Having succeeded in completing smaller projects, a decision was made in July 2005 to realize 458nm together. We met in October to bring our ideas and thoughts together, having thought about ideas over the summer separately. After some weeks of hard thinking and serious discussion, we realized it would be kind of hard to work out something that would be creatively and technically satisfying and challenging enough for all three of us. This was the central issue for all of us, because we knew if this wasn’t the case, it would be hard work for the next four months.

One of us watched Microcosmos while searching for some fresh inspiration, and there he saw two snails making love, the scene underlain with some classical music.

We were all very fascinated by the beauty and impression of the snails moving and “kissing” each other. Quickly the idea emerged to adopt the scene with clockwork snails. After thinking and talking about the idea for some days and after talking to the musicians, we decided that this would be the thing we would spend the next four months on.

The idea seemed to allow all the things we knew we wanted to create—strong images, a dark mood, and, most importantly, we wanted the music to be an essential part of it. We didn’t want the music just to support the images; we wanted it to melt with the images. The music should play an equivalent role to the images. Neither could be without the other. All this had a very strong influence on our working process.

The next days were spent setting up our working place. Since we produced our last project with XSI and were very happy with it, we decided to use it again. We started working out the story. Because of the important role of the music we couldn’t produce an exact animatic. We produced a roughly blocked out animatic which set the overall timing of the action.

The workflow for the exact editing consisted of giving some roughly edited piece to the musicians, than getting it back with some music under it to work on the images and edit again. This exchange kept happening until the musicians and we liked the piece. This turned out to be a very efficient way to deal with the situation.

In the first two months of production, we focused on the visual and technical design of the snails, which proved to be especially challenging for us on the technical side of things at an early stage. The high number of objects and polygons and the problem to get all the single objects moving together the way we wanted them to move seemed undoable to us. Until the middle of January we doubted that we would even get one minute of the movie finished by our deadline.

Suddenly the two biggest fears of not being able to animate and render the snails were solved. Putting the single elements of the rig together worked very well, and the problem of not being able to render a scene with snails in it because of memory problems was solved by being able to use the render facilities at the Animation Institute. With these things working we were able to finish everything in time.

The team was made up of Jan Bitzer, Ilija Brunck and Tom Weber. Jan Bitzer was responsible for modeling, shading, lighting, camera works and compositing. Ilija Brunck worked out the rig and the animation. Tom Weber´s function was design, modeling, shading and compositing. Additionally Heiko Schneck worked on shading and compositing.