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OGDEN: Four seconds a week? Is that full time? Did you have a day job? How much of your day is actually spent on the film?

MARTELL: For most of the production, I did have a full time job. Up until about 4 months ago, I was working full time at a boutique post-production facility doing a lot of color correction, digital intermediates, graphics, 3D… pretty much just about everything. I was the main graphics guy there.

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But about 4 months ago, I went full time freelance. Surprisingly, freelance actually ends up taking more of my time than having a full time job. I typically work 60 or 70 hours a week, but occasionally I won't have a gig and I'll get a week off. I can actually get so much more done in just that concentrated amount of time than I would if I dragged it out trying to work on it in the evenings or on weekends when I'm already tired of looking at the computer. It actually works out pretty well even if I only get a week here and there to do stuff.

OGDEN: What inspired the visual design on the film?

MARTELL: We sketched out the characters, designed all them from scratch. In fact, I think I mentioned before that we had a previous version of Walter that we completely scrapped once the story turned out to be more of a spy character.

But even though the characters got that custom design treatment, the environment and the props wound up being buildings and other real items we lifted from Austin, which is where our production is located. I would have loved to have taken advantage of the medium and designed everything from scratch, but there were so many elements to it that we just didn't have time to do that many sketches. And also, I think it's so much easier to model something that's actually in existence, whereas if you're designing and sketching it out, there are so many things that you have to make up and guess. You get a lot more realism if you work off of real-world objects.

So even though it would have been nice if we had been able to design everything up and really put more of a visual style on the environment, I think working the way we did saved us a lot of time. And it still looks really good. As a bonus, people will spot certain buildings. They'll recognize the Driscoll, and the Paramount Theater. People from Austin will recognize a lot in this film. It's a nice little homage to Austin.

OGDEN: A lot of your posts on the AnimWatch Forum have been about lighting. Could you talk a little bit about your lighting process.

MARTELL: Lighting is one my favorite parts of the process. I've done a lot more of it, so I'm just more comfortable doing it. But I tend to approach all of my shots like effects job, just rendering out a pass for everything - Ambient, Diffuse, Spec, Ambient Occlusion, all that stuff. And I also break the scene down into individual objects. So for an easy shot, it's still probably coming in at about 24, 25 passes. I average about 12 passes an object. But then, some of the more complex scenes that have a lot of elements in them, there might be 80 passes, easily. So it can get kind of unwieldy in the compositing software with all those layers. But it's way easier for me to work like that than having to work on all those objects and materials and the way the lighting is working on everything, dial everything in, and then wait for a render to see what it looks like. I would much prefer to have just low res version in the comp that I can tweak and adjust color on everything and really try to nail it in 2D after the fact.

OGDEN: You've mentioned that you've been working on the film for 3 years? That is a marathon!

MARTELL: Yeah, it has been a little over three years. I guess I started in September of 2004. It's been a long time to spend on 5 minutes of film.

OGDEN: Have you been working by yourself all that time?

MARTELL: No, I haven't been working on it completely by myself. After about two years of not getting much done at all, I ended up talking to a few friends who had done some 3D or were really anxious to learn. We ramped up and did a lot of modeling and texturing. A lot of the environment was done by those other guys. Animation, as well. There are a couple of animators who are far more experienced than I am with animation, and they've done some of the larger shots, some of the big 15, 20-second shots that have a lot of animation going on in them. So, that's been a huge help as well.

OGDEN: How much longer do you think you've got before the film is finished?

MARTELL: Right now, we've got about 75% of it animated, and I'm able to sit down now and really just knock out the last shots. The animatic was the thing that was holding up the process for the longest time. I just wasn't quite happy with little sequences here and there. But now I finally feel like we've got all the shots put together so that all the pacing is working really well. So the last thing to do is just animate and light and composite those last few scenes. We're about 20% done with the actual rendering, so we're looking to have it completely done by January or February of 2008. Really just a few months left.

OGDEN: All right. Well, thanks a lot for keeping us up on your progress, and for taking the time to talk to us. And I guess we'll be seeing you at the forum!

MARTELL: Well, thank you. I've gotten a lot of help from the other guys on the AnimWatch Forum, and all the films that are profiled at AnimWatch are a great source of inspiration. It's a great community to be a part of.