Two octopuses help each other in their comical escape from the grasp of a stubborn restaurant cook. However, even after overcoming insurmountable odds to reunite, their fight to stay together is not over.

We faced challenges at every step of making this film. The first was deciding on a story that all six directors were happy with and had confidence in. This process was particularly difficult because, due to the short production time, we were strongly urged by our professors to stay within a running time of two minutes. In hindsight however, this limit not only allowed us to finish the film, but made sure that we used our screen time efficiently in the telling of the octopusses story.

During production, the greatest obstacle was creating the octopusses. We needed a design that was appealing and allowed the character to emote without a mouth. The issue of appeal was particularly important as we were dealing with an animal that is by nature slimy, with suction cups and a strangely shaped body. Once we had the design and a 3D model, the next challenge was how to build a rig that would allow the octopus to perform a variety of actions with its arms. It had to be able to use them as real arms and legs, and it had to have the ability to perform broader movements, particularly to swim and fly through the air. Because of this, we could not rely on traditional rigging techniques and we had to find new ways of controlling our character.

Other than the octopusses, we had several other large obstacles to overcome, such as creating an entire village. We modeled about ten houses and a dozen props, and we built the background from these elements separately for each shot. We also had the challenge of simulating water for about a half dozen shots. Last, but definitely not least, was the challenge of breathing life into the story during the animation phase. There was an immense pressure to rush the work. In many shots, we had the absolute bare minimum amount of screen time to give the necessary performance, which meant that the action had to be fine-tuned on a frame-by-frame basis. We were only able to overcome this because we had spent sufficient time locking down our cameras in the layout stage, which allowed us to focus on the spacing and timing the same way we would in 2D. In the end, we were rewarded for our persistence with the Best Animation award at Imagina 2008.