OGDEN: What obstacles did you encounter during production, and how did you overcome them?

ACKER: I used Maya for 3D production, Photoshop for 2D art, Premiere for cutting and After Effects for compositing. Over the course of 4 years and different software upgrades you'll encounter many problems.

I'm not a programming genius so when it came to particles, rigging and dynamics I tried to find simple solutions. I abandoned the idea of using cloth for the characters early, I didn't want the headache. I would try fancy things for a day or two. If I couldn't figure it out I'd just "brute force" it to keep the production moving forward. It usually involved me just grabbing points or objects and keyframe animating them, rather than running dynamic sims or particle sims.

But when you think about it, that's just what stop-motion or 2D animators would do anyway. There is no "sim" to make your pencil draw something breaking, swinging, or blowing in the breeze, so just grab those points and animate it! I did develop a pipeline of rendering my frames as .rla files with z-depth channels and used After Effects depth filter for depth of field and rack focus effects.

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OGDEN: How involved is Tim Burton going to be in the film?

ACKER: Tim is great, he's amazing. He is Executing Producing and I feel very fortunate to have this opportunity to work with him. I am working with an amazing writer, Pamela Pettler, who has written a few films for Tim in the past. The feedback from Tim and the producers has been great and has really helped in shaping the film.

OGDEN: Are you guys going to be involved with Henry Selick's production company on this?

ACKER: No, we are partnering with Attitude, an amazing animation studio in Paris.

OGDEN: You must be very excited. You're gearing up for production. Why Luxembourg?

ACKER: Luxembourg? Don't you know Luxembourg is the epicenter of all things happening in animation? It's like a new renaissance there. [All of the 3D animation will be done in Luxembourg with Attitude Studio, the 3D house that worked on the gorgeous film Renaissance.]

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OGDEN: Talk a bit about how you are going to expand this short into a feature. Is there a bigger story to tell?

ACKER: We have a kick-ass story to tell. A lot of people scratch their heads and ask how we are going to expand the short into a feature? For me the short was just a small glimpse into a much larger world that I was creating. In the film you'll begin to see what happened to the inhabitants of that world, how the ragdolls and characters came to be, what this strange device is that they carry and how all these things are inextricably locked in a struggle for the future of the world.

OGDEN: When do you think the feature film will be finished?

ACKER: 2008 baby. Then it's on to sleep, glorious sleep!

OGDEN: Thanks for talking to us.

ACKER: Zzzzzz...