Please introduce yourself:

Hi there
I am 26 years old, born in Israel. I recently graduated from an Art college in digital media and animation. "Bernie Hiwash" is my final project at college done in my 4th year.

Did you have a goal when you created this short film?

The goal of making this film was first and foremost - fun. I seen a lot of college graduates that made serious and heavy shorts (not that there is anything wrong with that), but I wanted to do something that I will enjoy working on for two semesters. I wanted fun characters to work on and to also improve my skills in character animation over my last two shorts, And off course to make my audience laugh.

How long did the entire animation take to make from concept to completion?

The hardest thing for me was to find the concept and story of the film, it took me a whole semester to work on the script and the storyboard. In the second semester I started to work on modeling, textures, riging (took more then a month) the animation took me about 3 month (every day about 12-20 sec of animation for a character on a good day) the rendering and sound took another month or so.( thanks for my brother who helped me a lot with the sound) So you can say all the stages sum up to about 8-9 month.

Which tools and equipment did you use?

I used 3d studio max 4.2, with character studio for the rig, Photoshop for the textures. I made the film on my p III, 866 mhz, 512 ram. For the rendering I gathered all my family computers that I can find, so I had additional 3 computers for the task.

What was the most difficult part of this project?

I say the most difficult part of the project was coming up with the story and characters, I think that that was the first time in college I wrote so much J.
After that was the technical parts - like riging and texturing and off course standing up to my college deadline that made me compromise on stuff I wanted to add and improve (and also on my sleep time J).

Did you storyboard this project first? And do you think it's important?

I think storyboard is an essential part of doing a film, it helps you vision your film and saves you valuable time in the future. If I got stuck on a part of the storyboard, I waited till I animated to that particular scene, it helped me find the solution of what will happen next, and then I made a small storyboard just for that scene.

Do you have plans for the near future?

I am currently searching for a job in Israel in the 3d animation field, (which is mostly doing commercials and promos in 3d for the TV industry), later on I hope finding my self sitting in a big company abroad, doing just the thing I like most : character animation - a company like Pixar would be nice J.

Do you have a favorite artist?

I get inspired a lot from Pixar films for their great characters and stories, Chuck Johns and from anyone else that creates good character animation.