DUBON
When it came to animating the characters, Hugo also faced intricate problems dealing with rigging, specifically the Schliefer spine technique taught at the school. Hugo found the technique fairly straightforward, although for a first-time rigger, it meant having to redo the rig several times to get it right.

But the biggest challenge came in the montage sequence. "I was pretty insistent that I wanted all 10 characters in the cafй to move with an offset of 1 frame, to accentuate their mechanical nature. This meant I had 10 fully rigged separate characters to manipulate in the space. Every time I would go through the Schleifer steps, I would get to one last part where everything would go terribly wrong. Even at low poly, and using Sheridan's up-to-date tools, it was a big pain to work with." Still, he found a way round the snags, relying on a bit of his programming background. "It meant I didn't have a setup that was like everyone else's, but for my purposes it worked great."

"I wanted to get across a lone machine that was embittered and made weird by age; something that exhibited a human quality."     - Kent Hugo

The result is very effective. Both the old and young versions of the Dubonnet character were animated to act like machines. The montage in the middle, with all the young Dubonnet men, is a blend of choreographed motion, somewhere between engine pistons firing, and a graceful dance. And of course, Hugo learned a thing or two from this complex portion of the short. "In retrospect, I should have set up some stand-in barebones models. But everyone knows hindsight is 20/20."

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Another problem Hugo solved was the motion of the camera. It's an odd combination of hand-held and linear motion, as if the scene were filmed by a robot holding a camera. This is a place where Hugo's background actually handicapped him; his experience operating real world cameras and dollies was very different from animating the virtual camera.

DUBONNET
With the technical hurdles out of the way, Hugo was free to concentrate on performance. The character drums his fingers indecisively before taking the drink at the end in a nice character moment that pushes him a little bit away from being just a robot into something that has more feeling and soul. "I wanted to get across a lone machine that was embittered and made weird by age; something that exhibited a human quality." It's why Hugo had the robot drum his fingers and scratch his nose, and why he had his arm shake under the weight of his body when he's seating himself at the start of the film.

L'Or Rouge has been very well received, but Hugo has bigger plans for the film. "I'd like to show it to someone at Dubonnet. The piece is essentially an advertisement, and I'd love for it to live properly as one."