Making it

by Steve Hutton (writer, producer)

It all started in the summer of 2001, when Gregory Duke mentioned that his friend Michael De Boer had studied 3D animation. Whenever I hear that someone has a talent, I automatically start wondering how I can exploit this person.

At this point, it was clear that Fluff would be an awkward length (what some people would call a feature and others wouldn't). I was thinking, in vague terms, about doing a short to pad out the video and DVD. I had heard that 5 minutes is a very marketable length, because cable channels can easily use a 5-minute piece as filler.

A typical animated feature has about 100 artists in the credits. Even allowing for the fact that our film would be much shorter, we would still have to cut some corners if we wanted to produce a film with just one animator, who had never done a film before, working in his spare time.

I got to thinking about what kind of story would lend itself to low-budget 3D animation. A vampire story would have characters who don't need to look fully human, and would take place after dark so there would be lots of spaces that didn't need to be drawn. A film noir might also work because of all the slick, badly lit streets and dark, smoky rooms.

A month or so later, Greg came over to visit. He said he'd always wanted to do a gay zombie movie. "How about a gay zombie vampire film-noir comedy?" I asked. He said, "Sure."

A few days later, we spoke again. I had worked out that it would be a missing-person story, and the monster world would be a metaphor for the gay world. My working title was The Bar Scene. Greg listened politely to all this, and then asked about the carnage. Apparently, you can't have a zombie film without carnage. Zombies = carnage!

This sounded like stereotyping to me (exactly the attitude that keeps zombies from getting romantic lead roles in Hollywood movies), but I nonetheless promised to inject carnage (actual brain eating, not just the occasional flesh wound) into a light comedy that's a metaphor for the gay world.

When I figured out how to do that, the rest of the story fell into place. (And, I even found a way to make a zombie the romantic lead!) Greg and Mike liked my story and signed on to direct and animate. On July 31, I wrote a first draft of the script, which is actually very close to the final script.

Over the next few months, Mike came up with preliminary models for the characters using Maya - the award-winning animation software from Alias|Wavefront. Mike and Greg both told me they hated the title The Bar Scene. Considering that we were in line for a movie called Revenge of the Shogun Women at the time, that hurt. "Oh yeah," I said, "you come up with something better." Greg, showing a complete lack of respect for rhetorical flourishes, did. I agreed to call the movie The Night Life.

In December, we held auditions in Waterloo and Toronto. Unlike with Fluff, we actually had more auditioners than roles, so we had to turn down some very good actors. We also had two excellent candidates to do the score. We were delighted with the cast and crew we selected and we actually kept the same cast throughout the entire production.

We had a rehearsal in January 2002, and then went into the studio (Red Line Recorders) a week later. We were able to record the entire film in one afternoon. An animated short sure is less work than a live-action feature!

Unless you're the animator, that is. Poor Mike slaved away for months animating while the rest of us took it easy. Of course, we knew that Mike would come out of this with an amazing demo piece that could help him get a good job as an animator. Besides, hard work is good for the young.

In October 2003, Mike's work finally came to an end and we passed the film on to Rob LeGood (titles) and Dustin Windibank (score and sound editing). Over the next few months, they did an amazing job and we headed to Umbrella Sound for half a day in March 2004 for the final sound mix. The rest, as they say, is history.