WINDING THE MACHINE
The clock parts also came in handy when it came time to produce sound for the film. The clicks and ticks are obviously the sounds of the real clocks in operation, but there are also nice grinding and winding sounds present on the soundtrack. But the scenes where the cogs embrace at the end presented a unique sound challenge for Petrov and his audio designer, Maksim Andrukov. "[Finally] we used the original sound of the clock ringing and changed it in different ways to get feeling of the gears touching. That's why the sound has that nice ring to it."

"The inspiration for the film was living in Moscow. It made me think about people living in a system."      -- Alexei Petrov

As they live out their lives, the cogs leave a series of Spirographic marks on the ground, a record of their decisions and movements. "I wanted to have feeling of depth in the scene because I had such a stark, white background. I tried different textures and then decided to try tracks from the cogs. When I saw the result, I really liked it because I got the feeling of motion, and the feeling of the cog's mood." To get this effect, Petrov wrote a simple script in 3ds max to lay down tracks where the cogs intersected with the ground. He combined those tracks with hand-drawn lines, and several clock schematics he got from the internet, on the background texture.

The cogs are devoid of faces, limbs, or even flexibility, yet when their dance is done and they lay once again inert, you feel a little something for these characters. It's nice to see an artist bring pathos to inanimate objects without the over the top hopping glee or self piteous shoulder sag that is currently so common in character animation.

       -Steve Ogden

SEE the movie. You can view the entire short film at Alexei Petrov's website, which includes several other of the artist's works. This story first appeared as the Showreel article in 3D World magazine #77.