To create Water Man in Little Minx Exquisite Corpse: Come Wander With Me, an animation team scanned the live actor into a 3D model and applied lighting and water effects. All Little Minx images © Little Minx.

Commenting on modo's OpenGL feature, Bennett notes that for years, artists had to work with crude abstractions of their scenes when they were using 3D software. "Wireframe representations are fine when you are modeling, but that should be a small part of your creative process," he says. "You might even be importing a model in and not modeling anything new. So you need an interface that is more WYSIWYG -- and this is where OpenGL comes in. You can work with a fully textured and lit scene in modo; it's almost like being in a game."

"We built modo in full knowledge of what a modern workstation with multi cores and GPUs can do -- and that means the artistic experience is visually richer and more responsive," Bennett continues. "That means animators and film-makers are that much closer to the story. They can test alternatives more frequently. They can see what their production will look like before engaging in final rendering."

The Embassy, a Vancouver company that has worked on a variety of visual effects projects with production companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia, handled all vfx and post-production on the film. Special effects prosthetics were created by Sarah Bergeest and motion capture was done by Rainmaker Animation.

Terminus is taking advantage the Internet to attract an audience, offering the short on its own website, on YouTube and elsewhere.

Water Man
Little Minx Exquisite Corpse: Come Wander With Me by director Phillip Van is another short film found online on the Little Minx website, YouTube and other venues. This short is one part of a five-part Exquisite Corpse project launched by Little Minx partnered with RSA Films.

"The response has been tremendous," says the film's producer Rhea Scott. "We've had some two million hits, and it's been a branding exercise for Little Minx." Scott credits the efforts of Idealogue with creating a viral campaign for the film.

Drawing its inspiration from the parlor game of the same name, Exquisite Corpse comprises shorts by Van as well as directors Chris Nelson, Malik Hassan Sayeed, Josh Miller and Laurent Briet. Through the progression of films, each director responds to the last line of text of the previous director's script and gives their concept of what it means to be a minx.

Van's creation, Little Minx Exquisite Corpse: Come Wander With Me, has a mystical, dreamlike quality. The short follows a young girl's encounter with a mysterious water man and how this meeting changes her life. The song in the film, Come Wander With Me, is from an episode of The Twilight Zone, and sets an eerie tone. Also key to capturing the mood was the director's idea to create a man made out of water -- someone not entirely "there" -- realized through vfx.

"I was looking for something that worked on multiple levels… something that that could impact in a short period of time," Van says. As it turns out, those levels were reflected in the layers that were needed to create the vfx.

Van says that his Little Minx film used a lot of bluescreen with partially designed sets created with his Production Designer, Reegan Jackson, and shot with DP Dariusz Wolsky. Van collaborated with artists Andy Boyd and Seb Caudron at Method Studios, using a mix of 2D and 3D graphics work on a Flame and in Maya.