This film played before every screening at the 30th annual Ottawa International Animation Festival, so it needed to be extremely dense. Average festival-goers tend to be critical animators: they see the film at least 10 times, so it needed to stay interesting after tight scrutiny over many showings. We started production with semaphore flags spelling "OIAF" as an compositional device (basic triangles & rectangles dividing the frame into sections), made a scratch audio track and moved the semaphore shapes to the beat of the music. Twelve animators took one or more sections each, then animated to fill. Animators love detail, so we knew that
