I continued to check my work in the edit as I progressed.

When the film was animated, I enlisted some help with the post production. Fortunately, I was able to get in touch with some talented folks to help me complete the film. Scott Trosclair took on the lighting of the film and delivered some amazing results. Not only was Scott able to establish the look that the film needed, but he also had a strong knowledge of a production workflow and was able to work with our limited render resources by getting crafty with the compositing.

I used a popular piece of music as the soundtrack to the film and I knew that this would cause trouble if I wanted to display the film publicly. To get around this issue, I worked with Justin Melland to compose original music for the film. Justin composed the new piece of music on the piano that matched the beats of the temp track. Once the new composition worked with the animation, Justin brought in studio musicians to record the track. Finally, we mixed the final recording into the film and added some specific dynamics to correspond with the actions of the animated sax player.

The last step was the foley and final sound mix which was done on a sound stage at Sonic Magic Studios by Cody King and Richard Kitting.

Mike Stern:
Here are some of the thumbnail drawings that I did at the very beginning. A lot of the ideas in these quick sketches ended up in the final film.

Click image to enlarge

Mike Stern:
The biggest obstacle that I faced was the amount of time I had. I was working full time while I was making the film and as I had mentioned in the intro, I learned very quickly what my limitations were. The way I worked around this was to accept a slower pace and open up my production schedule. The film is two minutes long and it took me two years to complete. That was much longer than I originally planned, but it was the only way that I could complete the film while still taking care of my other responsibilities.

Mike Stern:
Animation Mentor provided the ideal environment to create this film. I wasn't able to work conventional hours and the program was able to accommodate for that. All of the lessons and critiques were available when I needed them. The school also helped me to develop as an animator. When I reached the short story class, I felt that I had the animation skills that I needed to execute my idea.

It was also huge for me to be able to work on this film in a class with other students that were focused on the same goals and facing a lot of similar setbacks. The constant loop of feedback and encouragement is what really helped me pull this film together.