"As abstract as the concept was, I felt that it is very true for today's age of distance learning college classes, cellphones, instant messaging, and email. Sure, our world can come together closely at an intellectual level, but at a human interaction level we are pushing each other apart.

"I went through many storyboards and abstractions while planning the animation. The governing faculty where I produced the animation many times tried to turn it into a very different animation with a crystal-clear story line. I wanted it to be very abstract, nonlinear, and in some ways incomplete. I didn't want someone to just walk away and 'get it.' A few compromises and adjustments got my story line to where it is now. The biggest compromise I felt at the time was the initial popping of the television out of the character's skin. But alas, looking at the animation now, it would lose a lot without this element.

"I first made the animation as a visual animatic. I drew out the entire animation on 3x5 cards and scanned them into the computer. Using Adobe After Effects and a crude sound track that I made with my own voice, I began pacing the animation. Zooming, panning, and rotating the camera began to create the camera angles and hand-held camera effects I was looking for. At the same time I was adjusting the final animatics, I used Alias|Wavefront Maya to construct the models. The models took about three months to complete and were polygon- and NURBs-based.

"Because the thesis was also a learning tool, I wanted to utilize as much of Maya as I could. I began investigating how the physics engine could be employed to aide in the secondary animation of the attached televisions. I devised a method to attach the televisions of the second- and third-scene character to particles that followed, bounced, and moved with the main character. I also used the character from the first scene to deconstruct and apply new texture maps to the skin to make the skin appear as though it was being eaten away by the technology.

"Another technique I wanted to employ was field of view to drive home the hand-held camera effect. I had not clearly decided if I wanted to be in focus or out of focus while animating, so I wanted to apply this effect during postproduction. However, utilizing the z-buffer in the software rendering was time-prohibitive so I chose to write out the z-buffer in hardware mode. It seems trivial now to use z-buffer in postproduction, but almost three years ago, After Effects' claim that it used z-buffer was a far cry from having it actually work correctly. I sort of jerry-rigged the z-buffer output frames to create blended alpha channels that were used to create masks for a blurry channel, then composited into the rendered frames. This method gave me excellent control over the animation and allowed me to adjust it up until the last day of production with excellent speed on my Pentium II 400.

"Because of the camera perspective and animation, the final pull-out shot was taking about five hours to render a single image with all the geometry. The cages were to resemble houses and originally I had intended to put more television men in the other cages, but this too added to the time. Instead, I decided to not render out multiple characters in all the cages and instead render out a single huge image of all the cages, then composite a close-up, looping rendering of the rocking character. This would also allow me to make it as fast or as slow a pull out as I wanted.

"The final sound track was made using Sound Forge ACID. I combined natural and synthetic sounds to further enhance the eerie mood. A moment of serendipity happened during the final editing. I edited the last scene down and put in the credits to Siggraph's seven-second limitation (although it never made the cut for Electronic Theater or any other venue). I made the sound with consideration to timing out the first and second scene, but timing out the final scene with the pull out wasn't finalized. When I added the sound track alongside the newly completed final scene, the final sound was exactly the length I needed without any adjustment to the score." --Eric Morin