http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lg2dqFCU67QHouse Special creative director Kirk Kelley in Portland, Oregon: "'A Tale of Momentum & Inertia' is one of our Short Stuff™ projects. The driving force behind Short Stuff™ is to create short animated films from ideas our staff pitch and then develop – ideas we think are funny and interesting, and ultimately reflect and hone our collective studio voice.
"The fun thing about our Short Stuff™ projects is that the entire studio has opportunities to contribute and try out new skill sets that the schedules for client projects typically don't allow. People take on new and different roles as they pitch in to help make the shorts happen. "This project was pitched by Kam Gates, who was a staff CG animator at the time, based on an idea of his and his long-time friend and writer Allan Turner. At its heart it's a creation myth, only this world has a creator of questionable benevolence.
"The final story stemmed from bouncing ideas back and forth about what this creator of mountains would do if he made a slight mistake, how he would correct it and what the consequences might be. Have you ever stepped on an anthill? "Giving the world a tactile feeling that was also graphic in nature was the constant challenge.
This applied not only to the environment but also the main character, composed entirely of rocks. He needed to be expressive and empathetic for the viewers to connect with him, while at the same time feeling completely rigid and imposing as a massive bundle of rocks. "Kam has a background in sculpture, so using actual rocks he gathered from where he grew up in Lake of the Woods, Ontario, the initial design was conceived.
"Scale and rigging of the character [were the main technical challenges]. The first hurdle was to make the character move in a way which felt more like plate tectonics than bones and muscle. This involved sliding rocks instead of bending joints and is a unique challenge to make the rigging of the body feel both natural and solid. "Next, the world had to feel massive to telegraph the character's physical scale. The number of trees built to fill the forest is mind-boggling.
We even added trees to his body. And then a lot of work was done to destroy all of those trees."
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