Unlike the studios, the Hoodwinked filmmakers locked the script in pre-production because they couldn’t afford to make any story changes once animation started.

DT: Such as?

KH: Part of the difficulty of making the film was the review process during the latter part of production. Every one of us, at different times, would sit in front of the computer up to nine or 10 hours a day looking at shot after shot after shot that you’ve seen 500 times already.

TE: And it becomes an equation: “I have 10 things that I would like to change in this shot. I have the time and the budget to do three. Pick those three and then let’s move on.” And that was hard to do.

KH: And the animating is not one of those choices!

CE: I’ll give you a perfect example. Because of the independent budget — and I just saw this in the screening last night — the wolf talks into a tape recorder. It’s when he says “Ouch” when Red falls down through the trees. We approved the gray animation where he’s got the tape recorder in his hand, we approved the color and the lighting and you can still see the tape recorder. Then in the last phase, we put the fur in, and it covers up the tape recorder. So it looks like now, he’s talking into his fist! For all time, in that shot, he goes and talks into his fist and you don’t know what he’s doing. But at that point, we’re in the final stage of that production pipeline, and you can’t go back. We’re not Disney, where we could retool or re-animate or re-size the prop.

PS: Yes, we’re not Disney, where we could actually just put the prop in his hand!

CE: So, in the final stages we might see that a prop isn’t working, or a gag isn’t working, or we just totally missed an expression. We want to go back and change that, but we don’t have the time.

TE: Another thing other studios have that people might not think about: Money doesn’t just buy you more talent and more machinery, it also buys you flexibility on a story level. At Disney, if they don’t like the third act, they just throw the whole thing out and re-animate the whole thing, even if it’s finished.

Twitchy (above) and The Wolf were among the first characters the Edwards created.

DT: They’ve done that as far back as Pinocchio.

TE: We had no such luxury, and so in a way, you’re watching our first version of the movie. We’ve looked at each shot a 1,000 times, but as a finished piece the only flexibility we had was in editing. We couldn’t really change any of our shots.

KH: And music. Todd was able to be very flexible with the music.

PS: We were as flexible as we could be, but there were certain “points of no return” in all aspects with a small budget, where as another studio might have almost no “point of no return." For them it might be, “It’s going to theaters in a week.”

KH: The consolation to us was, we had to remember that when people sit down to watch Hoodwinked, they’re going to be watching a story and they’re going to be following it start-to-finish. They’re going to be engaged with the characters, not looking at some isolated shot. That’s really important to be able to get out of the review session, to take a step back and say, “This is a seven-second shot. Are people really going to be seeing all those little things we see?

TE: We were thinking of going across America to hire people at each screening to yell “Hey!” when certain shots come on and cause a distraction. People would look around, say “What’s that?," miss the shot and then go back to the movie (all laugh). It’s amazing the stuff we debated about for hours, and then the further away I get from it, the more distance I have. When you just watch the movie as an 80-minute piece, the shots go right by — and it’s OK.

DT: Here’s another very interesting fact. You had a staff of only 50 artists and only 15 digital artists, and yet this film was made in about three and a half years, roughly the same amount of time it takes a major animation studio to do the same type of feature. What were some of the methods you used in order to do this?

TE: I think it’s because Cory, myself and the other director were able to pre-visualize the scenes.

KH: There was heavy storyboarding in the early stages.

TE: We front-loaded the preliminary stages of this film a lot more aggressively than maybe a studio film would. Like the script… as I understand it, at a major studio they go in with it as kind of a starting place and they’ll find the story as they start to animate. We had the script locked in pretty tight before we animated. We couldn’t afford to mess around with the script after we started animating. And I know we recut the story reel at least 50 times, so that by the time we got to the animatics, each phase of the project had a really tight foundation. At a studio where you have flexibility you can be much more loose with that and say, “Well, we knew exactly what the edits of these shots were by the time we were animating them.