Carnivore Reflux began as a nightmare Drector Eddie White had. he's always had issues with food, and had this nightmare that people were vomiting food that came out in the form of their original animals. he wrote it into a poem. James Calvert who also directs films at our studio read the poem and thought it would make a great idea for a film, so they decided to do it together as a co-direction (they had previously co-directed an animated short, Fritz gets Rich).

of all our films, this is the only one we made without funding. It was entirely self-funded. We made it especially as our entry into Tropfest (tropfest.com/), Australia's higest profile short film festival - its also the BIGGEST short film festival in the world.

The directors spent months creating all the artwork and characters, storyboarding, planning etc. The animators all worked on it for nothing. They had finished a string of paid projects with us and did this as a bit of fun. As such we kept the animation production time short - 15 days.

With no budget, these were the rules: 15 days to make animation; no backgrounds. mostly black. only a few elements modified from photos to indicate what the setting is; characters in cut-out (we used maya and flash). can only make characters ove in the same way a paper puppet can move.

The reductionist style was also partly a result of our reaction to the explosion of CG in the previous years: heavy VFX in matrix, LOTR and Harry potter films; CG blockbuster family films etc. we wanted to deconstruct how computer animation was used and make something that challenged people's assumptions about animation. Directors Eddie White and James Calvert had also come back from the Annecy animation fest in france and wanted to make a film that would work with eropean festivals.

The look was inspired by dadaism and absurdist art, George Grosz, that sort of stuff. the flapping heads were inspired by muppets. oddly, "carnivores" have underbites and vegetarians have overbites. The animation style is inspired by Terry Gilliam's Monty Python animations. Eddie White designed the characters. James Calvert spent hours giving them the texture.

Carnivore Reflux did make the finals of Tropfest and opened a lot of doors for us. It was also a festival hit around the world. Being Tropfest finallists, we were given the chance a couple of years later to animate a TV commercial for Mitsubishi Lancer as part of a competition. we got to make the TV commercial (see "Safer in a wild world" on our vimeo accout), and it helped launched us into more lucrative TV commercial work.

I love the combination of the styles of Terry Gilliam and George Grosz! We too work a lot with the combination Flash and 3d(sMAx). It's a rather difficult workflow (or at least a challenging one) but it gives your animation that handmade puppet style! Thanks for the great detailed reply!