ABSTRACT
The idea wouldn’t leave me alone. So I decided to suck it up and beg for a roll or two of fi lm and a small equipment package to go shoot a short live-action scene. Luckily, the faculty graciously gave me a very small camera package and 400 feet of fi lm to shoot on an off-weekend, but now I had to convince a few of my exhausted fellow students to help me out on my shoot. About a week before everything was lined up and ready to go, another idea suddenly hit me while driving in my car to my production meeting — weaving into the animation a live-action story about a lonely girl also searching for friends. It was a real lightning fl ash of inspiration. But I had to scramble to get things worked out for the new idea. It was both a blessing and a curse. I had to rewrite, fi nd locations, and cast about a dozen kids (no small feat in Tallahassee) in about a week. Thankfully, the small one-day shoot went off without a hitch. It was a really great experience — getting back to basics — just a couple of friends, a camera, and some refl ector boards. After shooting, I edited the scenes together and then set aside the next two months for animation. Since I was animating it myself (on my home PC on a program called Lightwave 3D), I could change things very quickly. Little ideas and ways to make the scenes more effi cient were always coming while animating. I just let the story grow and change as I completed it. Aside from the basic story skeleton, the fi lm really was a work in progress.
