KH: There were also informal test screenings going on with our producer, Sue Bea Montgomery, showing the film to the neighborhood kids and getting their feedback, showing family members, getting someone in who has fresh eyes to take a look at it so we could ask “What do you think, are you following it?” We also had a couple of producers who work at some of the other studios and really know their stuff, and they were nice cheerleaders for us in terms of taking time to look at Hoodwinked when it was in some of its earliest stages. They would say, “Consider this,” or “I really like this part, I’d like to see more of that.” That only speaks from a story angle. Preston, do want to speak from a production angle?

PS: I don’t know how we did it with such few artists. By doing the film in the Philippines we worked with a bunch of artists who were used to working quickly on their projects.

DT: That was the Digital Eye Candy studio, right?

PS: Yes. They were similar to our backgrounds in that they came from an independent film mentality. I think they were used to working under tight pressure conditions. We kept them confined to a very short time frame for each stage of the process. Modeling was very short.

Todd Edwards had the idea of making The Wolf (above) a Fletch-type character with a dry, deadpan humor. Cory then paired the low-key wolf with sidekick Twitchy the squirrel, who is very fast and upbeat.

TE: I was also going to say that they weren’t specialists at the beginning of the project. There wasn’t a lighting team and an animation team and an animatic team. Everyone did everything. That isn’t always best, because you find out later that someone’s forté is lighting, but he’s been animating characters.

PS: You say it’s great that we could accomplish the film in three and a half years, but if we had done it a little differently, perhaps we wouldn’t have had to do things multiple times, and maybe it could have been done in, oh, two and three-quarters years. It could have been done even faster than it was, with the fact that towards the end we pulled all the lighting and compositing to whole different animation studio to finish it.

KH: The truth of it is, we could never do it again the way it was done.

CE: It’s not a model to be followed. It was a once-in-a-lifetime, seat-of-your pants kind of thing that just barely came off.

TE: It’s more a model of how not to do it!

DT: Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! Don’t you see yourselves as inspirations to every animator and independent that doesn’t have $200 million lying around to make a feature with?

CE: Sure. And if you’re going to push it to the limits, do this one-time thing for your first big film; you’re really willing to do that.

KH: And there are absolutely no regrets for having done it!

TE: Because we got a movie out of it. As small is it may look compared to and films like that, it’s the Ben Hur of indie movies. There are so many characters and locations, ambitious types of shots.

CE: If we knew then what we know now, we might have been less ambitious. Thank goodness we were!

DT: Now that the film has been released nationwide and is eligible for a major award, would you do it all over again, in terms of making another animated film?

KH: These guys have already, in the last year, been fielding dozens of offers from other people to get involved with animation. This is really a point to step back and make a decision.

CE: This project opened up our eyes to what stories you can tell with animation, because we’re primarily live-action guys. I think I know how we could do it better and how we would work in the future. We are not ruling animation out.

KH: There are a lot of international markets that are very interested in the film, particularly in France, which is a surprise. Not only have they re-voiced all the characters using French stars, but they’ve re-voiced all the songs using French celebrities.

DT: Talk about how you created, developed and refined the Hoodwinked cast.

CE: Todd and I were the guys who started the character design, then later we brought in Peter and Dennis, our other two designers. For a while, there were just four of us making hundreds of little pencil drawings. We went for a different design than the type in Shrek. We were already very aware of what was already out there, so we went in another direction with our designs. Those choices don’t cost you any money. We did look at The Nightmare Before Christmas, where a character has a triangular head or super-long pencil legs, and so we tried to bend the shapes into extremes.

KH: There are some unconventional choices for a CG film. For example, the woodsman: one eye is bigger than the other. That’s intentional. Red has four fingers to make her look more like a doll, also intentional. CG in the past has been pushing the envelope to make things look more realistic, but Hoodwinked takes things back to where CG looks a lot more like a cartoon.