The animation process was rather tortuous. First, I storyboarded the whole thing on paper. Then, I used a bulky Panasonic to shoot footage of my classmate Dale Arndell running around London’s Underground to (sort of) match the storyboard.

With selects gathered, I taped tracing paper to a video monitor and rotoscoped around 80% of the animation with a ruler and a thick charcoal pencil. Since it’s hard to get footage of man-sized rats in lab coats, the rest was animated straight-ahead. Finally, the cels were scanned back in for assembly in After Effects.

Early line tests for the film were even more ambitious, and involved reference renders from Infini-D, which was the first 3D package I ever used, and a far cry from Maya. In the end I simplified things to meet the assignment deadline.

All the sound is original. Foley mostly came from the camera mic. I produced the fusion-y soundtrack using Deck II. The sounds came from a Roland Sound Canvas, Propellerheads’ ReBirth RB-338 VST synth, and my teen-dreams Ibanez shred guitar hooked up to a tiny Crate practice amp.