Blur Studio head Tim Miller (left) and Gopher Broke’s director Jeff Fowler worked closely on the short film, though they did spar on chickens.

Blur Studios, the company behind Gopher Broke, recently finished a game cinematic for Warhammer in just under three weeks. It looks sensational, so good in fact that you might worry about the health of the people who made it. “I’ve heard people who think, ‘Oh, Blur’s a sweatshop, you must be killing everybody,’” says studio head Tim Miller. “But when we have these projects that are death marches, it’s not because I said ‘We gotta make money here.’ It’s because everybody wants it to look great. They willingly throw themselves on the sword.”

Gopher Broke‘s director Jeff Fowler concurs. “Here’s Tim Miller, one of the founders of the studio, and he’s doing roto paint fixes on the fur on the gopher’s mouth at four in the morning a week before we had to finish it. So that says a lot about his dedication to the idea of doing shorts.”

Expert comic timing, strong acting and some impressive technical achievements are all on display in Gopher Broke. © 2004 Blur Studio.

Miller estimates that Gopher Broke would have earned the company $1.6 million had it been a paying job. The fact that the 60 or so staff members in the Venice warehouse home of Blur Studios are killing themselves over something that cuts directly into their bottom line is a testament to their desire to turn out something that looks good, no matter the client specs or the timetable.

Blur has no one meal ticket - it’s well-versed in game cinematics, commercials, Xbox projects, even ride films. “We have no sales whatsoever, so all the work comes in word-of-mouth,” Miller says. “They call me, and I go ‘Yeah, that looks cool. Let’s try to fit it in.’ We’re pretty lucky in that we’re always booked a few months ahead.”

The studio has been making shorts since 2001, when a big paying project was put on hold with no notice and a gaggle of artists were left twiddling their thumbs. Miller says, “One of our guys, John Jordan, says ‘Why don’t we do a short?’ And when I was going to be a freelance illustrator, I had written a bunch of apocryphal stories about my white trash family to send out as promos, and one of them was Aunt Luisa.” So they made the short, and a staff member suggested they submit the finished film to AMPAS for Oscar consideration. To everyone’s surprise this sweet comic vignette was shortlisted for Best Short in 2002.

Since then Blur has held a regular contest where the staff votes for the best short idea, which led to Miller’s Rockfish in 2002, Paul Taylor’s In the Rough in 2004, and its current Oscar nominee, Jeff Fowler’s Gopher Broke. Fowler started at Blur as a character animator, and when his idea won in 2004, another animation supervisor was assigned to direct it. “I certainly understood that there was a hierarchy that existed,” Fowler says, “and I didn’t want to feel like I had to raise a flag every time I didn’t think something was going the way I had originally conceived it.” But when the director left the company after three weeks of preproduction, Fowler was more than happy to take the steering wheel.

In the short, a gopher tunneling his way between wheat fields surfaces to the sight of a truck loaded with produce winding its way toward the farmer’s market, and the gopher sets about making bumps in the road to dislodge some choice veggies. But all are eaten by other critters — rabbits, chickens, crows — before the gopher can get to them. The last truck to drive by delivers something much less comestible — a cow. In slow-motion, its bell tolling ruefully, the cow slices a deadly arc through the air and lands, ass-first, on the enterprising gopher.

The expert comic timing and strong acting of the short have earned Gopher Broke its well-deserved nomination (see January 2005’s Fresh from the Festivals for more details). There are some impressive technical achievements on display, from the complex articulation of the Gopher’s face and body to the details of the vintage pickup trucks cruising in and out of frame. The billowing fields of wheat, in particular, nearly brought their render farm to its knees. “The first stalk of wheat could have been simpler,” Fowler admits. “And it just snowballed. When that single stalk of wheat was multiplied however many times… It didn’t need to have as much geometry as it did, so it created bigger problems down the road.”

Jeff and Tim admit to some creative differences along the way. “Our biggest fight,” Tim says, “was when Jeff had the squirrel show up, and then the chicken showed up. He had one chicken. I said, ‘You gotta have three chickens, Jeff.’”

“I was just trying to be resourceful,” Jeff says with a smile.

“No you weren’t, because you fought it!… So finally I said, ‘The next time I see this animation, there better be three fuckin’ chickens’.”

“So one of the layout artists put in three chickens,” Jeff notes. “They each had Tim’s head.”

“And of course Jeff and I had a bitter battle — I wanted the gopher to end up in the cow’s ass in the last shot. In hindsight, I’m glad we didn’t push it,” Tim concedes.

“Aww,” Jeff coos. “That means so much to me, Tim!”

Miller, though, says the turn-and-burn aesthetic that gets so many of their game cinematics out on time helped them solve these issues quickly. “Guys that come out of cinematics are super-efficient, and they can handle that. I think that overall, the more efficient you are, the more creative attempts you can do. If you have five days to do something, and you get it done in three, you’ve got two days to experiment and make it better.”

Vin Diesel is interested in a feature version of Rockfish, and Miller is taking meetings all over town, but he’s aware that there’s a lot of hype under that wave of genuine interest. “Every Rubicon we cross to operate on a different level, the same principles apply. An agent at ICM will have to hear about us from three different people to go ‘Ah, I guess there’s some buzz’.”

After doing 40 minutes for Disney’s Twice Upon a Christmas, Tim and company are aching to get a feature going. “It was great to be able to focus on the pipeline for Disney, the mechanics of creating in longer format,” Tim says. “But it would be nice to do some more story stuff. I think we have a lot to contribute there. Nickelodeon’s been talking to us, and we’ve been talking to Fox about doing some films, not necessarily family-style films — which is another goal of mine, for Blur to be able to do the kind of family films that Jeff would like to do as well as the more sci-fi fantasy stuff which is where my heart is. I’d like Blur, unlike Pixar, to be one of the first companies that can do both those styles of filmmaking.”