Kellie-Bea Cooper, producer and founder of The Better Mousetrap.

Having studied interactive media, children's literature and puppetry, Cooper has worked for the Jim Henson Company, Warner Bros. Television Animation and Phil Roman Entertainment. She is presently the owner and director of her own studio, The Better Mouse Trap, as well as The Webisode Academy, a specialty school teaching episodic animation skills for the Web.

For Major Damage, Cooper negotiated alliances with Hewlett Packard and Alias|Wavefront to secure the hardware and software for the project, and she was on a constant recruiting drive to solicit help from friends and colleagues in the animation industry.

Cooper says, "Since the project was a volunteer effort, we needed a way to work that would accommodate people's lifestyles and family time. Letting people work from home, and not require a central gathering to do their work was key to recruiting the kind of talent we needed for the show."

"Given that we all had day jobs," Bailey agrees, "working virtually gave us the most flexibility with our time."

The production process was broken up into departments: modeling, rigging, character animation, facial animation, effects animation, skinning, layout, lighting and so on. Most departments had a supervisor who was responsible not only for his/her own shots, but for communicating and directing the shot assignments for the entire departmental team. The lighting team, for example, was comprised of artists in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, the United Kingdom, and other locales, with the lighting supervisor in Tampa, Florida. Departments were often scattered globally, with no middle management other than the producer and the Internet-based assignment and shot status Web pages.

Doug Cooper, a CG supervisor at DreamWorks Animation.

Doug Cooper, CG supervisor for Major Damage, has always been interested in combining computers and art. Programming since an early age, Cooper worked on Balto at Amblimation, and he is now a CG supervisor at DreamWorks, having worked on The Prince of Egypt and most recently Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.

In describing the off-the-shelf tools that made Major Damage possible, Cooper explains, "Everything was produced in Maya — modeling, animation, textures, effects, lighting and rendering. Artists had their own computers, or computers that we provided to them loaded with Maya and an Internet connection. Animators would download the character and set models from our Website, then animate and upload individual shots. Our director would review AVI's and JPEG images of the work they uploaded and send creative direction and commentary back to them via email."

In moving around such heavy graphics files, the speed, reliability and security of the studio's infrastructure was an essential component for the project's success. Besides the workstations at individuals' homes, the key to supporting the production workflow was the centralized Web and file server. The server was run on the Linux operating system, and had several custom Web applications developed for it — including a graphical scene browser, which showed thumbnails of the current renders for every shot; and the File Depot, which was an online database of all the files created for the show.

Doug Cooper says, "We used a great deal of open source and freely available software, such as Linux, and MySQL, but also developed some of our own. The server was connected to the Internet through a consumer DSL line, and most artists dialed into it through 56k modems. Some artists also had DSL or cable modems to get better performance."