Lucas Martell's Pigeon Impossible is just the kind of film that led me to start AnimWatch. It's a nice looking film with a neat idea, and a small team laboring almost in obscurity to bring it to fruition. One of my favorite things to do is track these films under construction, and watch them mature.

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Like Matthew Tardiff's Adolescent Charm, and Sky's Shoot the Moon, Lucas started keeping the AnimWatch community up on his film's progress through the AnimWatch forum over a year ago. From the first initial character designs to some stunning set renderings, it's been exciting to watch it develop.

Along the way, Lucas has had to balance his life and his job with his desire to create this film in his spare time. He has recently, very wisely added some friends to the mix. As he says, you've got to know when to ask for help.

He took a few moments out of his overbooked schedule to give us this interview.

OGDEN: OK, Lucas - to start, why don't you give us the basics? What is Pigeon Impossible all about?

MARTELL: Well, when PI started out, it was just a simple test animation. It was about a guy versus a box, the sort of push-pull test animators do. But then I saw that someone else had already done that online and I figured I might as well take it to the next level. So it morphed and took about two years for the whole story to work itself out. I'd really not done much story stuff at all before then, so I kind of learned the process along the way.

But eventually, it became the story of a rookie spy named Walter, who gets this James Bond-style briefcase with tons of gadgets and stuff, and just after he gets it, a pigeon gets trapped inside. So the whole story is What to Do When a Hungry Pigeon Gets Trapped Inside Your Multi-Million-Dollar, Government-Issued Nuclear Briefcase.

OGDEN: You mentioned learning the story process along the way. Have you done any films before?

MARTELL: Well, sort of. I was a student at Milliken University. I was a music student, actually. And they didn't have a film program there. Like I said, it's a small school, about 25-2600 people, something like that. But since they didn't have a film program, a couple of other students and I did get a group together and we managed to get some of the money that they allot for student organizations, and we shot a 16mm short. I have to admit that it was probably more of a technical exercise than actually trying to tell a story. So I'd say that PI is probably the first proper film I've done, although I've definitely played around with it quite a bit before.

OGDEN: Did you do storyboards?

MARTELL: Yeah, we storyboarded the whole film. In fact, we didn't even really write a script, just because there's no dialogue, and everything's so visual that it just didn't seem to work very well trying to write all that stuff out. So we pretty much just jumped straight into boards, and cut it into an animatic to get the pacing and everything down.

Actually, the way I worked a lot was that I'd just do thumbnail sketches of the storyboards, and then I'd take it into a 3D layout animatic mode which worked really well for all the action sequences, because you can just move the character and move the camera around to get the different angles you need, and it's a pretty efficient way of working. I think it really shows the action well.

The only downside of doing so much of that stuff in 3D was that for the more emotional stuff, or the sort of funny reaction shots, it's really hard to see what's going on and for other people to see what I had in mind. A lot of people who saw the earliest versions of the animatic couldn't really tell what was going on. They'd say, "Why do you have that shot there?" I think that's something that, next time around, I'll probably do more of my animatic as 2D sketches before I worry about taking it into 3D.

OGDEN: What were some of the biggest challenges that you faced while making the movie?

MARTELL: I think it was definitely the story. But most of that was just because I didn't really know what I was doing, so I had a long way to go just learning more about dramatic tension, and buildup and character arcs, and narrative economy. Stuff like that.

But I think technically, the hardest thing was animation. Just getting a believable performance. That was another thing I had never really done before. Before this movie, I hadn't done any animation aside from basic bouncing ball exercises. I probably shot myself in the foot a little bit, too, just making my main character a human. Most people who do animation know that humans are probably the most difficult thing to animate just because we know how they move so well. And so I kind of had to learn animation from scratch, but also how to get a realistic performance out of a human character, which is even more tough.

I have been doing a lot of animation with the pigeon recently. We're wrapping up production on the film, and the pigeon shots are some of the last shots I have left. Those are a lot of fun, especially after doing all the human stuff for so long. It's amazing how much stuff you can get away with, but also how much more creative you can be with it. If you want to move his head a certain way, you can just do it and get away with it, because we're not so tied up in exactly how a real pigeon moves. You can just be a lot more free with it.

OGDEN: Wow, that's a really time-consuming process. Even just the animation alone. How many finished seconds of animation do you think you're getting out in a week?

MARTELL: Well, I've definitely gotten faster. I've also gotten a lot better about budgeting my time. I spend a lot more time on the really big, really important shots like the very beginning, the very end, and certain key moments along the way. And I don't wind up polishing some of the smaller shots quite as much.

Probably on those big shots that I am going all out on, I'm getting about 4 seconds a week of finished footage. Obviously, I'm not as good an animator as the professional guys at Pixar or Dreamworks. I think I wind up going a little faster, though, because I'm not taking as much time to polish and get all of my motion arcs absolutely perfect. If I were a better animator, I think I'd probably wind up getting all hung up on some of the little detail stuff that's in the performances.