The Last 912,5 Days OF My Life

With very mixed feelings, I am trying to comprehend this fact. Waking up the last 900 or so mornings, this film on my mind (and going to sleep thinking the same), it is not very easy to accept it. Of course we could’ve gone working on the film for couple of weeks (or months) polishing images, refining sounds and perfecting animation, but at some point you just have to say that this film is finished. Otherwise we would be doing this for two more years.

 

Usually the question everyone asks at this point is did it turn out to be the film you went to make. And the answer is no. No, it didn’t come out as we first planned. It came out hundred times better than we ever could have even hoped for. Remembering those first weeks and months we worked on the film, I look back and feel sympathy and pity for those poor fools who were to embark on a journey that would make them get lost so many times. And I would probably tell them “Don’t do it!”. To be completely honest, we didn’t have a clue what we were about to start. None of us had any experience in doing an animated film. All we had was a story for a film and a flimsy idea of how to carry it through. And lots of unreasoned faith in our idea. And massive amount of stupidity on the top.

 

If the story of how this film got started is not familiar to you, here’s a short summary of the events that led to making this film. In 2009 me and Juuso, our DOPAMOP (Director Of Photography And Master Of Photoshop), and Ilkka, the animator, had a couple of beers (curse that beer) over a discussion of what to do as our thesis work for University. As he is a photographer, Juuso had come up with an idea of making a film using really cool looking still photographs. I thought why not, sounds easy enough. Our last project in Uni had been a 30 minute short film that we had used a year and half to do, so I thought this idea would be easier to do. I told Juuso we should keep it simple this time. “Let’s do something that looks great and runs for about 5 minutes.” Ilkka had some experience in using After Effects and told us that you can make some great looking stuff with still images and some animating.

 

Of course, we failed miserably on the short and easy part, and made it a 25 minute film with 13 different scenes all in different locations, all of those locations completely crazy and massive (a metropolis, huge super villain headquarters, a villa in Bavarian mountains, a convention center...), with dozens of characters with custom outfits, native English speaking voice actors for all these roles, and all this with a technique that no one had tried before which we came up with ourselves. Yeah, we’re stupid.

 

But in spite of our lack of experience, technical skill, common sense or any kind of touch with reality, we managed to pull it off. And pretty good too I have to say. I have to admit that we had a huge amount of luck too. Luck with getting some really talented people working on our project only with empty promises of to-be-success somewhere in the remote future. With these amazing people, we worked and learned and became better and better with time. Looking back at our first sketches and plans and the material we ended up with is beyond remarkable. With great pride I have watched our team get more skillful every day. There are few things more rewarding than watching your ideas build up to an actual film. To see people, lot more talented than yourself, carry out those crappy drawings you made for storyboard into awesome pictures and animations.